May is Mental Health Awareness Month, so my posts this month highlight the many ways we all experience and manage mental illness. While the World Health Organization tells us that one in four people have a diagnosable mental illness, I believe, as my mother did, that we all, at some point in our lives, go through periods of poor mental health, and must work hard to find our way back to mental stability.
I also believe that writing, for many of us, is about managing our mental health. It is for me, and I know I’m not alone. So when I went to my shelf to start pulling the books that dealt with mental health, I had a hard time stopping. Because so many of the books that have come out of this program have dealt with mental health in one way or another.
For most of this month, I’m going to focus each post on specific ways of looking at mental health. Today, I’ll focus on diagnosable mental illnesses, but in future posts, I’ll look at the relationship between grief and mental illness, whether racism is a form of mental illness and, to finish the month, a review Chris Moore’s new book, The Power of Guilt: Why We Feel It and Its Surprising Ability to Heal.
In an interview after publishing Run, Hide, Repeat: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood, author Pauline Dakin confessed that on pitch day she had two books in mind. While the rest of the class of 2015 was unequivocal about which one she should write, she waffled back and forth for two years.
Dakin’s memoir tells of an unusual childhood with a stepfather who had a delusional illness that led him to believe he was being chased by the Mafia. He was so successful at convincing her mother of this that the family moved several times, without warning or explanation, to evade the danger this “threat” caused.
It’s hard to imagine the impact this must have had on a growing child, but in that interview, she talks about her relief at sharing the secrecy of her childhood. “The act of telling the secret, of being loud about the secret, undid some of the damage of the secret.… Eventually I came to feel that not holding secrets lets you let go. It’s the secrets that are so toxic.”
Jason Schreurs, author of Scream Therapy: A Punk Journey Through Mental Health, lives with bipolar disorder, a chronic mental health condition characterized by intense mood swings from extreme highs to severe lows. It’s commonly managed with medication, but like all psychiatric drugs, these have adverse effects that can severely impact one’s daily life.
Schreurs and tens of millions of others worldwide have taken a different approach. Growing up in a small town, he knew he was different and struggled to fit in. “In the punk scene,” he writes, “I found my chosen family.” A genre that might sound to others like tuneless noise is music to the ears for punk fans.
Punk rock grew out of a desire for people like Schreurs to find a place where they fit. The raw-throated screaming that others shun is therapy for people of all ages, an outlet for intense feelings, a reaction to being cast as “weirdos,” a decision to embrace, in themselves and others, the gifts that go along with having a neurodivergent brain.
I’d also recommend:
The View from Coffin Ridge: A Childhood Exhumed, by Gwen Lamont. While not directly about diagnosed mental health issues, it’s hard to imagine that parents could be so emotionally unstable in their parenting without having mental health issues.
Edit: On re-reading this last bit, I’d like to apologize to author Gwen Lamont. What I wrote in haste was a brusque and ill-considered way to express my thoughts. Lamont has noted that she didn’t see her parents as abusive or neglectful; “It was just my family.” Yet one of the back cover blurbs suggests her story is the Canadian version of Jeanette Walls’s The Glass Castle. And a blurb on that publisher’s website describes it as “truly astonishing—a memoir permeated by the intense love of a peculiar but loyal family.” I haven’t read Walls’s memoir, but I would compare Lamont’s story with Tara Westover’s Educated, which I would describe in a similar way: The love was clear; it was the parents’ unique ways of expressing their love that left me wondering if they were influenced by some sort of undiagnosed mental health issues.
Next week: grief and mental health.