It has taken me decades to vomit out the story of my coming of age. It’s taken me decades more to put pen to paper, publish, and share it with others. My memoir “The S Word” spills all sorts of secrets, many of which involve surviving my mother’s mental illness, from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s. Having gone undiagnosed for years, Mamma’s rage nearly silenced us all – similar to the actions of people like Andrea Yates whose mental illness drove her to drown her five children in the bathtub in 2001. Only we didn’t know it at the time…how close my siblings and I may have come to a similar fate. When we finally learned that my mother’s disease had a name – “paranoid schizophrenia” – the stigma preceding it only added to the reality we all had been living, and we secretly longed to return to our ignorance, still hoping and praying that she had “anything but.” To protect ourselves, we made sure that no one outside of a select few even knew.

Mental illness isn’t like a broken bone that can be fixed or even cancer that has the possibility of being cured. Quite the contrary, mental illness can never be fixed, and it has no cure. At its best, it is tolerated – managed – by cocktails of drugs whose levels must constantly be measured. It is the ultimate never-ending story with ups and downs and twists and turns, and the power to take down not just those who are ill, but those who love and care for them. The fact that mental illness is, indeed, hereditary, only adds insult to injury. In my family, the crazy genes continued, claiming my little sister at the age of 24.

In many ways, mental illness is a death sentence. Or, perhaps, from the perspective of someone who has lived through its devastation not once but twice, mental illness can result in the wish for death, the period at the end of the sentence. [Read more…]