Farewells and Goodbyes

This has been a hard week emotionally. I just returned from a memorial service where I said a permanent goodbye to a sixteen year-old student and friend who I knew for all too short a duration. Earlier in the week I said a (hopefully) temporary farewell to another young lady I have grown fond of and learned so much from. The grief and sadness is a little easier the older I get because I have learned to accept the choices of others, even when that means I am deprived of their regular company.

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Myself, Kaya, and Heidi

Kaya came to one of the Mile High Bug Club events at Cheyenne Mountain State Park about three years ago. She got my attention immediately because she had driven down from beyond the Denver area just to hang out with a bunch of "bug nerds" and look at moths and other insects drawn to the blacklights during the night.

As we got to talking, I learned that she, too, is an only child, with divorced parents, and eclectic interests. The more I got to know her over the years the more in awe I became of her intellect, adventurous spirit, and easy-going nature. She will be on to a new job now, in a far-off city, but I look forward to staying connected, and seeing her again someday should we agree on a place to seek new and fascinating insects.

It occurs to me that while I have genuine affection for Kaya, she embodies qualities I wish I had when I was her age: confidence, mostly, but an even richer analytical mind, a fearless approach to new experiences, trust in others, endless curiosity, and a sense of freedom. Yes, that romantic notion of just going wherever your heart and soul take you. Dream on, live fully, my friend.

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My late friend Erin

I met Erin Starkey, her brother Brad, and their mother in August of 2012 when we both turned out for a gathering of entomologists and insect photographers at a research station in southern Arizona. Imagine the surprise and delight to learn that we all lived in Colorado Springs. We got together again a handful of times, once for Erin's birthday if I recall correctly, and I shared books and insect specimens with her. I saw her last on my own birthday, last January.

Little did I know that she was equally enamored with all animal life, rabbits especially, and was a volunteer with our local Humane Society. I had no idea she was also artistically inclined, with a talent for songwriting, acting and directing, drawing, even animation. She was incredibly empathetic to the poverty-stricken, volunteering at shelters and soup-kitchens.

Unfortunately, I also did not know that she suffered from mental illness, and the spirit-sapping lows that come with that. On September 5, the heaviness got too much to bear and she took her life.

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She wasn't wanting to leave us, of course, she was attempting to leave herself. At least that part of herself that conjured demons of emotional misery, dominating every part of her psyche. As if that dimension of your soul could be shed like a snakeskin, killed with the equivalent of a silver bullet....but it always takes everything else down with it. Some people try and wash that part of their mind away by drinking. Others smoke, snort, shoot up, or otherwise exorcise one dragon with another. Some people try and outrun their own ominous shadow by literally running away.

The empty, unsatisfying, and self-destructive remedies abound, all of them equally useless, a mere temporary fix that might get you to tomorrow, but still leave you with no future visible to you on your horizon. You have choices only in what Devils to bargain with, what form of suffering is the least painful.

"You could choose to be happy if you wanted to..."

No, that is not how depression works. That is not how anxiety works. That is not how obsessive-compulsive works. That's not how any of this works. As long as you insist that it is "all in your mind," or imply that one has control over their state of mind, you are doing a horrible disservice to those cursed with mental illness. Stop being so damn condescending and free your own mind to contemplate the possibility that others can be "wired" differently than you, you healthy, sunshiny son-of-a-....

Listen, we all have our deficits, our ills, our weaknesses, our genetic uniqueness. I guarantee that you know people with mental illness whether you are cognizant or not. The manifestation of madness is not always what we have been taught that it is. Your job is not to assume, not to dismiss, not to pity, not to stigmatize, but merely empathize.

Depression

My mind is an emotional train wreck right now. Depression has many faces, at least that is what I believe is true for me, and I can speak only for me. It is a condition that can be fleeting, or stubbornly entrenched for weeks or months; and it can be triggered by many stimuli. Lately, the monotonous and unseasonably cold, wet weather, is largely to blame.

