The Reality of Mental Illness and the War against the Poor
I am mentally ill. The particular condition I have is a bipolar disorder, what used to be known as manic-depression. Over the past month, noted in passing with alarm by the Anchoress, one of my mutual commentors, I have been adjusting to a new medication cycle and not posting.
I try to be as open as possible about my disorder. The lingering stigma associated with a mental health condition in our culture is merely fed and made stronger by trying to conceal it from others. What so few really understand is that there is a gradient of what we in the mental health system (I also now work in the system on a consumer-staffed phone line) call both "disorder" and "recovery".
I personally think that my disorder has been with me from childhood, present but undiagnosed, and it did not prevent me from stable participation in society for half a century, until now. It is important to understand such things, and not to respond to mental disorder in oneself or in others with irrational fear.
For the last two years I have been struggling with the fact that my condition has become more troublesome and, finally, openly diagnosed. Three things made this happen, I lost a job in the recession at an age (50) when it is hard to find another, lost my health insurance in consequence, and two other latent medical conditions which both mimic and reinforce mental disorder, Type II diabetes and hypothyroidism, caught up with me in these same two years as a result of advancing age.
The inner experience of the disorder is, for me, the key evidence that the condition has always been latent. I have an iron and unshakable intellect, zoned in the direction of order and organization, a mind that functions in permanent outline form, constantly separating the world into topics and subtopics, major and minor items in a hierarchy. Obsessively so, in fact. And I have noted over the years both that this particular form of intellect is not very common and that most very intelligent people whom I know have minds that do not usually function precisely in this way. Nothing ever disturbs this "outlining" process. It is like some nautical instrument aboard a sailing vessel, a barometer or a GPS, which functions independently of whether the seas are choppy or still, recording data impartially in a calm or in a gale.
My childhood and youth was full of uncontrollable emotional storms, and I think that my intellect developed as it did to compensate for and manage this fact. The evidence is clear and unequivocal, these days, that such uncontrollable emotional affects, far beyond the incidents which elicit them, are due to biochemical imbalances in the brain. And my inner experience of bipolar disorder is one of a rock solid intellect trying to sail my brain and body in an unrelenting emotional gale.
The medicines help, but even these, as they wax and wane in the body, and as their power to damp down the biochemical imbalances expands or contracts, create independent interior changes of mood for which my intellect is constantly compensating. Medicated, I experience my brain and body like someone who drives different company cars every day, with each change of make, model, and year altering the acceleration, the speeds at which the gears change, and the precise location of many of the peripheral controls.
It's a good thing my intellect is stable. I really need it. As an unemployed and/or underemployed mental health client I have had to fight a constant guerilla war with the social service agencies in my town and my state. I am a paradigm case of how the frilling away of the social service safety net under 25 years of mostly Republican rule has been an undeclared war on the old, the sick, and the poor.
I subsisted these past two years, with a serious mental health condition, unable to see a medical psychiatrist who could properly diagnose and prescribe for it. I started out with health insurance, the kind called COBRA where, on unemployment (which is HALF your former salary in my generous Republican state) I had to pay the ENTIRE cost of the insurance which my employer carried. That's right, on COBRA both my premiums AND my employer's contribution suddenly became my sole responsibility on half of what I had been making.
How did I manage to carry it? By running up thousands of dollars in debt on my credit cards, as well as using the left over money from a home improvement second mortgage, while I was searching for work until (having been completely unsuccessful, probably in part due to my undiagnosed and worsening mental condition) the unemployment ran out and I defaulted on both the cards and the mortgage.
Did having health insurance help me? Not a bit. Every private psychiatrist in my town stopped taking private insurance long ago. They now do strictly a cash-and-carry business at $125.00 a session. My entire weekly unemployment check was about $125.00. And then I lost it.
That left me with the social service agencies in the public mental health system. And also the social service agencies that deal with the fact that you can't pay your utilities and you can't afford to buy food while your house in forclosure and you can't afford a lawyer to fight for it.
