[MotownJohnny]

Teacake, you said something I found really interesting in one of my other threads, so interesting I thought I would start a fresh thread to address it:

"Its because the affluent suburbs are very like a golf course prison. For kids they are. You cant get out. No bis línes. You are the prisoner and property of your parents. You cant get judicial review in most cases. You are second class citizens.

See how it works?

What priaon is to me i imagine involuntary commitment is to you. Im pretty sure its a childhood issue. Thsts why its encrypted. Irrational, symbolic and so compelling." - quote by Teacake, in this thread: http://forums.psychcentral.com/post-...-wrong-me.html

"The dark side" of suburbia is a recurrent theme in America in the past decades - we have everything from "Peyton Place" to "Desperate Housewives" and "Picket Fences", exploring the theme of "the dark side" in literature, film, television.

Part of that "dark side" is mental illness. But, no one seems to want to "talk about it". Even now. I have heard a lot of people in my community make comments about mental illness, such as in the days immediately after the school shootings in Connecticut in December 2012. Usually comments along the lines of "it's a shame" or "they should do something". But, I honestly can't remember ever hearing a real conversation about any aspect of mental health, not in my own house or family, not with neighbors, not at work. Just comments, some insensitive, some flippant, some short but sincere.

It seems to be one of the things we "don't talk about". In past generations, there were a LOT of things "we don't talk about" - most relating in one way or another to sex - the actual subject itself, as well as pregnancy, homosexuality, sex outside of marriage - and people had "secrets". One true story - my grandmother was pregnant with my uncle in the 1930s, and no one was told until after the baby came - and this was a couple who had been married about 14 years at that time and had already had 4 kids. Pregnancy was taboo, too scandalous to talk about, and as a somewhat heavy-set woman, she was able to hide it, literally, under her dress.

When I was in the depths of my despair, "sentenced" to the day hospital, not yet there, and even during almost the whole time I was there, I walked around town almost all night, almost every night, having my slo-mo breakdown. And, one of the things I thought was "they will cast you out when they find out you are 'crazy', because the 'good upright citizens' won't tolerate 'that" in this town." And, I pretty much believed this to be true, it was a visceral reaction, it hit me immediately in that doctor's office, part of the "your life is over except for the dying" thing upon hearing "bipolar" and "psych hospital".

But, I also walked around thinking "hypocrites!" - because I know there are all kinds of dysfunctions in my town -substance abuse, adultery/infidelity, bad parenting, gambling and spending addictions, whatever, you name it. And, I also know "how the system works" -- a good example, a few years ago, it came to light that a township supervisor's husband had a drinking problem, and had been pulled over several times impaired behind the wheel, but ... it was all conveniently covered up by the police. Until a political enemy found out and exposed the scandal. And, I thought, drunk driving is "forgiven" and "covered up", but mental illness, "being crazy" was, in my mind, an unforgivable sin, punishable by being "cast out" - I was sure I would end up, literally, homeless on the streets of Detroit. Because, you know, I've seen "those people" many times when I've been in the City of Detroit proper - a human tragedy in the "land of plenty". I thought that that is how "crazy people" ended up - it was my stereotypical view of the "mentally ill", and suddenly, I was one of them, and I just knew it was to be my fate.

So yes, I thought, for whatever reason, that my particular "crazy" was somehow a bigger transgression of the rules of my little corner of society than the "sins" of other people here, and that I would finally be given that death sentence .... the one I was expecting all of the time from dear old dad, because I always thought, growing up, that it was only a matter of time before he, literally, killed me.

Suddenly ... a lot of this is making a lot more sense to me than it did just a few days ago. I "know" all of this, I've been over all of this turf a thousand times, in the day program, with my therapist, with my doctor, on the net on support sites. But, it just seems so much "clearer" to me now. I was the teenage boy who expected to die because he did something really, really, really heinous, a capital crime, like getting a B+ on an English quiz, it was a "disgrace to the family" and it shattered the image of "the perfect son" and "the perfect family" that was so, so carefully cultivated, growing up my dad's own particular twisted dysfunctional Disneyland, where everything was make-believe for show, and the reality on the ground was that it was a Hell of epic proportions. In real life, the closest analogue I can think of is North Korea, with the various Kims playing the role of my father, or vice versa.

And, I grew into the man who expected to get the death sentence when something happened and he "broke the rules of society" by "going crazy."

