Voices

Some of us hear them...

             even when they're not there

Others can't hear them...

             even when they say "we love you"

All of us try to find our Voice

                         our way to share ourselves

But what we want just as much...

            at least one person who understands...

                          we want to hear an echo with a personal touch.

This is what came to mind after reading several accounts of  people experiencing various forms of mental illness. 

The stories come from the book, Beyond Crazy. 

The stories come from various parts of Canada. 

The stories come from people no different than the friends and family around us.

Compassionate Friends

This morning a friend sent me an article from the Jan/Feb issue of the Compassionate Friends Newsletter.  The article echoed their feelings about going through the loss of a sibling.  As I read the article, one line jumped out,

“Many feelings, thoughts or emotions that I may have thought were just mine I have found are universal with others.”

Just recently I was also reading Agnes's Jacket and came across a similar sentiment.  In Chapter One we hear about a lady named Helen who unfortunately started hearing voices and who's life spiraled down into hospitalization.. Fortunately she was told about the Hearing Voices Network (HVN) and, equally fortuitous, a group was just starting in a nearby day centre.  When Helen learned the group was one of 150 voice support groups in Britain, she said,

" I thought I'd faint.  I had no idea there were so many other people struggling with the same problem as I was."

Over three thousand years ago, the Epic of Gilgamesh described characters in a human drama.  The "Epic" notion aside, if we look around today, I don’t believe we’d see anyone with vastly different loves, hopes or fears than the people in the story.  I think if we read enough about other people or talk enough to others we’ll find humans are still pretty basic even today. 

The sense that I am not like someone else is a double edged sword with neither edge serving us well.  Either I look down on someone thinking I’m not like them or I look up at others feeling like I‘m not like them.  Either way I create an imaginary barrier between my humanity and other people’s humanity.  That’s the sting of stigma - the feeling of isolation it brings.

If you feel like you’re the only one in the world who is feeling the way you do – it’s not true.  It simply is not reality.  Look around on the internet, read about other people or, if you can, talk to people.  Someone somewhere knows what you’re talking about and feels compassion because they have had that pain.  Don’t give up.

A World of Grey

I often think things like, “Today was a good day” or “He’s  an idiot” or “I can’t play guitar.”  Black and white statements.  What about Mental Health?  If I say someone has mental health issues , it’s kind of like flicking a switch or checking a box.  Suddenly I put them in a group with all the other people I think have mental issues.  Wow, not much grace in that is there?  No effort to separate those clinically diagnosed from those feeling a little down.  Nope, let’s just put them all in the same box labeled “contains nuts”.

When  I look at myself and those around me I see something different.  Most people I know, myself included, engage in some behaviours that reflect an unhealthy mental health habit.  We may not have habits severely interfering with our lives but they’re certainly not helping us.  If I really took a look at any given day I’d be hard pressed to say that everything went well or poorly.  More often than not if something goes bad early in the morning, I know I can dwell on that and it casts a shadow over the rest of the day.  When I honestly look at anyone I’m having trouble with, it would be a stretch to say that everything they do is stupid or mean.  More often than not I can stew in the bad feeling and that will be the filter I see the rest of their behaviour through…until I get over it. Not really helpful

On a website I saw recently there is a statistic quoted, “one in three people will experience a Mental Health problem in their lifetime”.   At first blush this seems to me a ridiculous number.  My suspicion is the quote came from a questionnaire that had a very broad definition of mental health problems.  Maybe that’s the heart of the matter though:  we can’t talk about Mental Health unless we first acknowledge that it’s one of the balancing acts in all of our lives.  There is a quote “to not forgive is to burn the bridge we ourselves must walk”.  I believe part of the problem with stigma is thinking we are not “tainted” with the issue.  When we don’t see Mental Health as something everyone manages, we crucify ourselves in advance when our lives don’t work out like we hoped or planned.   Mental Health is not a taint,  it's part of being human.

A while ago I tried to print a picture in strictly black and white and the image was barely recognizable.  I tried again using greyscale and the result was far more accurate.

I still can't play guitar though.

