lisa
Stathoplos
writer ✧ actor ✧  behavior specialist ✧ educator

.................When my child or one of my students suffers with clinical depression and becomes suicidal, the average wait for a Crisis bed is days — often, it’s weeks. During this agonizing limbo, I spend, students’ families spend, countless hours in the unique hell of understaffed ERs with limited psychiatric resources desperately seeking help. If at last a placement is found, it could  be hundreds of miles from home. I will visit my child or my students wherever that may be. In a rural state like Maine, the ratio of adolescent psychiatrists to the population in need is abysmally disproportional. The handful of qualified and beleaguered counselors are completely swamped. This is America? We are a leader in Western culture?

     If you’ve spent this kind of anguished time in ERs waiting for Crisis beds, sought outpatient services regular folks can afford, spent night after sleepless night feeling completely alone, helpless and hopeless, anxiously looking for someone, something, anything! that could help your child, your loved one, met the exhausted saints bearing crushing caseloads who soldier on at work in the mental health fields, you see how much is wrong — how much needs to be addressed. Where’s the continuum? Where are the options for “Least Restrictive Environment” available to folks with passive suicidal ideation, not considered to be an immediate threat to themselves? Why is it a choice between essentially no services at all or lock up? Where is the support for loved ones half-crazed with fear themselves? What the hell is wrong with us?

     Emotional Disability is extra horrific because you cannot observe its physical manifestation. We never admonish a blind person to ‘just look, it’s right over there — can’t you see it?!” But, that is exactly what we do to folks with depression and other mental illnesses every day. “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, man! You can do it!” If a person could, they would; absolutely none of this is about not trying. Depression can make getting out of bed, talking, returning a text, taking a walk, eating a meal — brushing your teeth, for chrissakes! — a Herculean task. A task that for the sufferer is insurmountable. To truly help people, we need to first grasp the complexity of mental illness and how insidiously it can impact every aspect of living — something understandably difficult for healthy folks to do. We have to try to see “through a different lens” in order to understand a brain, a body, that works differently from ours. I know that it can be very hard to do — often profoundly frustrating — but, we need to do much better.

   As a young undergrad with a psychology bent, I read William Styron’s Darkness Visible — a slim volume that curdled my blood and gave me a visceral, insider’s experience of the dark force that is depression. Then, Mark Vonnegut’s extraordinary memoirs, The Eden Express and, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, revealing his personal journey through a mental health hellscape, did the same. R.D. Laing’s, The Politics of Experience confirmed my nascent intuition about the inherent flaw in our thinking about what we deem “crazy.” His book blew my mind and awakened in me a longing to understand psychiatric ailments through a lens more akin to Alice’s looking glass. Rollo May’s, Man’s Search For Himself, Love and Will, kept me up at night. I was drawn to any psychology courses but the classes that drew me the most focused on abnormal psych. I didn’t know then how much these themes would play out in my own life.

     When I entered the field of emotional and behavioral disabilities in students I was further schooled in this area. These studies made me realize I couldn’t apply rational thought to an effort of understanding conditions fueled by something other than rational thinking. Blind adherence to rational thought has made me wonder if those of us who think we are “in our right minds’ are the ones who are completely out of our heads.

     And, for clarity, we urgently need a new word or expression for clinical depression and anxiety. We must differentiate these conditions from transient depressions or appropriate worry. I made up my name for clinical depression with anxiety, “Dep-Anx”, because, for the sufferer, these evil twins often coexist, creating the ghastly funhouse of horrors that are absolutely zero fun and that sufferers know the horror of all too well. When your team loses or you accidentally shrink your favorite jeans in the wash or even when your lover leaves you, that is not clinical depression. Yes, you are sad for a time and you may have difficulty navigating life, but, eventually, you go on. Clinical depression is a clusterfuck of symptoms that often make it impossible to get out of bed never-mind go on with daily life. Absence of calm — forget joy — inertia, sleeplessness, agitation, somatic symptoms, loss of appetite, self-loathing, guilt, shame, crippling anxiety and the ever-present and terrifying danger of self-harm and suicidal ideation come together in a toxic hell that make people’s well-meant admonitions to “just try this — or that!” actually harmful because, not only do you have a miasma of negativity swirling inside you, you feel guilty and ashamed that you are absolutely unable to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps, man!” You don’t even know what the hell that means. Does anyone?

     People have good intentions. However, suggestions to “try this or that” can overwhelm someone caught in this vortex of pain. Sometimes the cause is physical — brain chemistry. But we cannot see it, observe it, and are only beginning to understand it. The problem with encouraging someone to take certain steps that seem easy enough for the relatively healthy person is that it can be too daunting for a person struggling with clinical depression. They simply can’t, really, just can’t. So that type of encouragement can actually be dangerous, can push the sufferer to feel even worse about themselves — less capable, more deeply ill, beyond hope. The sufferer may need a medical intervention. Neurotransmitters that require adjusting before rational steps can be employed. It would be terrific if the sufferer could take action, but, often, “action” is exactly the problem. To loved ones and those hoping to help, the paralysis so common in clinical depression is both frustrating and frighteningly real. We watch it unfold unendingly in real time. My son wants this pain to stop. Everyone wants their loved one’s pain to stop. It is excruciating to sit and watch helplessly while one you love is in depression’s torturous thrall.

     We’ve got to find better ways to encircle sufferers with multiple methodologies and paths toward healing and health. We need a “Manhattan Project” or “Moon Shot’ to address the dearth of mental health interventions in this country. It would take money, lots of money, and a society less focused on acquiring stuff, fame and fortune and one more focused on the welfare of its citizens — a society committed to helping all of its people live an engaged, connected, meaningful life. A society that implicitly understands we are all on the spectrum of mental health and mental illness and at any point could fall from one end to the other. A society whose concern for the health of all of its citizens matters — not only to the individual but to that society as a whole. A society that supports whole health — there is no health without the mental part.

     What services do exist in this country are paltry in relation to the overwhelming need. The webs are not connected, they are isolated and random help systems where one provider may be unable, ethically, to speak to another — unable to share invaluable information that could be key in helping the sufferer.

     I’ve sat in the ravages of hell with my son while the system has routinely failed us. There are thousands of families like mine. You might be one or you might know one. Or, you may know one and not know it. Everyone is afraid to speak about this, to tell their scary truth, risk the stigma so often associated with mental health — it’s not gone! If my child is in peril — no matter their age! — I will be a lion mother and will fight to get what services are needed. I am fortunate to have some skill in this battle, although, I’ll admit, the emotional toll of the battle is steep. Awfully, terribly, steep. And it’s a lonely fight, let me tell you. Few people know how to navigate what meager help systems are available. People need help. We are desperate.

     I wish I could say that clinical depression ends, mental illness abates, has an expiration date when it is outgrown or permanently resolved, but, sadly, I can’t.  And, the lack of multi-tiered systems for help remains static. It’s depressing. We’re desperately in need of a new word for, a new understanding of, and better treatments for, clinical depression and every single other mental disorder. One day, perhaps mental health services, social services, services to help those in so much invisible pain, will simply be referred to as part of wellness, as part of rightly and generously addressed and funded public health.

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