Add the Words

Why sexual orientation and gender identity matter to me

#addthewords #Idleg pic.twitter.com/bFyO78Bn6Z
— Liza Long (@anarchistmom) February 17, 2014

Katie M. (not her real name) was my best friend in high school. Tall, blonde, and beautiful, she introduced her simple, unsophisticated Mormon classmate to foreign cinema and the Smiths, while I returned the cultural exchange with apricot Jello and Wednesday night Mutual activities. A gifted artist, Katie passed me notes that were illuminated manuscripts, masterpieces of satiric humor. Once a month on a Friday, we would skip school and pursue our own education at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts—my mom was more than happy to write a note stating (honestly): “Liza did not feel like coming to school on Friday.” At our Texas high school graduation ceremony, Katie was the only woman in a pants suit—in her muted yellow, wide-legged costume, she looked like a young Katherine Hepburn.

My Dad had already accepted a transfer to Bakersfield, California, and two days after I graduated, Katie and I watched as movers loaded up the contents of my parents’ two-story Tudor style home. I was sad to leave my boyfriend and Katie behind (the boyfriend and I broke up shortly afterward. Katie and I are friends to this day). Katie had already arranged to visit me in July; we had been planning a road trip to San Francisco during our senior year’s final semester.

A week later, I got her letter. Written on thick cream colored paper in her distinctive bold, backward-slanted hand, were words that would change how I felt about sexual orientation forever.

“I can’t keep this a secret from you any longer,” she wrote. “I am gay. I have always been this way. It is not a choice.”

“I know you probably will never speak to me again,” she continued. “I know how important your church is to you, and how they feel about homosexuality. But I have to tell you the truth.”

I put the letter down. And that’s when I realized that knowing what I knew now about Katie didn’t change how I felt about her. Not one bit. I loved her as one of my dearest friends before I knew she was gay, and I still loved her.

I also felt immediately ashamed as I remembered the Mutual activities she had attended with me at the LDS church. In one activity, a leader explained how AIDS (a new disease in those days) was God’s specific curse for homosexuals, a modern day scourge for our nation’s new Sodom and Gomorrah. Had Katie flinched? Had I noticed? We talked about that—and other things—on our road trip that summer. We talked about what it meant to be a gay teenager, about the prejudice and painful stigma. These were things I had never known. My worst experiences in high school had involved a toxic bout of highly visible acne in ninth grade. That was nothing compared to the anguish Katie felt as she realized how difficult her life path would be.

I still love Katie today. And I think she has just as much right to marry her life partner—a lovely, brilliant woman—as I have to marry mine (and he is all guy).

That’s why I spent my lunch hour at the Idaho State Capitol building today.

My state, along with many other states, is in the midst of a new civil rights war. State Senator Lynn Luker, a Mormon from Meridian, has proposed legislation that would allow people to deny services to other people on the basis of their religious beliefs. As Magic Valley Times reporter Kimberlee Kruesi reported:

Under the bill, doctors could deny providing medical treatment to gay people or even unmarried mothers and not lose their medical license. The same would be allowed for teachers to deny educating one of their students if they were gay.  

Meanwhile, the LDS church has joined other religious organizations in actively fighting against the legalization of gay marriage in Utah, claiming that it is not bigotry but concern for children’s welfare that drives their opposition as well as a defense of so-called "traditional marriage" between a man and a woman as the only type of marriage sanctioned by God. I’m sorry, but the whole “It’s not me; it’s my God who is a bigot” statement  just isn’t going to cut it as an argument against fairness, decency, and dare I say it, love.

The God I believe in is all about love. And love—transformational, all consuming, non-judging—is not present in Senator Luker’s bill.  In all fairness to my LDS friends, many of them disagree with Senator Luker’s hateful stance and support former Idaho State Senator Nicole LeFavour’s brave crusade to add the words—see Joanna Brooks’s Ask Mormon Girl, or pretty much the whole gang at Feminist Mormon Housewives.

But this isn’t just a religious or civil rights debate to me. Respecting and protecting people on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is a mental health issue. Our children are dying. Suicide is the third leading cause of death for children and young adults ages 10-24. A disproportionate number of these young people are LGBTQ. 

Our refusal to love and accept our children for who they are is leading to their deaths, as In theParlor blogger and youth pastor Tyler Smither noted:

"We are now faced with the reality that there are lives at stake. So whatever you believe about homosexuality, keep it to yourself. Instead, try telling a gay kid that you love him and you don’t want him to die."

