Mental Illness

We got crazy folk in my family. To a greater or lesser degree we all show signs of dysfunction. Some of us are more functional in our dysfunction that others. I think we mirror the world.

To some degree sanity is a matter of perception and experiences. What seems logical to you seems crazy to me given my set of experiences and vice versa.

Who is the arbiter of crazy? Who sets the standards? Are there agendas in the normalization of perceptions, behavior, reasoning? Are there cultural implications at play in the processes of determination? Are mental health workers mentally healthy enough to be the judges of the mental state of others?

Ronald Regan changed the crazy game in California. His most memorable act during his tenure, as Governor of the sunshine state, was to revamp the mental health system. His shake up removed thousands of people from care and placed the majority of them on the streets of California. The Regan legacy still feeds the number amongst the hardcore homeless many wary of being sheltered.

I have noticed is that help is available in abundance after you enter the system. Not so much if you are not in a crisis that annoys others. Things like mass killings, suicides, and other disasters get attention. Silent suffering does not. I spent a day looking for a female intervention group for a young female sex addict in the San Francisco Bay Area to find nothing exists for girls with out criminal referrals. I tried to get police intervention and a referral for a girl working the street to be told there were just too many of them, we help them after we get a number on them. I have heard the stories of colleagues who try to help troubled youth in academic settings and encounter parents or most times the parent (mom) with hands in the air and a look of bitter resignation who “say take them.” These parents have done all they can with no resources and find relief for themselves and their children only after these children break the law. Often with other children in the home the only way some people can continue to parent is to give up the needy child to a system that won’t see them until it’s too late. The system attempts to fix broken things but is not good at helping fragile things become stronger, whole. It enters the picture too late, does too little, and does not serve the subject with the best intentions of normalized relations in the world. The system once engaged now filters existence and creates a dependence situation for the client for better or worst.

What produces all this un–sane-ness? Are some born wired differently? Is insanity genetic, environmental, or local to specific psyches? Is it a reaction to perception, toxic stimuli, contextual mismanagement, or a permanent “normal” state for those who suffer what we call mental health problems?

What do you do if your therapist jumps off the bridge on Thanksgiving Day? My sons did. Then there’s the woman who murdered her husband and defended herself counseled by fairies, the husband was a mental health professional who slept with the murderous wife when she was his teenage patient. Then there is the mental health professional who is currently under arrest for molesting his young male patients. Then there is the system in which all this exist.

I have heard a lot about “teaching moments” of late. Is anyone learning? I submit Mental Health in America is unhealthy. I would have us look to Einstein and realize maybe we in doing the same thing over and over exemplify insanity in our care of the mentally ill. I consider the skewed paradigm in which we attempt to function here in the belly and wonder along with James Baldwin in closing, “It’s a wonder we aren’t all stark raving mad.”




Ayodele Nzinga