Your daily Letter to the Columnist — Sept. 19, 2012
Rootology | Wikimedia Commons
Thanks for the story about your family’s struggles
A wonderful column about an incredible daughter. What a great service she is doing for others.
As a young model in the eighties, at my urging, a doctor gave me diet pills — and I was 35 pounds underweight. Certain groups such as dancers, models, and athletes face such body image pressure. I admire your family’s strength and honesty.
I faced major depression too and it was my parents, along with great mental health care, that literally saved my life. I am so glad your daughter had you.
I work in human services and I encounter so many young people with mental illness who have been tossed aside by family and friends. I know this column and your daughter’s calling will change lives. Helping others out of the darkness has saved me and it is so inspiring to read about her journey.
Thank you for writing this.
Survivor Too (name withheld)
ROANOKE
September 19, 2012 - 1:30 PM
She touches on an all too typical reaction in families to mental illness. When it is too hard, too many walk away. I cannot fathom a mind that can do that and I despise the organizations that encourage and forgive it. There are too many dead kids and kids in prison who were “allowed to hit bottom” by family who chose to kick them out, refuse to stand by them or just washed their hands of them. The one thing a mentally ill person needs is someone to care! That is half the battle and I am not kidding.
Yes Dan, your daughter is a hero, and a part of the reason is due to you and your wife and the support and love you continued to give her. It matters!
Dan, where’s my comment?
tass, I sent you an email regarding it. Check your email.
Sandi Saunders, walk a mile. seriously. Walk many miles, every day, until you have exhausted all of your resources, financial, emotional, everything. Until you’ve maxed out everything you have, and your other kids are suffering and are deprived of your attention, your time, the funds you had set aside for their college education, everything. EVERYTHING. And still your mentally ill child, who is not a child but legally an adult and who you have NO LEGAL RIGHT to do anything FOR, disrupts your home, your sleep, your job, EVERYTHING. Refuses treatment, or even worse, agrees to it, wants it, and there are NO SERVICES AVAILABLE.
Nobody is throwing ANYONE away. your judgmental attitude shows you have NO IDEA what families of mentally ill children go through. NO CLUE.
Dan Casey’s daughter suffers from a mental illness, sure. But she is not oppositional, not psychotic, not angry. With no intent to minimize her or her family’s suffering, which is real and significant, she is cooperating with the high-quality, hard-to-access, very expensive treatment that is available to her. Her family has the resources and the connections to find and pay for the services she needs, and she is both doing her part to improve her own health and fortunately responding to treatment. Good for them and I mean that sincerely. but don’t you dare use anyone’s success story as justification for judging families that don’t have the same success.
I am glad for you that you are so naive that you believe that love and care are enough. LOVE IS NOT ENOUGH. Your attitude is exactly why the stigma surrounding mental health persists.
How dare you tass! You have no idea how many miles I have walked or for how long. I am not a person who comments on things like this lightly. I was agreeing with the letter writer because I have seen these kids and I have dealt with this problem!
I tried to help a suicidal teen whose father had just told him, “the best part of me was runnin’ down your mama’s leg, you are no son of mine” as he kicked him out of the house, for good.
I tried to intervene with a police officer who was determined to give a teen a “tobacco use citation” even though I told him she would get the sh_t beaten out of her when she got home, and I had to go to my knees as I saw her stepdad backhand her across the face as they left my driveway!
I watched a beautiful, creative, successful person lose a marriage, a business and her self-esteem to bi-polar disease.
For over 40 years I have “lived” with a mentally ill and alcoholic brother. I have had to bail him out of jail, go to treatment centers and beg for help, rescue him from predators, and try to keep him sane and sober. If we walk away, and God it is tempting, he has no one, he is under a bridge and wandering the streets. My father died when I was 23 and left my mom enough to live on, she has spent it all and gone into debt, all to be a responsible “parent” to a grown man.
And believe it or not, that is not even the half of it, so don’t you get on some high horse and pretend I am not telling the truth. I KNOW what I am talking about because I have lived it.