What kind of God would want a young person to take his or her own life because of persecution and rejection? Not the God who said, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

Another Christian, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin put it bluntly: ““Anybody who doesn’t show love towards gay and lesbian people is insulting God. They are not just homophobic if they do that–they are actually Godophobic because God loves every one of those people.”

When I was a Mormon (a phrase that increasingly feels like “once upon a time” to me), our Sunday School teachers told us that we already knew who would win the great war between good and evil. I can now extrapolate that lesson to this current fight to deny our friends and neighbors, our brothers and sisters, equal protection under the law. We already know how this fight will end; and fortunately, Senator Luker and his supporters are on the wrong side of history.

But I want to make history today. I never want any young person to feel like my friend Katie did, afraid to lose a friendship or a job or even her life, simply because of whom she loves.  Add the words, Idaho! And let there be love now, for all of us.

Next Topic: Mental Health (Again)

Since Nick Kristhof was kind enough to ask

On Sunday, January 5, 2014, a heavy hitter weighed in on the topic of mental illness. Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Nick Kristof of the New York Times published an op-ed piece that asked a provocative and welcome question to the mental health community: what’s next?

“Mental health issues pose a greater risk to our well-being than, say, the Afghan Taliban or Al Qaeda terrorists, yet in polite society there is still something of a code of silence around these topics,” Kristhof noted. “Indeed, when the news media do cover mental health, we do so mostly in extreme situations such as a mass shooting.”

Why is that, exactly?

As the mother of a son with mental illness, I have a few thoughts on this subject.

Stigma
I talked about the devastating effects of stigma for parents and children, including my own family, in my October 2013 TEDx San Antonio talk. It’s not just external; stigma is internal as well. Peer advocates metaphorically beat up parent advocates, as Marlowe Franklin, a close friend of Kelli Stapleton’s, notes in her recent blog post about peer advocate attacks. In case you don’t remember Kelli, she’s the mom who attempted to kill herself and her 12 year old daughter who has autism because she truly felt she had no other options.

Speaking of autism and internal stigma, the mental health community is not immune, with too many people acting as if bipolar disorder or schizophrenia are “bad” but a developmental disability like autism is “good.” Guess what, folks? A lot of times, developmental disabilities and mental illness are comorbid.

And you know what else? Lots of children with autism and/or mental illness beat their parents up, every single day in America. Here’s some advice about protecting yourself during an attack straight from Autism-Help.org: “When a person is attacking you, you have the right to defend yourself. This is best achieved through defensive and blocking moves. If you have not attended a non-violent self-defense or crisis intervention program, I would highly recommend it.” The same fact sheet recommends calling the police when behavior escalates to violence.

In rare but still too common instances, children with mental illness grow up to be adults who attack or kill their parents, like Adam Lanza. Nancy Lanza was his first victim. More recently, Gus Deeds was unable to get treatment for his mental illness, attacked his father Virginia State Senator Creigh Deeds, and in every parent’s worst nightmare, took his own life.

Why can’t we all be on the same side here, the side that wants effective treatment for ourselves and our loved ones before another tragedy makes the media take notice of mental health again? And when will we agree that mental illness is a medical problem, one that requires evidence-based medical, not “feel-good,” solutions?

Language
Stigma is inextricably linked to language. I have a simple suggestion for journalists that could go a long way toward improving the lives of those suffering with mental illness. Use people-first language. We never describe a child with cancer as “that cancerous child,” or an adult with heart disease as “that diseased woman.” But we say “autistic child” and “bipolar young person” all the time. We also use phrases like “bipolar” inappropriately, as this recent HuffPost article noted.

I personally think it’s time to adopt National Institute of Mental Health Director Thomas Insel’s suggestion and start calling mental illness what it is: “brain disease.” You can watch Dr. Insel’s TEDx talk here.

Something about the word “mental” conjures up the false notion of choice in mental illness. Perhaps it’s the word’s history. Mental comes from the Latin mens, which is closer to our conception of the word “mind” than the more organic word “brain.” Think of the legal phrase compos mentis, “of sound mind.” That’s the standard for determining whether a person can be guilty of a crime.

People with serious mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder do not “choose” their mental state. They have an organic brain disease, which can be treated and managed. But one in three people with schizophrenia attempts suicide, and one in ten completes suicide. That’s another new word for journalists. When we say that someone commits suicide, we are suggesting that their act is criminal. In most cases, suicide is a tragic, fatal, preventable outcome of an organic brain disease, not a criminal act, and not a rational choice made by a sound mind.