I don't know Jack

So I'm meandering around the web last week and I go to the Mental Health Commission website.  My eye caught the article and video for the Jack Project.  This is an idea started in response to a family loosing their son Jack to suicide.  Have I met Jack? No, I don't know anything about him. I watched the video and my gut reaction was, "this is wonderful".  I know it might sound odd to feel that about this kind of project because I know what initiated the idea was a tragedy.

In a popular piece of writing called the Desiderata there is a line,

"Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in  sudden misfortune". 

I've always liked that part because I sense an old wisdom in it: tragedy, in some form, is inevitable.  The challenge is in how we respond to it. The last lines of the Desiderata are,

"With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy."

The families who start things like the Jack Project and ImagineTeam are among the many in the world who experience a tremendous personal loss.  Part of their response however is to embrace life and to reach out to others.  Okay so maybe I don't know Jack but if that's not beautiful I don't know what is.

The Question of Pain

I was going to call this "the Gift of Pain" but I thought it might have a lot of people questioning my sanity or wondering what I was smoking.  It wasn't meant to suggest that pain was a gift but rather Pain came with a gift.  I also wondered if the distinction was too semantic or maybe philosophical.  In any event, I didn't call it that so why am I going on about what I didn't call this post?

I suppose the universal experience of pain is at the heart of empathy and compassion.  I don't know anyone who has never felt pain so I guess I don't know anyone who cannot, at some level, understand what another person's pain is like.  I think that is the gift which comes with Pain.  Having just gone through a few days of some of the most intense physical pain I've ever felt, I was struck by how it made me mindful of others.  I was thinking of other people I knew who were having different pain in their own lives. I was thinking also of friends & family who expressed concern and I also was thinking about the doctors & nurses in the world who pour their energy out in this particular arena.

So now we come to what I do have as the title, "The Question of Pain". 
I am struck by the variety of answers people have to pain.  This past week what really struck me personally is how our answer to pain can include or exclude community.  For myself, I will be paying attention to to my pain in the future, not to focus on it but to see it in relation to a community.  Typically we will all have some deep pain in our life at some point but our response my lead us into isolation - away from others.  What good does that do?

Community can be as little as two or as large as the world.  Pain can scale from a child getting a bee sting to a major catastrophe like 9-11.  I'm beginning to see that whenever there is pain, there follows in it's wake an opportunity for community.  It's our answer to the question.

Snap out of it!

I know a few people who've told me they have a mental illness.  I haven't actually dug into their experience of it - how they live with it on a day to day basis, I'm just aware they deal with it.  Should I ask questions? Will it make them snap? What do I say?

Depression is possibly the first thing many people think of when they think "Mental Illness" and it doesn't take too much reading or talking to uncover the wide range of opinions about it.  The one that must be most stunning is, "Snap out of it!"  What if I told someone with Cancer or a torn ligament to shake it off - if they didn't hit me or yell at me they'd surely think I was the crazy one.

I'm guessing plain old ignorance is a large part to blame for attitudes that are off base.  Is it fair to heap all the blame on Ignorance though?  Is there something a little more sinister hiding in it's shadow?  What about Stigma?  It not only keeps the ones with mental illness in the shadow, in many cases it also keeps friends & family from even wanting to find out. Why?

I read a book a while ago, not too many pictures.  The writer talked about how so many  of us are careful who we associate with because we don't want anyone or anything to affect our social standing in a negative way.  We want the people we value (ie good looking or smart or rich) to value us...it's all about us and we're
not letting any negative stigma push us down the social ladder.

What if we could affect the Stigma monster? What if we could shrink it with a magical ray gun and make it so small that it didn't matter.  I don't expect we'll ever get rid of Stigma, just like we'll never get rid of ignorance or people leaving their left blinker light on long after they've turned the corner but we can shrink it.  We can chose to care about real people with real problems and when we care for someone else more than ourselves, great things can happen.

We won't wake up every morning with flowers in bloom but Stigma will matter less to us and so have less impact on those around us.  Really, we'd be freeing ourselves just as much as the the who is Stigmatized.  How cool is that?

This blog is a part of the www.mentalhealthmatters.ca website and we invite everyone to read, think and chat about mental health matters.  Welcome.