What is your solution to the problem? Seriously, were you this lady, separated from a mentally ill husband, responsible for a mentally ill son and two other children, what would you do?
Please keep in mind that there is scant government help. We don’t institutionalize the mentally ill any more. Recall that she was told at the mental hospital that the only way he would get help was if he was charged with a crime.
That’s where we are in this society. There is no pre-emptive option. He has to hurt someone before the law can intervene.
What would you do? How would you handle it? To whom would you turn?
Have you walked in her shoes? Have you had a dangerously mentally ill family member?
I have.
Womder if she could take the two younger children to a trusted friend or relative and get outta there.... Leave as fast as humanly possible.
If you are saying that the proper solution to her situation is to lament the “stigmatization” of her child, then I absolutely disagree with you, just as I disagree with her.
Do you think I am untouched by the difficulty she has faced, and that apparently you have too? I was around and following the stories when the great move to “mainstream” the mentally ill was taking place...I’d had some experience (not as a patient, thankfully) in some of the subpar institutions that warehoused the mentally disabled and mentally ill, and while I rather airily hoped that the changes would bring about good results, I didn’t quite see how it was going to work.
I am not minimizing her terrible situation. Maybe her perspective and her reasoning fell apart in the face of the monumental difficulties you are pointing to.
I am just saying that it is NOT the stigmatizing of the mentally ill that is the problem for her or her child, any more than the stigmatization of paper food stamps was the problem 10 and more years ago for those who received them. (Removing the stigma of food stamps didn’t end the problem of indigence, just as removing diagnoses and intervention didn’t cure mental illness.)
I can’t tell you how to ‘fix’ the problem. You have deep and haunting (if I read you correctly) personal experience with the situation. I would ask you to tell us.
Do you understand my frustration with her column? It was not that she was torn by her love and her pain, not that she wanted counseling and practical help with her plight, not that it seemed to her, as to you, that there are no answers...it was that she seemed to want help with this once-beloved but monstrous presence in her life, yet she demanded that none of us notice or label the monster.
It seems to me that the pre-emptive option you mention (and which seems the only hope to me) would involve the very labelling and stimatization that this poor mother dreads.
Sir, truly, I offer you and her my best wishes, and my prayers.