I am not pretending anything. NOTHING. I responded to what you said, your words, your BLAMING of parents for not CARING enough. “The one thing a mentally ill person needs is someone to care” is WRONG, 100% WRONG. It BLAMES FAMILIES for mental illness. By saying people care, or don’t care, enough, YOU ARE BLAMING FAMILIES for mental illness. What mentally ill people need is access to affordable, effective treatment. That is the ONLY THING that will help.
If you had one dollar to spend, just one, and the choice was your brother’s bail–again–or your daughter’s education, what would you spend that dollar on?
Because it’s not just bail, it’s legal fees, and time off of work to get him to court, and convincing him to actually go to court when he TRULY BELIEVES there’s a conspiracy there against him, and your own children are AFRAID OF HIM. What do you do, Sandi? Remember, you’ve only got the one dollar.
If you choose your brother, YOU SCREW YOUR CHILD.
If you choose your brother, YOU LOSE YOUR JOB.
If you choose your brother, YOU LOSE YOUR HOUSE.
I maintain that YOU HAVE NO IDEA. By saying love is enough, You. Are. Perpetuating. The. Problem.
When the hell did I say “love was enough”? You are making things up. All the love and treatment in the world is not enough in some cases and everyone knows that.
“Someone to care” means not abandoning them completely, it does not mean taking abuse or allowing them to take your family down. I did not advocate that, nor is that what she meant either. YOU are conflating the meaning to cover your own anguish. No one has accused you of anything. Families are well aware of the reason for some of the sacrifice and that is their line to draw. I did not tell anyone to choose and I never said anyone should choose the mentally ill member over others, or even themselves. Each family has to make that decision for themselves. You are making this about you and it isn’t.
There are families who throw their kids away rather than sacrifice anything, even time or effort. I have seen it and I know it. If you cannot deal with that, that too, is your problem.
At what point did I ever say I was talking about me? You are making it up as you go along.
You are talking out of both sides of your mouth. Of course there are families who don’t care, who do harm. But you are exacerbating the very real problems families face living with and caring for mentally ill adult children when you say “I cannot fathom a mind that can do that and I despise the organizations that encourage and forgive it. There is no organization on the planet that encourages and forgives the kind of abuse you’re talking about in your followup comments. When you said that you were talking about families that have to make the choice–often a Sophie’s choice–after trying EVERYTHING ELSE to help their adult children. You were blaming well-meaning parents for not caring enough. That you later reversed your statement to say you’re talking about hateful, abusive people who harm their children is irrelevant.
These are your words:
an ALL TOO TYPICAL REACTION in families to mental illness
When it is TOO HARD, too many walk away.
family who CHOSE to kick them out, REFUSE to stand by them or just WASHED THEIR HANDS of them.
And your less-than-brilliant deduction:
THE ONE THING a mentally ill person needs is SOMEONE TO CARE!
Because your loved one would not be mentally ill IF YOU CARED ENOUGH.
Your cancer wouldn’t come back IF YOU HAD MORE FAITH.
You would be able to walk again if you didn’t have SUCH A CRAPPY ATTITUDE.
Your kid wouldn’t have autism IF YOU WEREN’T SO COLD.
And TINKERBELL WILL DIE if you don’t clap your hands.
You have gone off into your own little tortured world tass and you are not making sense nor interpreting anything I am saying correctly. I do not give a tinker’s damn what you say, but everything you have said that I said or meant has been wrong, so I am in no mood to keep explaining what you are in no frame of mind to hear.
When you stop playing the victim and blaming people for not embracing your POV, read the letter and my response to it again.
I’d like to call a truce here between tass and Sandi Saunders. I believe that, on the subject matter, they are both well intentioned but . . . whatever. The train left the rails.
Can we bury the hatchet and move on?
I appreciate that Tass stayed on point without going personal.
#11,
“I appreciate that Tass stayed on point without going personal.”
Comment by Suzie — September 20, 2012 @ 9:43 pm
Oh yeah, thats so you.
#11 You are such a phony.
#8 “At what point did I ever say I was talking about me?”
tass, buddy, no matter who you were talking about, I’d guess your passion about the topic made most everybody reading it think you were talking about you. It was certainly a reasonable assumption.