Except, I didn't "go crazy" on purpose, and I resented then and still do the fact that "society" is not kind to "crazy". Most crazy is harmless to anyone except the afflicted. Maybe I am not the "crazy one" after all. Maybe society is profoundly dysfunctional in how it treats "crazy people". Because, as OpenEyes said in her thread, she needed loving kind support, but was ignored, was belittled, yelled at, treated badly in a time of intense stress and trauma, and that made it so much worse for her.

Well, I see it this way --- our wonderful little suburban Utopian society is just that way when it comes to mental illness. Out "system" doesn't really serve up the warm and fuzzy to people who are "in crisis" - it throws them in the back of police cars, puts them in restraints, sticks needles in their arms against their will, and then after they are "better" it sticks them out in a society that re-traumatizes them by making them feel bad, guilty, and ashamed for "going crazy". I guess it's nothing new, look at the poor guys who came back from Viet Nam with what they called "shell shock" ie PTSD, and then were treated like the scum of the earth for fighting in an unpopular war AND "going crazy" from it.

Image is so much here. Geoffrey Beene - I thought of "designer" whatever when I thought of this thread, because I was wearing a Geoffrey Beene shirt yesterday, and someone commented about "what a nice shirt". When the "image" becomes more important than the reality, there is a problem. Mental illness is like that --- I know I'm more worried about the "image" I might project if it were know that I was in the psych hospital day program, than I am about the reality of my life, which is that it's actually quite excellent in many ways. I spend almost every day unhappy and worried about a short period in my life. If I took the "Geoffrey Beene" label out of my shirt, it would be the same shirt. Well, whether or not I have a "label" in the form of a psych history, day to day, I'm still the same guy. I don't think I'm a bad guy at all. Maybe a little weird, but who isn't?

This is what I need to remember - that going to the psych ward, having a diagnosis code in a medical record, doesn't make me a bad person.

Well, that is my editorial of the moment.

[gayleggg]

I'm so glad to hear that you realize that you are not a bad person. That's terrific!

This was interesting, Johnny. When I was entering junior high, back in the day, my parents moved us out into the country. There was nowhere I could go without my parents taking me, except to school on the bus. Of course, as you mention, back then no one talked about problems of any sort, especially problems related to sex or mental illness (hm-m-m-m-m... is there a correlation there?) Anyway... I was taught that you don't talk about family problems outside of the home. And since no one in the home wanted to hear about them either, you just kept it to yourself.

I grew up with gender identity issues that I hid along with what I now realize was major depression & anxiety. At my new school I also became of target of unrelenting bullying & physical abuse. But no one paid any attention. As I advanced into adulthood, I continued to hide my mental health problems. I continued to hide them through the first 5 decades of my life, because that was what I'd been taught to do. I have written elsewhere that if denial were blankets, I'd have been crushed by the weight! Then sometime after turning 50, the pressure blew the lid off of the cooker & I made my first serious suicide attempt. It's been pretty-much a long s-l-o-w downhill slide since then.

I was, & still am embarrassed by my mental illness. I don't share it with anyone I know out in the community. I don't even talk about it with my wife. Sometimes I look in the mirror & think to myself: "you're not mentally ill... you're just a normal everyday old guy." But then I think back over my history & there it is. It's pretty hard to deny.

This, of course, is the danger inherent in not talking about, or doing anything about, mental health struggles. They don't just gradually dissipate. They fester & sooner or later explode. Sometimes the explosion is reasonably well contained. Sometimes it creates mayhem.

[MotownJohnny]

Thank you, Gayle. At least my latest regression hasn't brought me back to the place I was months back when I did feel like the scum of the earth. I think I "got over" that one.

Skeezyks, I know that when I was a kid in the 1970s, I never had anyone approach me about family issues. It would have been nice if someone had - every once in a while, there were little clues that there was something not quite right in my household, but no one every went anywhere with it. Which is a shame, my life perhaps would have been very different. And, my mother was too afraid to do anything. So, it all just flowed along. Such is life in North Korea.

Hiding in plain sight. Keeping up appearances, so to speak. It's always been a theme in my life. I guess the one thing I never had a problem with was bullying at school. I was sort of the opposite, I was the weird loner kid who wasn't able to be "one of the boys" because he wasn't allowed to do any of the things outside of school hours that it took to do that. I desperately wanted to, but Kim Jong Il Lite (my father) forbid it. I remember when I was about 7, I was invited to a classmate's birthday party on a Saturday, and it was "boys only" - every boy in the class went but me. The mom brought me a "goody bag" with some party favors, and a piece of cake, on the following Monday. It made me so sad, because I wanted to be "one of the boys" so badly.

