Nancy McCourt - December 22, 2005
Missoula Advisory Committee
Mental Illness
I am a mental health worker. I work in a community mental health center with adults who experience severe disabling mental illness – including bipolar disorder, depression, schizophrenia and other disorders. My staff and I work with adults who are mostly unmarried, have limited family contact and make ends meet on less than $600 month.
I’ve walked into work these past few days to a lobby filled with gifts for the people in our services – all donated by area individuals, groups and businesses. You are a very generous community - Thank you.
I’ve also been thinking of how we look at mental illness, how we develop our ideas of what are aberrant or abnormal, deviant, unusual, anomalous, peculiar, uncharacteristic, atypical, irregular, and crazy behaviors…behaviors that often stem from perceptions unique to the person with the behavior. I think of the risks involved when friends and family exhibit symptoms of mental illness. I also think about the sanity of insanity – how unfairly perceptions of “normal” can be applied and how talents and gifts that grow from the abnormal are largely undervalued.
Where, I’m wondering, did my earliest ideas of “insane” come from? I’m working through my memory to early images, people, experiences, jokes that somehow stimulated my personal theory-making around the abnormal behaviors or ideas of others. How much of my theory is learned? How have the ways mental illness has been depicted ultimately influenced my theories?
A flood of images comes forward: ‘the odd duck’, ‘odd bird’, ‘crazy as a loon’…sort of a Bugs Bunny-Jerry Lewis presentation; ‘you-drive-me-crazy’ (complete with hand gestures that include a finger circling the head for crazy). My dad had a horse that didn’t act right so his name was Mr. Nuts. There was a song…’They’re coming to take me away, hee, hee, ha, ha, ho,ho.” Early memories frame ‘crazy’ as goofy but safe; people who walked funny, talked funny, people who had odd social habits were all ‘crazy in the head’, ‘had a screw loose’, ‘lost their marbles’, and were ‘off their rocker’ as labeled by various others. For the most part these ‘crazy’ people were part of my community, came to church, shopped at Thriftway and had family members in town. Maybe we didn’t interact a whole lot, but there was not impression of fear or distrust because of their differences.
The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery taught me that moral dilemmas seemed to take honest folks to the brink of mental dysfunction; and at some point my religious teachings about morality seemed to frame a threat of mental anguish brought on by the guilt of immoral choices. Mental illness takes the form of ‘nervous breakdowns’ – vague television talk for emotional overload. I would imagine a person literally shaking from nerves and their body breaking down.
Moving then into junior high and adolescence, mental illness at once became cathartic and horrific. Books like Lisa Bright and Dark, and Go Ask Alice shed light on a shocking reality for my friends and me…the insanity of our pubescence brought into a dramatic perspective. Songs too, like Helen Reddy’s ‘Ruby Red Dress’ or Tanya Tucker’s ‘Delta Dawn’ spoke to the crazy girl I was sure lived inside me. Conversely, horror movies, stories and books also began to make an appearance in my world. Earlier movies like “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane” might have caused me to think odd people may be mean, but movies that feathured serial killers who stalked teens and people who become possessed, took ‘crazy’ to a new violent and scary level.
The movie, “Cybil” appeared and redirected my thoughts, once again, to a more realistic, illness-based, though dramatic, conception of ‘crazy’. Cybil, who experienced dissociative disorder, or multiple personalities, spoke again to the teen girl who felt crazy half the time. How close do people get, I wondered, to that edge of reality and emotional control without slipping over?
Later at University of Montana, as I approached internship, I found myself signing on at River House day treatment program for people with chronic mental illness. This was a placement somewhat by default as I’d not really thought of this population or service area as a focus area for my career. The solid people-centered approach and positive guidance by my practicum supervisor helped me make sense and order of all the images of ‘crazy’ that were floating around in my head. I found a little truth in all of those images, found them also exaggerated. I also found big pieces of the portrayal of ‘crazy’ were missing. The people I came to know at River House were far more like me than not in terms of what they wanted from life and relationships. They spoke again to the woman still inside who sometimes creeps close to the edge. These people displayed incredible talents and brilliance and trust…not just anger and fear.
It is difficult if not impossible to manage the images in our society of ‘crazy’. However I feel that strong community-based programs for people with mental illness go far to personalize the experience for us. Supporting relationships within our communities for folks with mental illness builds upon the positive images and helps us see similarities and strengths.
So, thank you for your generosity this Christmas. And remember that one of the greatest gifts is inclusion all year long.
I continue to see the people I met 20 years ago at River House…at Farmers’ Market, Butterfly Herbs or just walking down the street. The images I now hold of these ‘crazy’ people: members of my community, neighbors and citizens, but most of all, teachers of humanity.
This is Nancy McCourt member of the Missoula Advisory Committee.
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