Triage
Considering our limited resources, it just makes sense to help those who are most in need. That was the rationale behind Representative Tim Murphy’s (R. PA) proposed “Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act.” Murphy, who practiced for years as a psychologist, is co-chair of the Mental Health Caucus and spent 2013 talking with stakeholders, including parents like me, about what we most needed to help our seriously ill children. The answer: access to medical care for the 11 million people who suffer from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or major depression. The bill seeks to accomplish this goal by empowering parents, increasing acute care beds, and promoting AOT (assisted outpatient treatment) for as many as 50 percent of schizophrenia sufferers whose symptoms include anosognosia, or lack of awareness of their illness.

The bill also addresses the critical shortage of child psychiatrists (one for every 7,000 children in the U.S.) with funds for telepsychiatry and seeks to reform SAMSHA by redirecting funds for community-based care toward evidence-based programs. The Wall Street Journal praised Murphy’s efforts, noting that “SAMHSA [the government agency charged with funding community mental health treatment] has little or no focus on medically driven care, and of its 537 full-time employees only two are physicians.”

Mental illness is truly a bipartisan issue, and in fact, we already have the resources to attack this problem that harms children, families, and communities. DJ Jaffe of MentalIllnessPolicy.org, a nonpartisan resource, advocates for “spending smarter” by using funds for mental illness, not for mental health. This is an important distinction.

Deborah G., the mother of an adult son with schizophrenia, recently set off an Internet maelstrom when she criticized peer-driven care: “How confident would you be entrusting your daughter with a life threatening, cancerous brain tumor to a system of care that has developed policies and therapies influenced primarily by "peers"?” she asked. Her answer—and the answer of so many other parents in her situation—not too confident.

This is not to say that peers don’t play an important supportive role. Mom-peers like Deborah are invaluable resources for me when my son is going through a crisis. What Deborah was saying is that she wants more funding to go toward evidence-based, medical treatments for her son’s very real medical condition.

Unfortunately for so many of our most seriously ill population, lack of insight condemns them not only to the mental prison of psychosis but also to very real prisons, where we have chosen, as a society, to warehouse them. As I said in my TEDx talk, spending $80 billion on prisons and just $1.4 million on the National Institute of Mental Health is just plain wrong.

That’s my three cents’ worth, Mr. Kristhof. Thank you for bringing this issue to the forefront. As you so eloquently noted, “if we want to tackle a broad range of social pathologies and inequities, we as a society have to break taboos about mental health.” Let's go smash some statues.

The Thread of Life

Giving weaves our threads into a tapestry

This year’s carol was one I started last year but couldn’t finish. I awoke Christmas morning of 2012 to a lump of unimaginable coal: the news that my time with my younger two children would be severely limited for a while. At first, I thought a week, maybe two. Then weeks stretched into months. Finally, almost a year later, I got the best present imaginable: reunification of my family. As I write these words, I hear merry voices laughing upstairs, playing the new Toy Story version of Disney Infinity that some guy in a red suit left under our tree this morning.

Back to the carol. (And apologies for how soft it is! Since I only do this once a year and technology changes so quickly, every year is another crash course in Video Production 101).



It's the latest entry in a decade-plus string of annual musical essays. I feel a kinship to Christina Rossetti, the Victorian poet whose lyrics explore the relationship between human and divine.  The lyrics are taken from Rossetti's three-sonnet sequence “The Thread of Life,” published in 1895, a year after her death. That title surely alludes to the classical Moirae, the three fates who spin, measure, and cut the thread that controls us. Yet Rossetti asserts that she herself controls her destiny: “myself is that one only thing/I hold to use or waste, to keep or give.” And as she does in her more famous poem, “In the bleak midwinter,” (a famous carol which I have also set to my own tune), she decides in "The Thread of Life" to give herself (as king) to her King.

The poem is also about solitude, the infinitesimal and infinite space that separates self from other. As I was working out the carol's dissonant harmonies this morning, I heard Adam Frank’s thought-provoking commentary “The Christmas Now: How to Be The Center of the Universe,”  Frank's words struck me with awe:

“The simple physical fact that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light means all of us — every man, woman and child — share the same predicament. We are all profoundly separated and yet deeply connected at the same time.” 