© Healthination.com

Frustration

Feeling powerless to change circumstances is without a doubt one of the leading emotions that causes me to fall into despair. I truly can't change the weather. It is going to be bad until it is good again. I cannot change the marketplace. My chosen profession and its attendant skills and knowledge will continue to be devalued for as far into the future as I can see; but I also can't change who I am, which, at its core, is a writer. It is also difficult to accrue new skills and new circumstances when one does not have the financial capacity to attend classes, travel to better weather, or otherwise self-improve....because you can't earn enough at your profession.....a vicious cycle.

Anger

Frustration for me results in one of two things: sadness or anger. Usually it is the latter. Lately I have been more silent than usual because I fear nothing but a string of expletives would leave my mouth (or my fingers as they dart across the keyboard). I wish that it was more widely considered by the scientific community that violence and depression in men are strongly linked. Men have a much harder time expressing themselves verbally. Why do they smash the plate against the wall during an argument with their spouse or significant other? "There! Do you see that? That is my heart, shattered." Men want desperately to have a tangible expression of how they feel, and this often comes out violently.

Snowball Effect

One expression of depression for me is what I call the "snowball effect," whereby one negative thought leads to another and they keep accumulating until there is no stopping them and they almost bury you. During one of these episodes your life seems to stink more than it really does because the snowball is also a dredge that hauls up memories that are not necessarily still applicable to your current condition. The good thing is that I am getting better at recognizing this before the snowball builds enough momentum to be all-consuming. The bad lunch does not carry as much weight as I thought initially, and can be allowed to fall off the conglomerate of other matters.

Coping Poorly

I will assert that few people are able to cope with depression, tragedy, and other life challenges in a healthy manner. Such things usually trigger extremely bad coping "skills" such as addictions, flight (from relationships, reality, etc), suicide, and homicide. These days, another coping mechanism is "oversharing" on social media. This is understandable. Misery doesn't necessarily love company, as the old saying goes; but misery does crave understanding and empathy; and reassurance that most situations we face are only temporary. Facebook has become in many ways a 24-7 version of Oprah or The Phil Donahue Show, or Sally Jesse Raphael for those who can remember that far back (I even appeared on Phil Donahue's show in February of 1989 to talk about adult children of divorce).

Anyway, few of the ways we want to exorcise our demons are productive. I cannot go on a shooting spree when what I really want is to kill the marketplace, not its inhabitants; and the social fabric of our world already has enough holes in it anyway. We need more patches and some really good seamstresses. I can't kill myself because then I send someone else down the road I just exited. Drugs and alcohol only serve to make one more destitute financially, and more unhealthy physically.

Therapy?

Suggesting someone suffering from depression get "counseling" can seem helpful, but here timing is everything. So is type. Personally, I am so self-analytical as it is that seeing a psychoanalyst is redundant. Back in the day I eventually tried a twelve-step group for adult children of alcoholics. I was receptive enough to the idea in that particular window of my life to actually get a few things out of it. This is when I first realized my problem with "God" was actually rebellion against religion, a human social institution. I also finally started understanding how my "buttons" were getting pushed, and began rewiring the mental circuitry so that I could better articulate my own position instead of reacting inappropriately to the other person.

Both one-on-one therapy and peer therapy groups can be helpful if only because you are expressing yourself out loud and you tend to hear yourself better when you do that. Listening to the experiences (traumas, really) of others helps build empathy and creates a more holistic view of one's place in the spectrum of personal atrocities and joys. Ideally, it does this by creating a reverence for those who suffer, including one's self.

