News events and one's personal work sometimes connect in the most horrific ways. As I was waiting to board the plane last Monday morning in New York City to spend a week in the Chicago area to promote my book, Scags at 7, an unfortunate story was unfolding in Virginia.
I was on my way to visit high schools while in Chicago and Skokie (where I had gone to high school) in order to talk about more than my book. I had been asked to speak about how I had been diagnosed with schizophrenia while in high school and how I had been cured.
CNN was hurling the news from Virginia at all of us sitting at JFK and I watched my fellow passengers watch in disbelief and horror as the events unfolded. While we didn't know his name then, we knew someone else had gone on a shooting rampage and killed as many students and faculty as he could before killing himself.
The story kept coming at us in a loop with each new piece of "information" being hurtled at us like a football pass we were all out of position to catch. The reporting felt as alienating as it could possibly be.
I arrived in Chicago and first thing on Tuesday morning, I spoke to 60 students who were studying psychology at Whitney Young High School. I told them my story. How I had been schizophrenic starting at about 17 and had spent more than half my life being cured of it. I wanted them to understand that this disease is not a hopeless cause without a cure as it had been believed to be when I was their age. (Though, as the week progressed it became clear that many in the media had not been given this news.) I specifically talked to them about the rage I had to walk around with and the addictive nature of being so enraged and the ways in which I had taken it out against myself and wanted to take it out against others. I also described to them the process by which I had learned to extinguish that rage. They were fascinated to hear about this process and like anyone who has to go through it, upset at how long such a process takes.
While standing smack center in the small theatre at Whitney Young, surrounded on three sides by the students, I also watched them as I spoke. Some were interested. Some had already gone back to sleep. Some tuned into their iPods and some squirmed in their seats. These were bright kids and had studied abnormal psychology as it is called. When they felt comfortable, they asked wonderful questions about other people -- their brothers or students of their mothers. What I wanted them to take away from our time together was if they thought they needed help to go get it and if they knew someone who needed help to help them get it. That was my sole reason to talk to them about this aspect of my life.
As my week continued and I continued to meet with high school students, the news of poor Mr. Cho kept getting worse and worse. He seems to have gotten through high school without really talking. I wondered if that was something anyone had noticed then? Did anyone care that this poor young man sat in his dorm with his classmates and never spoke and never participated in their lives? He seemed to have been another one of those kids who fell through the cracks. With neither enough time nor resources, how many school districts allocate much funding towards this type of intervention? And what is its eventual cost not to help someone like Mr. Cho?
Onward my days went. I talked to students in Skokie, where I had grown up and gone crazy, about my experiences with schizophrenia at their age while reliving in my mind being in that school and what it had been like 40 years ago. With all the students I spoke to, I described in as clear a way as possible how the social worker I had worked with for over 20 years had helped me to get rid of my menacing, and angry, paranoid thoughts that could have left me homeless, institutionalized for life or dead. I told them just how lucky I had been to find someone who knew how to deal with schizophrenics and was not afraid of them.
My experiences have taught me that most people dealing with kids who have bizarre and angry thoughts tend to be frightened and distant from the kids. It is a natural response but serves to only reinforce the feelings of alienation and rejection from the world that has already so wounded and scarred anyone who is mentally ill. But my message is not one of hopelessness but one of hope and that to me was important to say as often as I could say it.
I listened when I had time to what the news people were saying about poor Mr. Cho. I grew tired of hearing him referred to as a creep or as a terrorist or as anything other than what he was -- a very sick young man who had never received the help he needed in order to overcome his illness who had then tried to get even for that.
Then word came that there would be a new commission to study this type of violence. It was clear to me as the names started being discussed that no one really wanted to help others who felt as poor dead Mr. Cho did. Their interests were in law enforcement, homeland security and the worst of the worst (in my opinion) the very people who think that medicating people solves problems because they have been bought by the pharmaceutical corporations -- the psychiatrists. Having suffered at the hands of these "caregivers" I do feel particularly qualified to discuss their inability to help others like poor dead Mr. Cho.
What interested me most of all, and it was with limited information coming my way due to my schedule, was whether anyone knew or seemed to want to know why he really did this. Could any of those people so well informed and digging up information as fast as their little journalistic shovels could move ever try and empathize and work their way into what had happened to this young man's mind? His illness didn't just appear two weeks ago after all.
I do grieve as we all do for the victims of his rage and hatred. I am also trying to feel as their families and friends feel about the seeming randomness of their loss. And in honor of that kind of awful separation from loved ones it seems also our collective responsibility as a nation to give in ways that make sure this kind of tragedy can be stopped, another time to say never again and mean it.
Experts in law enforcement and homeland security are by their titles prone to a certain agenda and set of expectations of what to do and how we should respond that has little to do with any type of informed and helpful caring. It is unfortunate that we cannot count on the psychiatric profession to respond with the kind of care Mr. Cho should have received. But we, the citizens of this country, a jury of his peers as it were, can do something. We can respond first of all to whomever among us is in this kind of pain and get them help now. Mental illness is not a cold and will not just go away in a few days. As a person ages the illness gets much worse. We, as a nation, cannot afford to be robbed of these bright people whose minds are being sacrificed. We must learn how to deal with our own fears and prejudices about all forms of mental illness. We have a responsibility to take care of everyone who needs help.
The students I met with this past week were quite sympathetic to what Mr. Cho had suffered through. They were aware of the effects of walking around with bottled up rage. They asked penetrating questions about how to work with people like that.
Now it is time for all of us who have been cured from our own mental illnesses to stand up and talk about it openly. We must not let those young people who are already frightened and feeling alone be further stigmatized and ostracized because of something over which they have no control. If we come forward and share with them what has worked and what has not and let them know we are leading normal lives, perhaps this kind of tragedy can spark a new revolution of mental health care that will provide more than another clever slogan but real help for those who need it -- all of us.