I think this is exactly the point Rossetti was trying to make in her poem more than 100 years ago, before we knew anything about the speed of light. And I’ve used the dissonance of major seconds to convey that all-too-human predicament, as well as postponing the longed-for resolution to the chord until the very end. The piece starts in E minor and ends, at last, in G major. Because you know what? That’s pretty much how I felt about this past year. (E minor is a nice key to be from; G major is a nice key to be in).

So how can we express our connection to each other? How can we overcome the aloofness that necessarily characterizes the human condition? Well, for starters, on Christmas Day, we can give.

Scads of studies show that giving and gratitude are the secrets to happiness. We saw that joy this season with #TipsforJesus. One study found that even children as young as two years old feel happier when they give treats to others. 

What are you giving this year? As 2013 draws to a close, I urge each of you to consider what you value most, then give something right now--money, time, love. I plan to donate to ChildMind.org  to support research and treatment for children who have mental illness. I also support the anti-stigma organization Bring Change 2 Mind  because when I felt truly alone last year, this organization helped me to find my voice. And I'm supporting Clarity Child Guidance Center because they represent real hope for children and families struggling with mental illness. Of course, I donated to NPR because it makes me feel smarter. And finally, I'm giving time to TeachIdaho, an organization that helps teachers to create communities of learners.

Though we are all individual threads of life, the tapestry we weave with others as we give is what creates meaning and purpose from solitude. Wishing you the joy of giving this Christmas season! 

I Am Not Adam Lanza's Mother

Now that we’ve talked about mental illness, when will it be time to act? 

Photo by Charles Mims, October 2013

Republished from The Blue Review, December 15, 2013 

On the morning of December 14, 2012 I closed the door to my office and started to cry as the news of a tragic school shooting in Connecticut blew up my Facebook and Twitter feed. My then 13-year old son “Michael” had been in Intermountain Hospital for two days, placed there against his will after an inexplicable and violent episode of rage he couldn’t remember. After years of struggles, we still didn’t know what was wrong, or how to help him. I was exhausted, sad and afraid. The isolation of living with a child who had a serious, undiagnosed mental illness made me feel like there was no hope for me or my family. 

That night, I sat down and wrote my truth. I told about the years of missed diagnoses, medications that didn’t work, costly therapies. I wrote about my worst fears for my son’s future. And as a national tragedy beyond comprehension intersected with my personal sorrow, I called for a conversation about mental health. My cry for help, which I published on my formerly anonymous blog, “The Anarchist Soccer Mom,” was picked up by The Blue Review and republished under the title “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother.” The essay was shared everywhere. Many people wrote me to say, “You told my story! I am Adam Lanza’s mother too!” But a few excoriated me for talking openly about my son’s struggles with mental illness. 

One year after the Newtown tragedy, where has that conversation about mental health led us as a nation? The official report about the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School could be summarized in five words: no answers, lots of guns. Lanza’s mental illness was certainly a factor. As the report notes, “the shooter had significant mental health issues that affected his ability to live a normal life and to interact with others, even those to whom he should have been close.” Like his mother. 

As the one year anniversary of the shooting approached, with yet another school shooting in the news, policy makers were paying more attention to mental health. After meeting with the families of the Sandy Hook victims this week, Vice President Joe Biden, whose initial response to the tragedy was to push for tighter gun control, announced a $100 million increase in funding to help people access mental health services. Half of the money will come from the Affordable Care Act; the other half has been pledged for rural mental health care, which should be welcome news in states like Idaho. 

Lots of things have been promised. For example, when the state mental hospitals closed, we were promised community based care. That never happened. The fact is that in December 2013, one year after Newtown, if you or a loved one is in crisis, you still have to call the police. And we continue to use prisons as the new institution to treat our adults and children who have mental illness. 

In the past year, I have slowly found my voice as an advocate for children’s mental health. I haven’t done it alone — my son has joined me in calling for an end to stigma, by bravely speaking out about his condition on Nova and in a StoryCorps interview. We were honored to share an award for family advocacy from the Idaho Federation of Families, which my son placed prominently on our piano. 

Where is my family a year later? I’ve had quite a bit of time to think about what I wrote. And I can’t sugar coat it: the consequences of my decision to put my name on my story were devastating to us personally, as we learned firsthand just how harsh the stigma of mental illness can be. 