If I had tried to commit suicide, or lost my wits and started taking my clothes off in a public street and howling at the moon, I could have, finally, seen a shrink--after having been incarcerated for some time, and then booted out on the street fully medicated, but a homeless wreck, whose meds would shortly run out. Then back to crisis center for more incarceration, another round of medication, and another bout on the streets.
I am not exaggerating. On my phone line work I deal with such cases routinely.
By clinging as much as I could to my intellect, I have managed to avoid this. My home is gone, I rent from the man I sold it to, and I have managed to obtain part-time work while I hide from my other creditors (I still don't have enough cash flow to even bankrupt cleanly.) And by persistently demanding care, over and over, I finally managed to get it.
I had to lose one counselor to funding cutoffs, change care agencies, and pull every social service bureaucrat I met into the fight. And I had to cope with the fact that my feelings and my body from day to day, and sometimes from hour to hour, would be an unceasing roller coaster ride from utter exhaustion and suicidal despair to manic motor-mouth wittiness with a high as complete as anything on crack cocaine or crystal meth. But it has finally happened.
I write this blog because it helps relieve the pressure of constant emotional pitch-and-toss in my private life. And I write on politics because I KNOW from personal experience that my political adversaries, whether they admit it or not, are part of a deliberate and calculated war on folks such as I. A war which they cannot win, but which I and my fellow targets can completely lose.
And a war which, in the end, will turn this country into a spiritually bankrupt desert.
I try to be as open as possible about my disorder. The lingering stigma associated with a mental health condition in our culture is merely fed and made stronger by trying to conceal it from others. What so few really understand is that there is a gradient of what we in the mental health system (I also now work in the system on a consumer-staffed phone line) call both "disorder" and "recovery".
I personally think that my disorder has been with me from childhood, present but undiagnosed, and it did not prevent me from stable participation in society for half a century, until now. It is important to understand such things, and not to respond to mental disorder in oneself or in others with irrational fear.
For the last two years I have been struggling with the fact that my condition has become more troublesome and, finally, openly diagnosed. Three things made this happen, I lost a job in the recession at an age (50) when it is hard to find another, lost my health insurance in consequence, and two other latent medical conditions which both mimic and reinforce mental disorder, Type II diabetes and hypothyroidism, caught up with me in these same two years as a result of advancing age.
The inner experience of the disorder is, for me, the key evidence that the condition has always been latent. I have an iron and unshakable intellect, zoned in the direction of order and organization, a mind that functions in permanent outline form, constantly separating the world into topics and subtopics, major and minor items in a hierarchy. Obsessively so, in fact. And I have noted over the years both that this particular form of intellect is not very common and that most very intelligent people whom I know have minds that do not usually function precisely in this way. Nothing ever disturbs this "outlining" process. It is like some nautical instrument aboard a sailing vessel, a barometer or a GPS, which functions independently of whether the seas are choppy or still, recording data impartially in a calm or in a gale.
My childhood and youth was full of uncontrollable emotional storms, and I think that my intellect developed as it did to compensate for and manage this fact. The evidence is clear and unequivocal, these days, that such uncontrollable emotional affects, far beyond the incidents which elicit them, are due to biochemical imbalances in the brain. And my inner experience of bipolar disorder is one of a rock solid intellect trying to sail my brain and body in an unrelenting emotional gale.
The medicines help, but even these, as they wax and wane in the body, and as their power to damp down the biochemical imbalances expands or contracts, create independent interior changes of mood for which my intellect is constantly compensating. Medicated, I experience my brain and body like someone who drives different company cars every day, with each change of make, model, and year altering the acceleration, the speeds at which the gears change, and the precise location of many of the peripheral controls.
It's a good thing my intellect is stable. I really need it. As an unemployed and/or underemployed mental health client I have had to fight a constant guerilla war with the social service agencies in my town and my state. I am a paradigm case of how the frilling away of the social service safety net under 25 years of mostly Republican rule has been an undeclared war on the old, the sick, and the poor.