Comedy

There is a reason that you never see the theatrical "tragedy" mask without the "comedy" smile right there next to it. I find that the one sure-fire antidote to depression is humor. I think I may start building a library of stand-up comedy DVDs to have at the ready for my next low spell. A good dose of humor might not cure me permanently at any given time, but it will get my head out of itself and probably get me started writing my own material or drawing a cartoon. Comedy is also an awesome substitute for those times when the weather, lack of transportation, or other obstacle prevents you from doing equally healthy things like getting outdoors in nature, or exercising. Maybe music has the same effect on you as comedy has on me. Personally, music can be profoundly sad to me, so I have to be careful in my choices of artists and albums.

Onward

I have no way of knowing who is reading this, and what their own struggles may be. I do hope that they gain a measure of hopefulness and a sense of brotherhood out of this essay. Meanwhile, I need to scatter my eggs among less weather-dependent, market-driven baskets and reclaim my identity as something more than what I do for an occupation. We're all much deeper than we know, and far more substantial than what society tells us we are. Don't fall for it. Laugh at it instead, and be the individual example of what you want humanity to be. You'll fail early and often, but don't we all.

Mental Illness

The headline on the front page of the Sunday Arizona Daily Star this week asked “Why don’t we help those with mental illness?” Talk about a population that is misplaced, the unfortunate individuals diagnosed with mental illness are probably at the top of the list. I think there are several reasons why we don’t help the mentally ill, and the first one is because we call it “mental illness.”

I am not a doctor, but given what I know, there really isn’t any such thing as mental illness. All diseases have a physiological cause, at least at the level of biochemistry, so it would seem more appropriate to call diseases of the mind by a name that reflects this. Perhaps “neurological disorders” or “cerebral anomalies” would be a better phrasing of such conditions. Our minds are not something disconnected from our brain and nervous system. Indeed, our mind originates from those sources.

Adding to the difficulty of diagnosing mental illness are the media stereotypes of those disorders. We continue to perpetuate myths such as schizophrenic people being violent. What does legitimately concern our society is the unpredictability of mental disease episodes. A manic or depressive period may come at the worst possible time for an employer, spouse, or friend to deal with. We are generally an impatient and selfish culture that gets frustrated (at the least) when we don’t know if we can count on someone to be there for us and our needs.

There is the stigma of mental illness to be sure, but we are also wary of being fooled. Don’t those with Multiple Personality Disorder just turn it on and off at will? There is this mistaken belief that the mentally ill still have some choice in their state of mind at any moment, because those of us without any affliction know how we are presenting ourselves to the world.

Another barrier to addressing mental illness is the notion that people bring on mental illness themselves. Drug use, for example, often leads to symptoms of mental illness such as hallucinations and erratic behavior.

Treatment is often an exercise in futility because the patient is not the best source of information on their state of well-being. Patients who are doing well because of medication may decide they no longer need the drugs, which then leads to cycles of sickness and recovery.

Patients therefore need “management,” but we have painted ourselves into an ethical corner because of our previous sins in committing mentally ill people to asylums where they were horribly abused. We are loathe to repeat such crimes, so dismiss the idea of institutionalizing “mental patients” in a society that celebrates freedom above all else.

We are also reluctant to intervene when we suspect someone may be suffering from mental illness. I see this in the entomological community whenever someone broaches the topic of “delusory parasitosis.” This condition is usually manifested by the sensation that insects are crawling on the person, or beneath their skin. The patient often brings bags of lint and dust to an entomologist, insisting that the bugs are “in there,” when even microscopic evaluation of the fibers and particles reveals there is no insect, mite, or other creature to be found. The entomologist then tries his or her best to pacify the patient or pawn them off on another expert, which leads to frustration for the patient, too, who can never get a straight answer.

What do we do, then? What is the answer? There is no single answer, but the first step is for us to become better educated on just what constitutes “mental illness.” We need to learn how to recognize it, especially in its early stages when treatment might have a better chance of success. Mostly, we need to have compassion for those who suffer from mental illness, as we do for those who have more obvious physical handicaps.

Let’s not let the mentally ill remain misplaced in our society. Let us find ways to integrate them into our places of employment, social circles, and our healthcare system.