Yet there were also rewards. I researched and wrote a book, The Price of Silence. The book will be released by Hudson Street Press in the fall of 2014.which explores stigma and other barriers to mental health care for children and families as they try to navigate the healthcare system, public schools and the criminal justice system. I also had the opportunity to speak at TEDx San Antonio, where I asked the audience why we never see a picture of a child with mental illness in a grocery store checkout line. 

My family has also found some answers. Michael now has a diagnosis — bipolar disorder — and medication that works. I can’t tell you how much this has changed our lives for the better. A year ago, I had almost no hope for my son. Now, we are talking about where he will go to college (he says Harvard or Oxford, but he’s going to have to bring his math grade up just a little bit). 

Above all, I’ve learned this year that I am most emphatically not Adam Lanza’s mother. While I still feel a great deal of empathy for Nancy Lanza, who surely loved her son as I love mine, we are different in two important ways. First, by acknowledging the seriousness of my son’s condition, I am empowered to do everything I can to ensure he gets the treatment he needs. 

Second, I don’t own guns, and I never will. 

Some have speculated that perhaps guns were a way for Nancy Lanza to connect with her son. My son and I share some common interests too: writing, history and Greek mythology. As far as I know, a love of history never killed anyone. 

Still, I believe that in the futile search for answers, too many people continue to blame Adam Lanza’s mother, the first victim of the tragedy in Newtown. Emily Miller of the Washington Times is representative of that view. As she explained in her Op Ed piece that followed the release of the official Sandy Hook report:

"In the end, we can’t blame lax gun-control laws, access to mental health treatment, prescription drugs or video games for Lanza’s terrible killing spree. We can point to a mother who should have been more aware of how sick her son had become and forced treatment.”

If only it were that easy. Instead, numerous barriers still exist for children and families who need access to mental health care. In 1999, NAMI published a report called “Families on the Brink: The Impact of Ignoring Children with Serious Mental Illness.” That report addressed school shootings in the wake of Columbine:

"As we struggle to make the lives of all our children better in the wake of unthinkable school violence, we must not forget our children who have serious mental illnesses and their families who love them.”

On December 14, 2012, more than ten years later, we watched again in horror as we witnessed exactly how devastating that impact of untreated mental illness could be to a community — and very little if anything had changed for children and families who needed help. 

If 2013 was the year to talk about mental illness, let’s hope that 2014 is finally the year to act. 

Watch my interview with Marcia Franklin on Idaho Public Television’s “Dialogue,” December 13, 2013.

No Answers

Why we need first aid kits for physical and mental health

On the first Wednesday of December, I had big plans for my children. There’s something about this past year—the stress, the anxiety, the uncertainty—that has made me nostalgic for Christmas in a way I haven’t been for a long time. I gave up on physical Christmas cards years ago, opting for email ostensibly because I wanted to be green, but really because I was just lazy. And even an artificial tree is usually too much work.

But this year, I wanted real Christmas cards, real homemade sugar cookies and creamy fudge and steaming mugs of frothy cocoa, and a real, fragrant, noble pine tree.

Wednesdays are important days for me. Since my blog about my son with mental illness went viral in December 2012, four hours after school and every other weekend have been my only times to be with my younger two children. When you have to cram a whole week’s worth of love into four hours, every minute, every second counts. And this first Wednesday in December, I wanted to create perfect Christmas memories.

In hindsight, I should have listened to my daughter. She wanted the smallest tree, but her brothers talked me into a bigger one, perhaps too large for our two-bedroom town-home. We lashed the tree with twine to the top of the car, and I made my way home with an excess of caution, annoying the drivers behind me as the kids and I hollered out Christmas carols at twenty miles per hour.

“Let’s saw off the end of the tree so it can hydrate,” I told my 16-year old son when we got home. We hunted for the saw, an old dull one, and he began to work in earnest on the trunk. It was knotty. I held the tree firmly between my knees as he sawed. “Be careful,” I warned.

Too late. In one instant, the saw glanced off a knot, gauged into his finger. He cried out and ran into the house to apply pressure while I hauled out the first aid kit. As we wrapped his throbbing, bloody finger in gauze, it was clear that we needed to get medical attention right away. My mind raced—I thought of my son’s piano playing, his dream of becoming a surgeon. Could one freak Christmas tree accident ruin everything?

“Come on, guys,” I called to the others. “Change of plans.”

We piled into the car and drove around the corner to the Doc in a Box, where we are on a first name basis with the staff.