I subsisted these past two years, with a serious mental health condition, unable to see a medical psychiatrist who could properly diagnose and prescribe for it. I started out with health insurance, the kind called COBRA where, on unemployment (which is HALF your former salary in my generous Republican state) I had to pay the ENTIRE cost of the insurance which my employer carried. That's right, on COBRA both my premiums AND my employer's contribution suddenly became my sole responsibility on half of what I had been making.
How did I manage to carry it? By running up thousands of dollars in debt on my credit cards, as well as using the left over money from a home improvement second mortgage, while I was searching for work until (having been completely unsuccessful, probably in part due to my undiagnosed and worsening mental condition) the unemployment ran out and I defaulted on both the cards and the mortgage.
Did having health insurance help me? Not a bit. Every private psychiatrist in my town stopped taking private insurance long ago. They now do strictly a cash-and-carry business at $125.00 a session. My entire weekly unemployment check was about $125.00. And then I lost it.
That left me with the social service agencies in the public mental health system. And also the social service agencies that deal with the fact that you can't pay your utilities and you can't afford to buy food while your house in forclosure and you can't afford a lawyer to fight for it.
If I had tried to commit suicide, or lost my wits and started taking my clothes off in a public street and howling at the moon, I could have, finally, seen a shrink--after having been incarcerated for some time, and then booted out on the street fully medicated, but a homeless wreck, whose meds would shortly run out. Then back to crisis center for more incarceration, another round of medication, and another bout on the streets.
I am not exaggerating. On my phone line work I deal with such cases routinely.
By clinging as much as I could to my intellect, I have managed to avoid this. My home is gone, I rent from the man I sold it to, and I have managed to obtain part-time work while I hide from my other creditors (I still don't have enough cash flow to even bankrupt cleanly.) And by persistently demanding care, over and over, I finally managed to get it.
I had to lose one counselor to funding cutoffs, change care agencies, and pull every social service bureaucrat I met into the fight. And I had to cope with the fact that my feelings and my body from day to day, and sometimes from hour to hour, would be an unceasing roller coaster ride from utter exhaustion and suicidal despair to manic motor-mouth wittiness with a high as complete as anything on crack cocaine or crystal meth. But it has finally happened.
I write this blog because it helps relieve the pressure of constant emotional pitch-and-toss in my private life. And I write on politics because I KNOW from personal experience that my political adversaries, whether they admit it or not, are part of a deliberate and calculated war on folks such as I. A war which they cannot win, but which I and my fellow targets can completely lose.
And a war which, in the end, will turn this country into a spiritually bankrupt desert.
posted by Joseph Marshall | 9:44 AM
9 Comments:
I am Wolfgang von Skeptik, posting as "Anonymous" because I blog via a competitive server and therefore cannot otherwise post on your site. I apologize in advance for the length of my response, Joseph, but you give me a lot to answer.
You are absolutely right about there being a War on the Poor. But I wonder if you realize that in its present form, it has been going on since the Nixon Administration. It was continued by Ford and Carter, radically escalated by Reagan, slightly de-escalated by Bush I, escalated again to near-Reagan intensity by Clinton, and now escalated to the all-time Herbert Hoover level by Bush II. Why? Because from the perspective of the powers that be, the poor – especially the disabled poor – are worthless: too worthless even for exploitation.
And why has the war so intensified at this particular moment in history? Because without the Red Army a continent away to terrify America into developing a social conscience – to terrify the American plutocracy (which includes the Republican Party) into some small pretense of humanitarianism, and to discipline the American Left (which includes the Democratic Party) into remaining true to the principles of Franklin Delano Roosevelt – there is literally nothing to protect us from the greed-heads of Enron Nation.