I still have fantasies about being "one of the guys". One fantasy I haven't pursued yet - I really, really want to play on a softball team. That was a 7 year old's fantasy, crushed like a bug by Kim Lite, too. And, to this day, I want to do that so badly. I know I would be terrible - I cant' pitch, I know I can barely hit, I think I could do a decent job fielding at least. I just don't have the time right now to pursue that - a goal for some future spring and summer before I get too old.

[Open Eyes]

I grew up in a middle class way too. We had the problem child no one wanted to deal with, my older brother, I was the youngest in my family. Well, we could not hide my older brother, he struggled with school, ran a way a lot and things at home were bad too.

I remember like it was yesterday when my parents took him to see a psychiatrist as they were at wits end with him. I remember sitting in the waiting room really hoping that man behind the door that my brother disappeared behind would have the right answers. Oh, I was not going to see that happen, the advice was "discipline" and my
mother was not to coddle him in any way. The discipline happened in a shed out in back of the house where my father would take my brother and we would hear him screaming,
I think it was a belt that was used. That did not help, it only made him worse. And as little as I was I can remember seeing my mother pacing back and forth crying and talking to herself thinking she was alone and she said, "This is wrong, this isn't right,
I am his mother, why can't I just love him and cuddle with him?" and she was weeping and pacing back and forth, back and forth.

I was just behind my brother in school and I was going to see how really bad it was for him every day. He had to stay back twice so he was just above me in school and from my first bus ride, when I was young all I saw was him being bullied from the minute we entered the bus. I will never forget the pain in his face either, every day twice a day, and even in school, he would try to run away, but that didn't work, so instead he suffered on the bus and in school and often when it came time to get the bus home, I would walk to the bus and he would come out of the principals office, another punishment day for him where he was told how bad he was, everyone told him that "constantly" except for me. I felt bad for him and I was his only friend, and that was
not easy because while there were times where he like having "some" attention, there were other times where he just could not take it and would rage and I had to run and hide.

I dealt with that for "years" and often I was so exhausted from the bus ride to school,
I was too tired to pay attention, I honestly don't know how I managed to learn anything either. I did stay back a grade, I was in first grade and I just could not concentrate so they would bring me to kindergarten where I could finger paint, I loved that and now I know why, it was a way to be "calm" for me. Now that I think about it, because my brother struggled I was considered just another problem too when I struggled to pay attention. Often I would get so exhausted that I would play sick just so I could go to the nurses office and actually "sleep".

Teachers were always "mean" to my brother except for one that I liked too, she was sweet and read stories to the class, I loved the stories she read, and she read them so well too, I could get lost in those stories and not have to think about all the other challenges I had to deal with constantly.

I have mentioned before that my brother got so bad that he sucked his thumb all night long, he did so loudly and feverishly that his lips would swell and bleed and blister. My parents tried to put something bad tasting on his thumbs, it didn't work, he sucked his thumb anyway. He also peed his bed and the floor too, my mother had to make his bed with shower curtains and lay them on the floor. She would go in there and have to change his bed every day and I could hear her crying.

My brother had to face the bullying on the bus about his lips too, they called him big lips. It was so bad but never "once" did that bus driver turn around and stop it, I remember him looking at it through the rear view mirror, but he would look away and
keep on driving. I always felt so sorry for him but as I mentioned, I had to learn how to know when he was going to have to rage it all out.

He was scrawny, but a miracle happened, he grew and he got bigger than the other boys. When that happened he began to fight back and they all knew he would be
coming for them one by one. But, he still struggled in school and got in trouble.

Then my parents found him a tutor and for the very first time someone helped him and was "nice to him", and I got a break. He began to change and do better and began to have more self esteem, I could see it, and I felt so happy for him, so happy that someone else saw what I saw, did what I wanted to see happen for him for so many years.

That is what I wanted to be for my students, I wanted them to walk away from me with that same look that I had seen in my older brother, I didn't know what that was, that
it had a name, "self esteem". I wanted that for my husband who also struggled in school because he had dyslexia, and another challenge I did not know about and really wish I had called "compulsive ADHD". He had wanted to work with children too, he wanted to be a special ed teacher but he struggled in college because of his dyslexia, and there was no real help for that back then. I stayed with him because I wanted to find a way to help him too, I trained a beautiful white pony for him to take out so he could be with children. That really helped him so much, it filled that niche and he certainly was very popular with his white pony. When that pony was so badly damaged,
that he could no longer do that, I found my husband crying in the woods.

