Stigma

Stigma:  An invisible mark of disgrace or dishonor

I probably don't look like someone who has been deeply touched by stigma.   I am white,  straight,  middle class,  raised protestant;   I dress in a fairly casual fashion,  but not too sloppy;   I am reasonably good looking,  and though I could drop a few pounds without doing myself any harm,   I am not particularly over-weight.   

And yet stigma has had,  by my reckoning, a massive influence,  negative I might add,  on my life.   See,  when you're a kid,  you can't really tell people that your mom has a  mental illness and that dad did too,  and that his was bad enough that he ended up shooting himself.  You just can't say stuff like that without expecting people to move away from you as fast as their manners will let them.   Actually,  come to think of it,  you can't say that as an adult either.    Unless you're in a group like the ones forming around the work NAMI is doing.

NAMI has a refinement of the stigma definition which relates to mental illness:  

Stigma in mental illness:  "The banishment and scapegoating of people with mental illness whose conditions are considered so fearful,  and so repugnant,  that they are judged to deserve their fate"  (from Family to Family materials)

In one important way I am very lucky.   Though mental illness has touched my life very deeply,  I do not suffer from a biologically based brain disorder myself.     And considering the fact that both of my parents did,   that makes me particularly fortunate.   Statistically speaking,  because of my genes I was more likely to get mental illness than not.   

One of things that is so horrible about mental illness is that a person not only has a terrible disorder,  but they are also shunned by others because they didn't have the good graces to come down with a disease that people are more comfortable with.

My mom has suffered way more than I ever will.

Between her bipolar and the high wall of protective denial she's built,  it's pretty hard to see her essential being.   She carries a lot of baggage around with her every day.   To help her cope with some of the challenges of her life,  she comes up with fantasies which help her keep her head up.   

I have no doubt that if stigma hadn't been such a force in her life,  her psyche would not need such a high number of protective structures.     I can't help but think that without stigma she would be able to bring forth much more of her self,  mentally ill warts and all.   

Until I was fifteen she did not know she had a mental illness.    We were on our own wavelength and somewhat in our own world.   No one told me "your mom is crazy" or anything like that.   I knew my family was different than others.   Pretty much all of my friends had two parents at home while I was in a single parent household.   I knew my mom was wacky and a bit off the wall at times.   And that she could be very irritable.

After her diagnosis I was in shock.   No one told me about her illness or what it meant.  When she was in the mental hospital she's the one who told me her diagnosis--first it was schizophrenia and after several days the doctors changed it to bipolar.   She told me that the doctors had determined that she had another personality,  a little girl,  inside of her.   That's why they originally made the diagnosis of schizophrenia.   

I was already having a pretty tough adolescence.   My dad had died just over a year before that.   I seriously disliked my mom's new husband.   And she became psychotic just a month or so after she and he were married.   He was way freaked out.

All of a sudden I had a mom who was "crazy".   I previously had thought of her as "quirky",  "difficult",  "impulsive" but now she she was determined to be f***ing nuts.   I tried not to think about it.   She tried not to think about it too.   And there was no way in hell we were going to actually talk about it.   In our minds we were running from it as fast our little mental legs could take us.

Stigma:  An invisible mark of disgrace or dishonor

I tried to carry on in life as if nothing was different.     I worked hard in school and on the weekends drank beer, did drugs and tried to maneuver myself into situations where I might get laid.    As a high school junior I was looking at colleges and such but,  in retrospect,  my focus was really just on survival.   

But to look at me you probably would not have guessed that.   The same protective denial my mom used seem to work pretty darn well for me too.   Just pretend this giant,  terrifying monstrosity called mental illness in your family is  not there.   

The fact that no one ever talked to me about it made it easy for me to keep it in the closet.    Just ignore it and it will go away.   Yeah,  right.

If my parents had died or been maimed in a car crash my friends and extended family would have all rallied around me.   If my mom had contracted cancer or some other terrible, but socially acceptable,  disease I could have talked to people about it.     They would have come in to support me.   "Does he understand the condition?"   "Is he in counseling to help process the feelings he must be having?"   None of that came toward me.   The silence was deafening.

 This shameful silence is something I took deeply into my soul.   It is something that I carry with me every day of my life.   It is always with me.   If you read my previous post you know that it has powerfully impacted my speech,  my ability to express myself,  my throat chakra.

I need to gradually transform this shameful silence;  to find the radiant and beautiful parts of me which have been buried in the mudslide that stigma let loose on me.

Your comments are welcome.

Warmly,  Ben