By Ammi Midstokke
Reader Contributor
I knew a woman who thrived, and then didn’t. There were subtle changes, the kinds of things you see later, when it’s too late — when they play over and over in your head as a placeholder for a time when history could have been changed, but was not.
She was failed by a system that minimized and stigmatized her experience, confused who she was with the diagnosis she had. When she died, she was mother, wife, biologist, friend, artist, advocate, naturalist.
And when people say she died by suicide, I think, No, She died by discrimination.
I loved a man who remembered everything about me, but forgot to leave a note. The conversations we had were cryptic, an indirect language of engagement veiled in delicacy for a reason. We had learned that to name the thing was to forever alter his identity: To label him was to reduce him to the condition. To limit his access to employment, to his children, to his rights.
He was failed by a society that prefers isolation over connection. He was stripped of purpose until he recognized it as a basic human need, and the only plausible solution seemed obvious. The opposite of purpose is burden. This message is blasted through criminal charges, court verdicts, denied insurance claims.
I have a friend who cried her way through years of therapy, medications and misery, only to miraculously surf a black wave of suffocating depression to the secure sands of a resilient shore. She’s built herself a rudimentary shelter out of driftwood buried in stable soil: resources, education, awareness, blatant honesty.
Maybe a tide will come and wash those walls away, but she knows she can float now, and build if needed. I watch as her structure grows in complexity and strength, observe how she has transformed her learning into the hope she gives to others.
I raised a child who was happy, and then was not. As I cried over suicide-safety plans, pharmaceutical package inserts and terms like “personality dampening,” a team of practitioners guided us through the torrent, then out of the storm.
This child taught me the language of believing and the promise of recovery. He taught me that love and acceptance include the entirety of his human experience.
You know these people, too. They are your neighbors, friends and family. They are hundreds of members of your community, because one in five Americans live with a mental health condition. Nearly half of all Americans will meet the criteria for a mental illness at some point in their lives.
It is not only the myriad of complex genetic and transgenerational contributors to mental health. Normal life events we all go through can cause mental illness: chronic pain, the horrors of surviving a social-media-stricken adolescence, divorce, grief, Seasonal Affective Disorder, climate change, headlines and — lord knows — elections.
For some, it is temporary. For others, it is a lifelong experience. For everyone, there is a path to a full and fulfilling life. We only need to build it. We need our government and communities to collaborate in that effort. We need our friends and families to clear the way with conversation.
While we’ve made arguable progress since locking premenstrual women into asylums on catatonic doses of laudanum, we’re still struggling to accept those with mental illness as valuable members of society — as vital, contributing members to our communities. It is this belief that keeps legislators from justifying care.
I’m no lawyer, but I think that’s the definition of discrimination.
Our laws, health care system and stigmas actively limit those living with mental illness from treatment, recovery and thriving. Our poor awareness, education and dialogue about mental health conditions diminishes our community members and costs our country. It’s a problem of the system, not the person.
When practitioners are showing measurable outcomes and Medicaid or insurance is refusing to pay for it, when the most basic math says it costs less to rehabilitate people than to not, we have to question the reasoning of the unreasonable. Preferably in a Biblical-proportion locust plague of letters, advocacy and education of those resistant to understanding.
For that, we must be willing to learn this language ourselves, to see and hold precious all the wonderful iterations of humans we are surrounded by. We must be willing to have conversations that make it safe for people to share. And we must embrace equality for all, because if we can just agree to that simple principle, then unwavering hope will become tangible change.