The Democrats are even more to blame than the Republicans: note how – with the very notable exception of one “idiot’s tale” of anti-poverty histrionics by John Edwards, the Democrats were as sullenly silent on the issue of poverty as the Republicans. As I have been saying for some time now, our social conscience was merely a construct, a domestic weapon in the wars against Nazism and Communism – that and nothing more. Thus our social conscience sickened after the Axis died – note the radical erosion of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal during the late 1940s (especially by the Republican 80th Congress) and throughout the 1950s. Note also how the New Deal died almost immediately after the Soviet Union died. Once again, we are back to the “normalcy” of the Herbert Hoover era – the True Norm in the land of Eternal Greed: by the greedy, for the greedy and of the greedy. Enron Nation.
But why do I say the Democrats are even more to blame than the Republicans?
Because the Republicans have ALWAYS been the party of the plutocracy. Yes, even under Abraham Lincoln – who fought the Civil War NOT to free the slaves but to give the Yankee timber barons access to the rich and meticulously well-managed Southron forests – a long-suppressed historical fact the researchers of the environmental movement have rediscovered (to their politically “correct” horror, I might add). And because the Democrats (despite their Civil-War-era association with the Southern plantation oligarchy) had always been the party of “the little guy,” with all the little guy’s blemishes and (yes) bigotry. Hence FDR’s New Deal: two words so pregnant with reformist meaning they can still give me the chill of True Poetry.
(I am Brooklyn born but I grew up in the Appalachian South. I have not only seen the ragamuffin children without winter coats gathering coal on the railroad tracks; I have walked home from school with them – have in fact given them my own cast-off clothing and even helped them gather the coal with which they would cook their meager suppers – and I know them to be, in the spiritual and socioeconomic senses, truly my brothers and sisters...)
(I have stood beneath the great concrete bulk that is Norris Dam, awed beyond words by the New Deal’s epic accomplishment, grateful beyond speech or even prayer by the clear green water roaring from the mammoth penstocks – water the very clarity of which celebrates FDR’s gift of the land’s recovery from the malevolent, let-us-make-the-South-our-colony depredations of the Northern timber monopolists...)
(I have seen the blessings of electricity FDR brought to a land where once there was only darkness...)
Such was the Democratic Party until it was taken over by the radical feminist elite and that auxiliary corps of eunuchs known as the cult of political “correctness.” Such was the Democratic party until it abandoned its never-obsolete, never-old notion of a New Deal and a Square Deal and became instead the party of viciously anti-intellectual victim-identity cultism and politically “correct” censorship and the infinite, ultimate Enron Nation selfishness of “the personal is political.”
The Republicans are only a third of your problem obtaining proper social services, Joseph. The other two-thirds – assuming you are Caucasian – is your gender and race. The discrimination you suffered is called “quota-mongering.” It and the attendant denial of treatment (for a temporary and thus easily curable condition) is what ousted me from the work force and dumped me onto Social Security. Such is vicious legacy of matrifascism and its unspeakably malevolent hatred of all things white and male. And the Democratic Party today is matrifascism’s executive-action agency.
I’ll tell you a true story:
In 1981, as a consequence of my long coverage of social issues (and my very brief 1971 tenure as a press officer for an umbrella group that included the state welfare rights organizations), several sources alerted me to the fact that Washington state’s feminists intended to use Reaganoid welfare cutbacks as “a unique opportunity to restructure social services in accordance with feminist doctrine.”
(A little background: radical feminists had tried to organize the welfare rights movement in the early 1970s. The welfare rights people properly despised the feminists as snooty, arrogant, pretend-revolutionaries gone slumming, and rejected them accordingly. The feminists then in retaliation denounced all welfare mothers as “hopelessly reactionary.” The 5,390 percent administrative-cost increase the feminist-dominated welfare bureaucracy foisted on American taxpayers between 1970 and 1990 is the direct legacy of that clash; so is the two-thirds reduction in the value of welfare stipends and services during the same period.)
In any case, the feminist position is that NO male should receive ANY social services (veterans’ benefits included) until females are granted absolute economic parity. Hence what “restructuring” means – I say it in the present tense because it is continuing to this day – is the wholesale displacement of all males from all such programs. Hence too, when I was fighting my own wars with the Washington state Department of Social and Health Services in the late 1980s, there was the constant spectacle of temporarily disabled males maliciously denied any rehabilitative services that would return them to the workforce even as drug-addicted hookers – a category of people almost certain to revert to the junky life and thus to the streets – were willy-nilly awarded fully funded vocational rehabilitation packages.