More than two hours (and nine stitches) later, it was time to take the younger children back to their Dad’s house. No cookies, no fudge, no cocoa. No decorating the tree, which lay forlornly on its side, shedding needles all over the carpet.

“Mom,” my 14-year old son said when I got home. “I think it would be a good idea if you did all the sawing from now on. It was really inconvenient to have X cut his finger like that, right during our time with the kiddos.”

(Thank you, son, for stating the obvious).

My son sliced his finger just a few days after the Connecticut State Attorney released the report about what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School last year. And that report has been on my mind. The verdict? No answers. Lots of legally purchased guns. And a young man with a long history of mental illness.

From the report:

"The obvious question that remains is: “Why did the shooter murder twenty-seven people, including twenty children?” Unfortunately, that question may never be answered conclusively, despite the collection of extensive background information on the shooter through a multitude of interviews and other sources…. It is known that the shooter had significant mental health issues that affected his ability to live a normal life and to interact with others, even those to whom he should have been close. As an adult he did not recognize or help himself deal with those issues."

No answers. It’s the hardest thing about life, isn’t it? When something bad, worse, or truly horrible happens, we want answers. We want accountability. Maybe we even want revenge.

At the very least, we crave simple cause and effect. We want fairness, and we want life to make sense.

But it doesn’t. It just doesn’t.

After my son cut his finger, my friends tried to make light of it. “Anyone can have cookies and cocoa,” one joked. “How many people get stitches for Christmas? That’s the way to make lasting memories!”

I'd still prefer the other, more conventional memories. For me, the accident was a reminder that sometimes bad things happen, and those things are beyond our control. In fact, all too often, all we can control is our reaction to the event.  We can choose to hate. Or we can choose to forgive.

What have we, as a society, done since Sandy Hook to help people with “significant mental health issues,” people like Adam Lanza, Jared Loughner, Seung Hui Cho, James Holmes, Aaron Alexis, Gus Deeds? In my essay last year, I said that it was time to talk about mental illness, and it was.

It’s still time to talk. And it’s definitely past time to stop blaming the mothers, a memo I’d like to send to Emily Miller, senior opinion editor of the Washington Post, who apparently still thinks that’s the solution: 

"In the end, we can’t blame lax gun-control laws, access to mental health treatment, prescription drugs or video games for Lanza’s terrible killing spree. We can point to a mother who should have been more aware of how sick her son had become and forced treatment.”

But Adam Lanza was 20 years old. Even if his mother had recognized that his insistence on communicating solely through email was a little off, Nancy Lanza would have had a potentially uphill fight to force treatment for her adult son, as Pete Earley and others have noted. The fact is that the whole system is broken, and tragedies like Newtown are inevitable until we start to make real changes in how we view and treat mental illness.

In a pointed call for action nearly one year after the Newtown tragedy, Linda Rosenburg, CEO of the National Council for Behavioral Health, recommended a practical, real-world solution: Mental Health First Aid training for everyone, so that we all can recognize the early signs and symptoms of mental illness and intervene before it’s too late. 

“Mental Health First Aid makes it OK to have the difficult conversations — it helps people open up and talk with family, friends, and coworkers. It ends the isolation and offers a path out of the despair,” Rosenburg wrote. 

Mental health first aid might be just what we need. When my son cut his finger, we grabbed the first aid kit. Then we called the doctor and got him the care that he needed. In a few more days, he will play Christmas carols with a healthy finger.

It’s about time we had the same solutions for mental health. Enough talk. It’s time to act.

Choose Your (Fighting) Words

Or better yet, shut up and buy me a latte

I have a confession to make. Social media exhausts me. I was an early adopter—I joined Facebook in 2007, without really thinking about the implications of this new technology. Really, I just wanted a place to play online Scrabble with my siblings and post pictures of my adorable progeny. But early on, I made a critical decision about “friending” that would prove to be surprisingly intuitive. I decided that—with very few exceptions—I would only friend people in this virtual space whom I actually knew and trusted in the real world.

Because you know what? I have enough drama in my real-world life. I don’t need Facebook drama.

When my blog about my son with mental illness went viral last year, I was especially glad I had made that decision. The Internet can be a decidedly unfriendly place. But my Facebook friends supported me, virtually and on ground, as my family struggled to find treatment for my son.

I’m extremely fortunate to have a diverse and thoughtful group of friends. Some of my friends are atheists, some are Mormons, some are Catholics, some are Unitarians, some wear colanders on their heads and pray to the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Many are liberal Democrats. And many are stalwart Republicans. But the one characteristic I admire above all else in my friends is their kindness.

