The Wrong Label

Posted on October 8, 2006 in Adolescence College Mania

My mother knew something was wrong when I was younger, but chose to couch it in a personally-wrought pop psychology that excluded the possibility of treatable mental illness. One should remember that in those days lithium had only been used for a few years and the other drug of choice, thiorezine, was a nuclear bomb that turned the patient into a wandering ruin. So my mother defined my illness as immaturity, a designation which made me angry and exacerbated the problem.

The clues that she did this included not letting me go far from home for school. I needed to be checked out for a few years before they let me go on a school-organized semester in Athens, Greece. Plenty of watchers had to be around. And those watchers missed so much!

In my sophomore year, I had the first and most severe of a series of delusional episodes in which I believed that I was the only real thing in the universe. Then there were the times when I made manic rushes across the street in front of traffic. She knew of my depressions. I did a fine job of concealing my drug experiments and the experiments my brain performed upon me from her.

Strangely, she, my brother, and my father took it as a fell sign that I did not like to drink. Perhaps it was a Catholic obligation to be an imbiber in a nation of Protestants. Here I was a son who did not smoke, drink, or use drugs, yet they thought me a failure and immature. With only this designation, I distanced myself from them. Who wanted to be a resister to adulthood?

The result was that I became entangled in my illness, so much so that I lost faith in myself because I could not please them. The ambushes they laid for me hurt just too much. And they all revolved around the theme of immaturity and arrogance. Who could weather that and love? When I finally became aware of my illness, at first, it seemed hopeless. It wasn’t my will: the cards were stacked against me. And it felt that they’d won in their bid to destroy my ego.