I have no doubt this same thing is happening all around you. Look closely: what you’ll see is matrifascist malignance run amok. I’ll guarantee you bad-risk women are getting full benefits even as you and other good-risk males are being denied. (In Washington state, for example, in 1988 even definitively middle-class women qualified for single-parent daycare subsidies, but crippled males were routinely denied vital orthopedic appliances.)
Point being, the matrifascists are even more hostile to disabled Caucasian males than the Republicans are. The Republicans just want to starve us to death – and the same for all the rest of us who live here beneath the salt. The matrifascists would rather have us euthanized forthwith: read Grace Shinell or now-feminist-sainted Valerie Solanis. And until we acknowledge these Enron Nation realities, there is no way we can address the deeper problem of the pathological, morally imbecilic lack of a national social conscience that was equally manifest in both the Democratic and Republican presidential campaigns.
(I would correspond with you, Joseph, if you are willing. Ask the Anchoress to forward you my e-mail address.)
Hello, Joe. I'm a regular reader of the Anchoress, a Conservative politically, a Christian spiritually, and have an interest in politics (though not as keenly as you or the Anchoress). Your story disturbs me. I've been prayin and donating increasing amounts to charities for a while now, knowing full well that BOTH parties get their acts together on domestic issues. Like The Anchoress, I'm not bright enough to know what the best solutions are. But I know there are people out there who can come together and FIND the best ways to reach the neediest among us, systematically, locally, federally, individually, corporately, by churches and by organization, one by one.
I do my own part as an individual with multiple chronic health issues,including hypothyroidism and type 2 Diabetes as you have, along with others that make working difficult. But I also do not trust the federal gov't to get it completely right, either. The status quo sucks. Your situation is cruel. But I suspect the situation was also cruel under Clinton and Johnson and Carter. We just don't have a really good overall plan to deal with mental illness, chronic illness, the uninsured and the underemployed.
I do not believe that Mr. Bush is out there trying to crush the needy. I do believe he needs to have better plans of action and more focus on these issues. How can we proceed?
Praying and hoping and giving day by day to those worse off than I....
M.
I'm also an Anchoress reader and a pro-Republican conservative. I was moved by your post. I ask this in all humility, but would you be able to post on how you imagine things would have gone for you in prior eras? I've personally done some work of my own helping homeless people, and doing other charity work, and it seems to me that no matter who is running things, the government has completely missed the boat on effectively helping those who need it. Take the total federal "redistribution budget" and divide by the number of truly needy people and it is quite easy to see that government employees and the healthy middle class are the prime beneficiaries of all of this taxation to "help people". I'm not saying this to be doctrinaire. Is it really the case that Republicans are ruining everything, or is it that we've never, ever gotten it right in the first place? According to my impression of the "bad old days", say 50 years ago, wouldn't you have been in some hideous institution somewhere against your will undergoing electroshock and maybe a lobotomy under the kind auspices of Nurse Ratched? I'm being absolutely serious here. Maybe I'm woefully uninformed, but it would be interesting to see your thoughts on this.
