A Parent in Denial

Posted on March 6, 2005 in Crosstalk Depression Film Mania

The rush to embrace chemical remedies for mental illness sometimes results in a denial of the full human being. I stuck my neck out when Susan Inman of The Tyee launched an attack on Martin Scorcese for “blaming” Howard Hughes’s mother for his OCD. After outlining her objections to The Aviator, she says:

The unsubstantiated theories that led people to believe that families are the cause of OCD, autism, and other serious mental illnesses caused tremendous damage to patients and families. These family-blaming theories postponed the development of the desperately needed services that people with brain disorders are only beginning to get. These are the stories that promise the motherlode of unmined dramatic material that informed writers are finally beginning to tap. This much needed public understanding about the roots and processes of serious mental illnesses will finally enable its victims to escape the social “quarantine” that too many have to endure.

I stuck my neck out and wrote a response:

I suffer from bipolar disorder and also from PTSD. I don’t necessarily feel that The Aviator puts the whole responsibility on the mother. Rather, I felt that like many of us who suffer from mental illness, it says that we remember lessons that we are taught as children and carry them to excessive extremes. The view that our obsessions are the pure products of chemical imbalances is as misguided as the Freudian view. Having taken medications for many years — first for depression only and now for bipolar disorder — I have learned that the medications alone do not solve the problem. In fact, a mania with unresolved issues to inform it is a very dangerous thing. If I’ve taken the time to work those through, they possess much less power when I lose it. Medications can only serve as a floor for doing other work such as cognitive reframing of the messages we were taught as children and beyond. Without them, the problems are much worse; [when you do take your medications], they still exist and lurk in the subconscious waiting to come out. It’s not Nature or Nurture: it’s both! And in my recovery, I have found it expeditious to follow a course which includes both medications and talk therapy which strives to identify learned behaviors and replace them with new ones. Sometimes that means reframing your parents not as gods or tyrants, but as fallible human beings.

Hughes’s ideas didn’t just arise spontaneously out of his brain. He learned them, somewhere. And given his sheltered childhood, that somewhere must have been his home.

My experience of parents of adult children with mental illness or addiction issues is often denial. “This just came out of the air and I did everything right,” is something I have heard from sires of some of the worst relapsers. I’ve often found them contentious without reason and hostile. They fail to see that they have contributed to the ideas which inform the episode. Introspection and inventory of their own behaviors can be rare. Support groups for parents and other family members can often turn into sessions which discuss how crazy the victim of mental illness is.

If such a group fails to bring the focus off the patient and on to the individuals supporting the patient, it has failed. This is why many mentally ill people end up breaking ties with their families: the support isn’t there. It has been shown that medicine alone cannot alleviate the symptoms of mental illness. Nor can cognitive therapy. The most successful programs do both: you take the meds and you get at the issues.

It helps the patient best if their families do “a fearless and searching moral inventory”, get out of denial, and make amends for what they have done by taking a more positive approach to the disease. Words like “I told you this when you were young and I was wrong” can do much to help those afflicted by neurotransmitter demons. They do not undermine parental authority or deny that the parents had good intentions. Rather they strengthen the bond of love which is so essential in the recovery transaction.