I also spent a lot of time with my daughter who also had dyslexia, she just happened to
love riding and was good at it. I supported that because of how she struggled in school and the riding helped her with her self esteem too. The other children made fun of my daughter because of the dyslexia, so because she did well with the riding, I did everything I could to keep her busy with that. I also took her to school a lot so she would not have to ride the bus, I picked her up from school too and took her to riding lessons, that was very expensive, but I kept working constantly so she could have that. Yes, there were things we dealt with in our home too, things we didn't talk about either. People on the outside looking in would make comments, even be disrespectful, yet we all kept trying and working at it.

As I read the stories here, I feel so bad for those who struggled, it sure was not fair and
yes, we are not supposed to talk about it either. I am sorry for that, and I am so glad
to see that happening here so we can all hear we are not alone with the challenges we
all had. I think that is important to our healing too.

OE

[MotownJohnny]

That is really a very sad thing to hear how your brother was bullied at school, suffered at home under some very dubious advice, all to the point he developed several psychological problems.

[Open Eyes]

Yes, it was horrible Mowtown, and to this day when he is stressed as a grown man he still sucks his thumb in his sleep. He had several year in therapy for his challenges resulting from what he experienced growing up, it was truly horrific.

When I lost so much of what I had created, I tried so hard to explain "why" it was so important to me. I touched on that history even because of the devastated condition
I was in and that I was not getting through to people the depth of how what I did meant
so much to me.

I was so shocked to see how badly misunderstood that was and lead to me being so badly misdiagnosed too. Oh, how that misdiagnosing lead to making it worse and worse for me too, even my GP looked at me with so much anger and threw my records at me.
My ex lawyer was going to try to pursue for psychological damages, he got my records before I did and once I saw what was written and learned how the opposing side would
get to see "all" my records and how all of that would be made public, I took that out of my case. I did not want to be misunderstood or have so many "private" challenges of others in my life exposed to where they would be hurt.

All I ever did my entire life was help people, and YES, it took a lot out of me, it was very hard. I was not prepared to have so much hard work destroyed the way it was and have
so many people just not get the significance of what I had been doing either.

I was the only adult that was willing to see that trainer severely neglecting his children
too. I left him even though I my daughter was so close to the end of a season and so close to obtaining awards for state and zone championships. I could not have my daughter thinking that ignoring that was in any way "acceptable" either. I could not fail those children who were students coming to me so concerned about this abuse either. These young children coming to me, and afraid of telling their own parents?

I never in my wildest dreams would imagine the gossip this trainer spread about me in anger that I left him would come up by the opposing attorney getting advice about
horses from a trainer who heard this gossip either.

Yes, I suffered in my childhood, my brothers rages were awful and I had to know how to run from him. Yet, I also took a lot of lemons from all that and made lemon aide in my own way too. No, people did not understand that yet I did have therapists tell me I was gifted and should be a psychologist.

I never ever dreamed I would have so much turned upside down the way it had to where I struggle with this disorder and how people have been so horrible to me. The only one who is seeing a lot of "the real me" is my T and it took a lot of time to explain it all to him. You think people don't understand PTSD, well, they don't understand dyslexia either, or a lot of the ways people are challenged through no fault of their own.
My daughter has dyslexia as I have mentioned, well, she also has a very high IQ, but she definitely learns and processes differently, it took a lot of patience and time and dedication to help her with that.

Mowtown, there are a lot of people that process information differently, that have challenges that other people do not understand and abuse them for too. I saw that constantly growing up. I see it now so many years later too. I had a child that I taught that displayed behaviors that I had never seen before. She would ride a little and then just have to rest and discuss how she "needed to rest a bit before she could continue".
It turned out that when she was being raised by her mother, her mother was battling breast cancer and treatments that made her tired all the time and that is the way she interacted with this child. The mother never noticed "why" her own child behaved this way either. She tagged her as not very "athletic", but that was just not the case at all.
I spent a lot of time on it but I worked on slowly teaching her to abandon that "need to rest all the time" and she got so she stopped doing that and became more involved and developed athletically. She still rides now "years" later and she called me to touch base and let me know she has been riding the jumpers over in England and there certainly is no resting in riding the jumpers.

I am so sorry for those who were mistreated for things they could not help, or for things that their parents struggled with that traumatized them. Yes, the world is full of ignorance and labeling that is definitely "cruel".

OE