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Wednesday, June 25, 2003
posted by gbarto at 1:36 AM:
Father, Daughter Survive CapsizeMan evaluated after taking 11-year-old to sea to save her from 'poison gas'
And yes, he had gone off his medication. So again a reminder to all the folks who in one way or another have - or have a connection to someone with - mental illness. This is not a game. Pretending that ignoring it will make it go away, that difficult medicines need not be taken, that the person's "feeling fine" means treatment can be allowed to slip - all these hypocrisies, designed to help society engage in its own mental illness - massive self-delusion - carry consequences.
It is strange: We wouldn't tell a person with high blood pressure to eat fatty foods, stop exercising and quit taking their medication for the simple reason that doing so might kill them. Yet when it comes to mental illness, there's a crowd out there that thinks that it won't exist if they don't believe in it so they can fix it by cutting off treatment, taking away medication and telling people to just deal. Sadly, a certain number, already bothered by side effects of the drugs or anguish over what's coming out in therapy, decide to play along. A fair number of these kill themselves when it doesn't work. This is called moral weakness by those who so loved them that they "rescued" them from treatment.
Let's hope for a day when our backwardness about mental illness has receded enough that people show the same concern for the Benjamin DeLillas of the world and their treatment that they show for the colleague who just had heart surgery or radiation therapy. Left untreated, heart problems, cancer and mental illness all ultimately prove quite devastatingly fatal. In this case, the third almost proved fatal for two people, something the first two can't really pull off. So if this story becomes a topic of discussion, let's do something new and be grownups about it for a change. Pointing fingers, tut-tutting and being outraged at DeLilla's conduct makes for good tv but it does nothing to solve the central problem: How can we claim there's no excuse for his behavior while remaining silent as the no-such-thing-as-mental-illness fruitcakes give him and his lot every excuse in the book for not doing what really needs to be done to correct it?
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