I occasionally post provocative things on my page, because I’ll admit it: I love a good debate! And my smart, informed friends are usually not shy about sharing their opinions. But the one thing that everyone seems to get is the unspoken Golden Rule of online discussions. We can criticize or disagree with anyone’s ideas. But we don’t attack people on my Facebook page.

What does a personal attack look like? Well, it often takes the form of a so-called “you statement,” in which someone feels the need to tell you all of the things that you are doing wrong, because hey! That kind of message is bound to get you to change, right?

Recently, someone who I truly believed was a longtime real friend sent me this “you statement” riddled message explaining his decision to “unfriend” me on Facebook.

I am also sorry for the bitterness you have for people. You told me once that you have not gone into the dark area of you. I am here to say that you are have gone there. Your constant attack on the Mormons church and the people, has proved this to me. You have become a person that I was 35 years ago. A person that I have fought to leave to in my past. You can justify your feelings and actions anyway and however you want. I know I did. However, I now choose how I feel and what I feel. But you are no better than the Mormons you criticize, make comments about and put down. You behave as smug and judgmental as those you are angry at. You have the right to say and to post anything you want, when you want and you want. As do I and anyone else. However, I do not support the spreading of hate. I will not listen to your hate, demeaning or attacking of anyone. Therefore, I will un friend you from my facebook. (sicut, you emphasis added)

The first thing I am going to say about this is, yep! It hurt! I trusted this person. I don’t really care that he unfriended me—that happens all the time. It’s the way he did it, lots of “you statements” and maximum drama. To me, it seems like he wanted to make sure I knew that it was all my fault.

Because ????

At this point, we should all be reminded of Jessica Wakeman’s excellent blog post  on Facebook unfriending netiquette: 

“1. Disappear as subtly and quietly as possible. Don’t email the person to explain why you’re unfollowing. Don’t tweet or Facebook or write on Tumblr or post an interpretive dance on Vine about why you’re unfollowing. Don’t call the person up on the phone and verbally explain why you’re unfollowing. Why? Because assuming a person needs to be informed exactly why you’re unfriending them is self-absorbed and definitely begging for drama.”

Amen. To my “friend,” a) don’t let the virtual door hit you on the way out; and b) don’t expect to come back into my circle of real friends either.

And if you really want to stop the spreading of hate, my suggestion is to go for a random act of kindness rather than a targeted act of cruelty. Do what the woman in front of me at Dutch Bros did this morning—buy the person behind you a latte. That simple kindness from a total stranger moved me to tears. Oh, never mind! You’re Mormon, so you can’t buy coffee… (smiley face filled with hate).

Trollegitimi non carborundum

A simple cure for trolls: crack an egg on their heads!

Trolls offer simple, wrong solutions to painful, complex problems

One of the most astonishing benefits of the Internet is that it has made us all instant experts about other people’s lives.  We can skim a Facebook status update and immediately diagnose the obvious causes of and solutions to a child’s mental illness, where trained therapists and psychiatrists have tried for months or years to provide answers.  In fact, some of us are such “experts” that we just can’t quit posting—we have to argue our point until it is dead, buried, and reincarnated as a three-toed sloth somewhere in Madagascar. Then we have to hunt down the sloth, kill it again, bury it, and…

The Internet community has a name for people like this: trolls. 

I’m not exactly sure where this term comes from. Is it because they lurk under blog posts, coming out to challenge any viewpoint that disagrees with their own? Or is it just because they are really ugly, mean people? Or some combination?

I have a theory. I don’t think that trolls are actually mean people. I think if a troll were standing behind me in the grocery store checkout line, s/he would be perfectly pleasant. We would probably talk about the weather, because that’s just what people tend to talk about when they are not on the Internet pummeling people with their brilliance (in ALL CAPS, of course).

Trolls are especially good at diagnosing the simple, unambiguous cause of my child’s mental illness. It's definitely one of these:

• No father/stepfather/male role model in the home.  
• Violent video games.
•  Red Vines/vaccinations/gluten/casein/soy protein/no soy protein (etc.)
• Demons
• Me (bad parent, poor prenatal care, not enough discipline, too much discipline, etc.)
• My child (willful, disobedient, etc.)

