Free to be (crazy) you and me

This week I am starting a class and working on a deadline.  So far in 2012 I’ve been meeting all my deadlines, but I don’t want to gloat lest I start missing them!  Instead of a new post, I am re-posting the following entry from June 3, 2011.  Thank you for reading, friends.

A New Yorker article by Rachel Aviv (“God Knows Where I Am”) came out in the last week that has affected me deeply.

It’s an account of a woman who was diagnosed with bipolar and schizoaffective disorder. Part of the nature of her illness was that she didn’t accept the diagnosis. She didn’t take her prescribed medications unless she was in an institution where she was compelled to. She had committed a number of petty crimes and bizarre behaviors that landed her in jail and a mental institution. But she was described as otherwise likable and often lucid.

I would have found the article fascinating (and depressing) even if I didn’t have a personal interest in this subject. It’s a circular situation, a true conundrum, when an illness manifests as a refusal to accept that you are ill. These were the types of questions that kept me from really understanding my college courses in philosophy, hanging just at the edge of my reasoning abilities. But the real reason that this is such a difficult topic is that my father’s story was similar.

My father was out of touch with reality for most of my memory. He only went to a psychiatrist once, forced by a court order during my parents’ divorce. On that brief visit, he received a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. His symptoms included delusions of grandeur, auditory hallucinations, and paranoia. He had these symptoms for the rest of his life and never took medication or (to my knowledge) ever saw a physician.

My father’s story did not play out as tragically as the mentally ill woman from the New Yorker article. He lived a marginal existence in Chicago for over 20 years and then rejoined his family in Taiwan for the last few years of his life. But the fact that he refused treatment made dealing with him a constant exercise in frustration, and in effect, his illness steered our family history during my brother’s and my childhood and young adulthood.

The article brings up difficult legal and ethical questions about how to treat the mentally ill. During my father’s lifetime, I was not willing or able to take drastic measures to curtail his freedom. Because he was able to hold down a series of jobs, he maintained financial independence. He died ten years ago, around the age of 60. And since he’s been gone for a while, I’m able to see the trajectory of his life and try to put it into some kind of narrative framework to understand, past tense. But I have no idea what I would do if he was still a force to be reckoned with in my life.