Mental illness can be pretty serious. For my clients, it was a life-changing and sometimes life-ending experience. For my family, it was traumatic, and changed family relationships forever. I am writing to you about my personal/professional experience with mental illness. And how it changed my life. It isn’t something that a doctor would write. It is simply my viewpoint. As a survivor of the family experience, I was drawn to working with people with similar issues. Not an uncommon reaction. If you talked to many people who work in nonprofits or social service organizations, you will find that many of them have some kind of background that leads them there. Whether it is a history of alcoholism or drug addiction, or some other kind of serious
mental/physical illness in the person or the family, it is there. Of course, this is an opinion based on the ‘evidence’ as I have observed it. It certainly isn’t scholarly study. It comes from looking around at people. If your experience doesn’t match up, that is no big deal. I would love to hear from you.
One of the things that I have become aware of is how mental illness is sometimes generational. My Mom was a foster child. She lived with a family for almost twenty years as a foster child. She wasn’t adopted, but she pretty much considered this long-term foster family her only family. She obviously had a biological family. And I found out about the family mental illness connection from learning about my Mom’s birth family. My Grandmother died in a mental institution. In those days, I guess that those with severe mental illness were hospitalized. Sometimes for long periods of time. From what I have been able to find out, my Grandmother was separated from her children when my Mom was two or three years old. And my Mom next had contact with her Mom after the age of 18. I think she visited with her Mom one time at the institution. Was Grandma in an institution that whole time? How severe was her problem? I really don’t know. I don’t even know what the diagnosis was. The only information I have about my Grandma came from my Mom. And by the time I was old enough to hear this, my Mom was a pretty poor historian, struggling with her own mental health problems. My Grandfather had given up my Mom and her brother (Buddy) after an incident in which Buddy had used a hammer on somebody in the family. I think. I met Buddy a few times before he died. I knew from those meetings that he drank too much. Or at least I thought I knew that. I believe he was usually drinking when I saw him. And I
remember him coming to my bedroom to kiss me goodnight one night, smelling of booze. That is one way to frighten a little girl. And that is exactly how I reacted. I wasn’t so upset when I was told that Buddy had died. He scared me.
So, as a child I knew that my Mom’s family had some ‘different’ kinds of people. Of course, I could clearly see my Mom and her problems. What did I take away from that? I was terrorized by the thought that I was going to be mentally ill. Which seemed to me to be a fate worse than death. As I grew into womanhood, my thoughts naturally turned to getting married and having children. This knowledge of family history, coupled with any studying I had done about psychology in college made me very wary. At 23 years old, I got married. And at 26 years old, I became pregnant. That was one of the most joyous experiences I have ever had. If anybody has ever really wanted to have a baby, I was that person. But that joy was tempered by my knowledge of family history. First of all, I worried that I was going to eventually be mentally ill. Then I worried that I would be bringing a child into the world who was going to be equally prone to mental illness. This was quite a load to carry as a new Mom. Obviously, I did it anyway.
To be continued...
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