Trolls offer equally simple proposed solutions:

• Find a new dad for my kids (aside: could someone make a Disney movie about this one please? Because I would really love to see the Disney movie where Dwayne Johnson comes into the single mother’s life and rescues her kid—oh wait, that was Journey 2: The Mysterious Island  and it was like my FAVORITE MOVIE EVER!)
•  Only let my teenage sons play games based on “MyLittle Pony.”
• Dietary supplements. Lots of expensive dietary supplements.
• An exorcism (when I told my priest about this, he looked at me and laughed).
• Crack a raw egg on my kid’s head.

Yeah. I’m actually not going to do any of those things (though the supplements are tempting, so tempting! Also, the egg, but mostly because that seems like it would be kind of funny.)

But I am also not going to criticize anyone who claims that any (or all) of these solutions has worked for their child. Because you know what? We all want something that works for our kids.

And that, to my mind, is the place where many of those mental illness trolls come from. They’ve found a “simple” solution that works for them—so they assume that it will work for me. They want to help me, to educate me, to enlighten me, in ALL CAPS. Why would I give my kid a Zyprexa when I could have him on a gluten-free diet instead? (Zyprexa is a nasty drug, by the way. I’m not even going to attempt to argue otherwise. But sometimes there are worse evils).

I’ve found H.L. Mencken’s oft-quoted bon mot to be more indicative of my actual experience with my own son:  “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong.”

In too many cases, that “well-known” solution continues to be mother-blame. I recently posted a portion of a tragic email I received from a desperate mother in Colorado. This is some of what she wrote (reprinted with her permission and in her exact words):

My 9 year old son has a mood disorder with severe anger problems and after 3 hospitalizations for hurting himself and other people, being kicked out of schools, after school programs and summer programs, I finally asked social services for help. Social services placed him in a residential facility, but in order for that to happen; I had to give up partial parental rights. Meetings were set up with social services, GAL, residential therapist and me to come up with a safety plan for my son to return home. After my son failed the first step in the safety plan, the group still pushed him to come home, but I denied him to return home for safety reasons.

Within a few months I received paperwork in the mail that the GAL placed a motion for me to lose my parental rights stating that I was an unfit parent and that I abandoned and neglected my son. The GAL felt that my son was institutionalized and he needed a loving home for him to get better. The court dd side with the GAL and my parental rights were taken and so was my son. It has been 6 months since I’ve seen or talked to him; my family is able to see him, but I am not allowed to and social services are holding all my gifts, letters and cards until he is stable. A foster family did come along, but within 4 weeks, they told social services that he will not work out for them because of him being unsafe. I feel that I am being abused by the system and being punished for advocating for my mentally ill son. I feel that I am not the only mother going through this.

Most people had the same reaction I did to this story—horror and sadness for the mother. But one sincere and well-meaning gentleman had to make the point—again and again—that the state could not possibly take this woman’s child from her unless she was an unfit mother. Which meant that she was probably a single mother. Because everybody knows that single mothers are the cause of boys’ mental illness. Etc.

The thing is, this mom’s story does NOT imply in any way that she was a bad mother—in fact, her attempts to get help for her son in the face of overwhelming odds show that she is a good mother. It’s the system, to my mind, that is at fault here. Why would the state terminate her parental rights? Why would they try to place her child in foster care, rather than working with her and providing access to resources?

Why indeed. I encourage everyone who does not realize how common this mom’s heartbreaking story is to become acquainted with the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. Here is what the Bazelon Center has to say on the subject of relinquishing custody: 

Parents forced to make this devastating choice are victims of an irrational and wholly inadequate system of insurance coverage. Employer-based health insurance may cover outpatient therapy and acute hospital care, but the intensive community-based services (such as wraparound services) required by many children with serious disorders are typically beyond the reach of private insurance. As a consequence, working families who cannot pay out of pocket for such services must forego essential care for their child, often with dire consequences, or relinquish custody to the state so that the child will become eligible for public insurance, typically Medicaid. 

Parents are asked to give up their rights because the state wants the money that attaches to a child who has mental illness. There it is. That answer is not as simple as blaming the mother. But it makes a whole lot more sense, if you stop and think about it before hitting “post.”

And that’s what I’m asking here, troll-folks. Let’s all stop to think, just for a minute, before making a potentially hateful and hurtful comment about an issue that might be more complex than it appears at first glance.  Apology accepted. 

P.S. The "clever" title is not my own--the inimitable Xeni Jardin from BoingBoing tweeted it a while back. Loosely translated, it means "don't let the troll bastards get you down." Words to live by.