Spiritually, Mental Illness and Recovery

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My father is a retired protestant minister and I grew up attending church. When I was a child, Easter was my second favorite holiday. I preferred Christmas because I got presents. At Easter, we hid eggs but didn’t exchange gifts. Of course, when I got older I came to understand just how important Easter is to protestant faiths.

I am writing about religion because of a question that I was asked recently at Viterbo University, a beautiful school in La Crosse, Wisconsin. About 550 people attended my speech at Viterbo, which traces its origins to a small school founded by the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. 

“How important is spiritually to mental health recovery?” a woman in the audience asked me.

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What Is Critical To Recovery?

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What’s the most important ingredient to recovery if you have a mental illness?

I’m beginning my week by flying into LaCrosse, Wisconsin, where I will speak tonight at Viterbo University.  As always, I will talk about my book, my son, and what happened to our family. I will explain how those terrible events led me to the Miami Dade County Detention Center where I followed persons with mental disorders through the criminal justice system.  I will talk about how our jails and prisons have become our new asylums, why this is wrong and how we need to turn our current system back into a community health issue rather than having it continue to be a criminal justice problem. 

But on this trip, I’ve also been asked to speak in the afternoon to a number of local leaders as part of an informal afternoon “conversation.” The goal of this talk, which is sponsored by the Mental Health Coalition, is to discuss what is happening in La Crosse and what it might do better. 

My role is to describe successful programs that I’ve seen visiting 46 states and three countries — Iceland, Brazil and Portugal — and touring more than a hundred different programs.

I am always happy to talk about programs that are making a difference and I don’t mind citing specific examples.

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Death, Friends and Political Memories

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A funeral this week was yet another reminder that time moves on. I used to go to weddings. Now I am entering the funeral age.

It actually was an unnecessary third reminder.

The first was the death in March of David Broder,the Pulitzer Prize winning, Dean of Washington political writers. I knew him when I worked at The Washington Post, although we were not close friends. Every workplace has a pecking order and Broder sat on Mount Olympus. I was on a ledge much farther down.  

Despite that, Broder stopped by my desk shortly after I was hired and spent several minutes talking to me about Oklahoma p0litics. He had heard that the Post had hired me away from the now closed Tulsa Tribune. I was the newspaper’s lone Washington correspondent and had covered the state’s two senators and five representatives for three years.  I was shocked that someone as famous as Broder would take time to    introduce himself and even more stunned by how much he knew about Oklahoma politics. Not only was he familiar with the state’s congressional leaders, he also asked me about several county commissioners. I later learned that Broder was that well-versed about every state. Like most other young staffers, I thought he walked on water. But he was never arrogant and that was not something that could be said about several of his other Mount Olympus colleagues.  

The second death that caused me to feel nostalgic was the passing of Geraldine Ferraro, the first female candidate from a major political party to run on a presidential ticket. I had met Gerraro through an Oklahoma congressman named Mike Synar who was the only politician whom I ever covered who I considered to be a personal friend.

First, a bit about my pal Mike.

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What were the first signs?

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“Did you see any warning signs that should have tipped you off about your son’s mental illness?”

It’s a question I get asked whenever I speak in public. 

Like other parents, I have spent hours thinking about my son’s past,  wondering if there were behaviors that I missed which were red flags.  If so, what were they? When did his mental illness first begin revealing itself?

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College Disability Services: A Tricky Issue

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Should someone born with only two fingers on one of their hands be admitted into a medical school?

   What if someone with a severe stutter wants to work as a broadcast journalist? Should a college allow that person to enroll in its school of mass communication?

These are some of the questions that disability and special needs officials on college campuses routinely face.

I hadn’t thought much about these questions until last week when I was a keynote speaker at the AHEAD in Virginia Conference held at Sweet Briar College in Amherst. AHEAD is an acronym for Association on Higher Education and Disability.  Nancy Beach, one of its members, invited me to speak about my book and experiences with my son, Mike, whose mental disorder first surfaced while he was attending college.

Most AHEAD members are responsible for making certain their colleges comply with federal and state disability, discrimination, and privacy laws. That can be tricky business.

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Chemical Imbalances: Real or Imagined?

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One of the first terms that parents and others hear when someone shows symptoms of having a mental disorder is “chemical imbalance.” It is the catch-all that often is used to explain why someone suddenly shows signs of major depression, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. I remember being shocked when I used this term in a news article and was later confronted by someone who proudly identified themselves as being “anti-psychiatry.” She told me that there is absolutely no evidence that mental illnesses are real and/or caused by biological problems inside the brain. 

I soon learned that this is an ongoing argument, often a bitter one, waged between different factions in the mental health community. 

So I was happy when I was sent an advance copy of the book: SHRINK RAP: Three Psychiatrist Explain Their Work   written by Dinah Miller, M.D. Annette Hanson, M.D. and Steven Roy Daviss, M.D.. Their book is being published by the Johns Hopkins University Press next month. 

The doctors, who write a popular mental health blog offer their take on “chemical imbalances” and I found their comments helpful.

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