You live in the GREATest nation on the face of the earth, but are you GRATEful for it? Fuck no. Woe is me! Woe is me! If you are that unhappy with it, MOVE! Try Canada or England or France or Germany. Go live in Mexico or Cuba. Maybe try Russia or China or India or Mozambique or New Zealand. But don't sling the BULLSHIT that implies President Bush wakes up every morning thinking how he can best fuck with the downtrodden and expect anyone but the tinfoil hatters to agree with you. "War against the poor"? Are you out of your mi-- ... ooops ... sorry. WHAT DO YOU WANT? UNCLE SUGAR TO TAKE CARE OF YOU? CRADLE TO GRAVE? Be a man, Joe! Go out and help somebody less forturnate than you. I mean really go out. I can help you get to Sudan [if you're interested, comment here and I'll hook you up]. Try holding starving, dying little children in your arms, Joseph. You'll soon feel better about your own condition. But just remember if you start up your bitching about bi-polar this and hypothyroid-that, don't be surprised if the little pot-bellied, starving children don't give a rat's ass. Life is hard, Joe. Harder for some than for others. I'd say you're doing pretty damn good. I wish you were doing better. I wish you had the health of a triathalon athlete! BUT DAMN, JOE. WISH IN ONE HAND AND SHIT IN THE OTHER AND SEE WHICH ONE FILLS UP FIRST. If you just gotta piss and moan, try prefacing it by telling us if there is ANYTHING about our country that you are THANKFUL for.
I think I'll be less brutal than Anonymous. But I'm not sure that there is a "right" to health care. Rights are things that we say we are born with, that must be secured for ourselves. Rights are things that the government will enforce at the point of a gun. If a child is born in a tin roofed shack in Eastern Kentucky, will the govenment force a doctor to go out to the house and give it a well baby check-up? If no-one volunteers to be doctors, will the govenment force people to become doctors against their will? Doctors are quitting all over the country, because tort lawyers are driving up the cost of practice to where it isn't worth it. Are we going to get police to force doctors to practice medicine? We will send a policeman to protect you your life, liberty and pursuit of happiness from the deliberate act of another human being. Because that is your right. But if you want protection from the effects of accident, lifestyle, genetics or age, you need to pay that price yourself. We have helped provide protections of Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness to people all around the world. Is it our duty to provide health care to them also. And if such a thing is a right, can there be any argument that the war on Iraq was moral and legal?
Well, Joe. . .
All I can say is that I know how it is. I sunk into a psychotic depression about six years ago that put me out of the two jobs I was working to pay the rent on the apartment I lost, along with everything in it, and every friend I had -- except for the one or two who weren't too creeped out to be around me for more than a minute.
I was fortunate enough to have a family who cared enough to take me in and put up with the paranoia, delusions, and wild, neck-breaking mood swings. I was also fortunate enough after two or three years to find a disability lawyer who worked on a contingency basis, and who helped me get monthly checks for $572.
I live in Kentucky, which is just about as Republican as states get, and at no point since my illness have I been denied care that I sought. Though, I did have to go through an appeal in order to be awarded disability payments.
My suggestion to anyone with a keen intellect -- particularly one inclined toward logic, order, and organization -- is congnitive/behavioral therapy. If you can't pay for it, then immerse yourself in the study of it. Go to the library and read every book you can get your hands on that discusses the approach. Do the exercises, and make the whole concept a part of your daily existence.
Don't let some of the hoaky book titles fool you. With a couple of years of constantly reminding myself of the logical fallacies that riddled my thoughts, and about a year on a moderate dosage of Paxil, I went from believing that I was a new Messiah in a global race war receiving messages through my sister's television, to believing that everything was going to be alright, even if the worst possible thing happened.
I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying it's possible, if you'll only retrain your brain to stop making logical leaps. You just have to accept that intelligence can be a barrier to your mental health, as long as you think that it's stupid to be happy about things when there are things to be unhappy about.
Hey Joe,
I am responding via the Anchoress also. I have a couple of friends with bi-polar disorder. I also had a major situational depression myself and my kids have all been in therapy for depression. If it weren't for wonderfully enlightened mental health professionals, my family would have been lost. These professionals testfied in court, leaving themselves open to libel which they had to deal with, to protect my kids and me.
Do not underestimate what 'strangers' will do for you! I have first hand experience.
Thanks, once again, to the Anchoress, and all who have written. Enough discussion has been developed for me to write a new post in response, which I have. Read it and enjoy!
You know, It's really dopey when the Blogger himself forgets to use his name when he comments! But I'll keep it up as a reminder not to take myself, or my postings too seriously!
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