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It is difficult for me to write about sex because I am 74-years-old. The following are my observations about love, in the sense that love means closeness, inclusion in the family.
I am the wife of a lawyer who has been mentally ill for a large part of his adult life. We have been married 41 years. After my late son, who inherited his father’s illness, took his own life in graduate school at the age of 22, I was invited by a friend to join a focus group, sponsored by the National Alliance on Mental Illness and held at Bellevue Hospital, comprised of family members of mentally ill people. One couple’s story about their mentally ill son stands out in my mind. I think their reaction is often typical of families who are at their wits’ end in dealing with an out-of-control relative (my definition of a mentally ill person). They excluded their son, who was living on his own in an apartment, from their holiday celebrations, because “it was too embarrassing” to have him around with other relatives coming to enjoy the holidays with them.
It is difficult enough for the mentally ill to deal with the stigma attached to them by strangers. But when their own families don’t support them, this is horrendous. I have always mainstreamed my husband into the community, and although his hospital stays during his lifetime have been frequent, as soon as he got his act together I lobbied to have him home. He is now in a long-term care facility, since he can’t walk due to a Parkinson’s-like syndrome, tardive dyskinesia. He developed this condition over the years due to the long-term use of psychotropic drugs, which didn’t really work that well. He also has kidney failure, from the same cause. His mind is still as clear as a bell.
There have been times over the years when we were invited to a party, reception, or public gathering, and I thought to myself, in observing the manic condition of my husband, that it would be “too embarrassing” to attend this gathering with him, since he might act out in public. When he insisted that we go to the party, I wouldn’t go without him. I found that he was “as quiet as a lamb.” The presence of the throng of other people set limits on his behavior, which is also true of so-called “normal” people.
It has been my observation from my life with my husband that so-called “mentally-ill” people are often smarter than the average person. They are super-sensitive, and the use of psychotropic drugs serves only to “dumb them down” so that they can see the forest for the trees in a given situation. Many people in the mainstream look upon a “crazy” person as “retarded,” and this is wrong. There is a need for a greater amount of education as to what mental illness is in order to remove the stigma attached to it. Isolating the so-called “mentally ill” from society is the worst thing you can do, and can only make matters worse for both families and their relatives. The pharmaceutical companies have estimated that 38% of the population is “mentally ill.” Can we as a society afford to waste more than 1/3 of the population and deprive them of the love, closeness and their potential contribution to our lives?
It is well known that brain chemistry is the key to mental illness. If this were not so, then the psychotropic drugs would not work. However, not enough research has been done on brain chemistry to determine which chemical reactions lead to which extreme behavior patterns. The tragedy is that such a large segment of the population is affected and nobody cares.
Dr. John Mann invented a test about eight or nine years ago to determine the levels of serotonin in the human brain, and determined that low serotonin levels go hand-in-hand with clinical depression, which can lead to suicide. This knowledge is a good start, but for the most part, mentally ill people are like guinea pigs. When doctors start to treat them, they don’t know which drugs will improve their behavior and which ones will make them worse. Mental illness is the only illness in which a doctor gives a patient a prescription drug and then observes how they behave to determine the effectiveness. For most other physical illnesses (and this is a physical illness) there are physical tests to prove the effectiveness of the treatment (i.e. high blood pressure, irregular heart beat, cancer growths, etc).
Some key answers will probably come in this millennium, too late for me and my family. My husband is now in his last illness with kidney failure, exacerbated by lifelong prescribed use of psychotropic drugs. My son took his own life 11 years ago when he was in graduate school at NYU.