Simply Mad...Mental Illness & Empty Museums

I am from The South. We don't have mental illness in the South. We don't believe in it. What we have instead are Eccentric Relatives, Crazy Aunts, Odd Uncles & Cousins with a case of the nerves & bouts of hysteria. In the South, if someone commits suicide, we don't talk about it. We say, they died of a "head injury" if referring to a self-inflicted gunshot or in the case of overdose, we would say "natural causes" (?????) or my own personal favorite, if they were considerate enough to dispense of themselves at the house we publish in the local paper, "died at home". When I asked about my grandfather, I was told he "had shell-shock" which I now know probably means that he went through town naked on a mule, randomly shooting at the locals around the town square before returning home to hang himself in the outhouse. So it may be true that growing up in this particular culture MAY have influenced my views on what others call Mental Illness. I had crazy aunts on both sides and as you may have already guessed, yes, they are the ones I most take after. I didn't know til I grew up and started to read too much that there were names for this stuff. I thought it was just Life. Before I type this, I am going to pause for a moment of prayer, as I am praying like hell at this moment that none of these people or their families own computers. My favorite aunt on my Mama's side was a hoot. She was very childlike & Delighted. She was also scared to death of EVERYTHING & we spent stormy afternoons hiding under the coffee table, quickly removing all her bobby pins & my pigtail holders so as not to be struck by lightening. Then she would tell me stories about Heaven, which apparently we would be entering at any second. She never had children, was afraid it would kill her, she wouldn't take a bath during the winter to avoid catching her death of cold and all their cow's milk was boiled, not pasteurized, but boiled, as a neighbor's cow had once had a sickness. 30 years before. She never left the house except to go to church a few times a year. Now being the self educated intelligent woman that I am, I now know that she was a hypochondriac, an agoraphobic, had extreme germ phobia and OCD. Ew. And all those years I thought she was just a very sweet odd duck, who taught me to chase the hens but never the roosters, always had King Leo's peppermint candy sticks and Juicy Fruit gum for me. She showed me how to hear the ocean in her big seashell and gave me eggs to try to hatch at home. We made paperdoll chains, ate lemon jello cake,listened in on the party line to the neighbor's telephone calls, caught daddy longlegs and went running out onto the porch when we saw the dust in the road rise up to wave at the car passing by. Simple joys. I had another aunt who would walk us to the curb when we left, wearing her underwear on her head, all the while pulling her curls though the leg openings. Another aunt kept marrying men who would wait on her hand and foot, fix all the food, clean the house and worship the ground she walked on. When one would die, she would obtain another within a couple of months. My favorite aunt on my Daddy's side is also a loon. In The South, great tragedy and disaster apparently await at every turn & great care is taken to avoid death by lightening and electrocution. (thus the previous bobby pin story) This included never taking a bath or answering the telephone during a storm. Aunt Wheezer had a little poodle dog named Joey and she loved that dog. One day when it was thundering and lightening, her phone rang and the dog went running into the kitchen barking and yapping and Wheezer screamed, "JOEY! DON'T YOU ANSWER THAT PHONE!" So, as you can see, I come from a long line of Crazy People. No one ever told them they were dysfunctional or chemically imbalanced. And I like it that way. So I have had a lot of experience with what the psychiatric world calls mental illness. However, I don't want my children to remember me as "suffering" severe Attention Deficit Disorder, being Bipolar, being paralyzed with Agoraphobia many months out of the year, having Post Traumatic Stress disorder which causes short term memory loss, the inability to retain new memories after a certain point which worsens with age. Ew.Or how my potpourri of "ailments" results in extreme disorganization & all the struggles that come with that.. How boring, self-absorbed and monotonous is all THAT...but because of my colorful childhood and my exposure to Life as opposed to Illness, I don't live my life like it's a piece of something broken that needs to be fixed. I just live each day. My kids don't think of me in any of those terms, because I have chosen not to think of Idiosyncrasies as an Illness to be cured. My kids won't have memories of mom popping happy pills, or going to therapy or a lot of psychobabble. I think of most of what we call mental illness is The Human Story. What I hope my kids see & will remember... is a mom who walks by a ringing phone but doesn't answer it, who stays home more months than she goes out, and coming home from trick-or-treating to find me decorating a Christmas tree.They are not surprised to walk out at 4 a.m. to find me painting the kitchen hot pink. No one is thinks it strange to find me in the same spot as I was when they went to bed reading the same book the next morning. They know I don't have any memories of when they were babies except what I have seen in pictures. This particular knowledge is very valuable to little boys who use it to their advantage often I am sure. A mom with no short term memory, how good does it get? :) They know no project is ever finished, I could walk through the door with a new puppy at any second & that if I put things away (including birth certificates) I will forget where they are & that is why we keep them in the freezer. My kids like me. My kids are flexible, creative, artistic & I think have "survived" quite well.They will be writers, actors and directors as I have provided them with SO much great material. :) I hope they will remember me as a Delighted odd duck. If the psychiatric community had the power over society throughout history that we have handed over to them now, the world would be a tragically different place. If Abraham Lincoln had been medicated or hospitalized for his manic depression, would our country still be a country? Would some of my friends with dark skin still be bringing me my mint julep, good lord. If doctors had tried to "fix" all the "broken" people like Van Gogh, Beethoven,Hemingway, Mozart, Winston Churchill, Henry David Thoreau, Leonardo Da Vinci, we would live in a colorless world. So, EMBRACE your mental illness, I say! :) Get UP off that psychiatrist's couch, rip off those electrodes, and flush those pills (unless you intend to share with the rest of the class) and BECOME the Character you were meant to be! I believe if the psychiatric world was as prominent in the past as it is today, and every mood, personality & eccentric quirk was treated as something to be fixed and cured, then all the art museums, libraries, theatres & concert halls would be EMPTY. Except, of course, in The South.