Lunar Roses

Lots of people are talking about the current Newsweek article about a boy diagnosed with pediatric bipolar disorder… at the age of two. Max Blake is now ten years old and has been on 38 psychotropic drugs in the past eight years. Because drugs are what you do with bipolars, of course.

It’s a distressing thing to read about, and the entire issue of pediatric bipolar disorder is horrifying and complicated.

Our friends and neighbors at the Treatment Advocacy Center have also contributed their two cents of reaction to the article. After an attention-grabbing headline and a single sentence referring to the article as “disturbing and heartbreaking,” TAC gets down to their real business.

“The Blakes may have a rough road ahead,” TAC wants you to know. “Max has not yet reached the age of majority, so his parents have control over his treatment plan. Unfortunately, the Blakes will face even more hurdles when it comes to getting treatment for their son Max when he turns 18.”

There it is. That’s what the Treatment Advocacy Center is all about. The problem isn’t that Max is in big trouble, or that he himself certainly has a rough road ahead. They don’t give a crap about Max, or anyone like Max. That’s not their constituency. This entry is for parents of kids like Max. They want you thinking ahead to that horrible, horrible day your sad/mad/bad child becomes an adult. Adults are so inconvenient, with all those legal and civil rights, including the right to tell mommy and daddy to piss off. TAC says every day that what they do is “work to eliminate barriers to the timely and effective treatment of mental illness.” The barriers they are talking about are those very legal and civil rights.

Oh, but not your legal and civil rights. Just “the sickest of the sick.” And if the system isn’t so good at figuring out who should be in the category of “sickest of the sick”, well… oops. Wrong patient. Of course, once you (or your kid, or your grandkid) have been stripped of your legal and civil rights, there’s no way to get them back. TAC is awfully sorry about that. What do you want? They did say “oops.”

With this particular blog post, the Treatment Advocacy Center is hoping to rope in a few more converts. Fear is a great motivator. Ask President Bush. People will let you get away with a lot if you can scare them badly enough first.

“Many times the law leaves parents with no voice in the treatment of their son or daughter,” writes TAC. Not your two- or ten-year-old son or daughter, of course: feel free to drug them as much you as you wish when they’re pre-schoolers. But when they reach their majority? Uh-oh. Somehow the stupid laws of the nation automatically cover everyone, even the mentally ill. Clearly this must be stopped.

“As it stands now, many states require that a person be immediately dangerous before they may be involuntarily treated.” Please pause for a moment to consider if you think this is a bad thing. Involuntarily treated. As it stands now, you don’t even have to break a law to be involuntarily treated; all that has to happen is a doctor somewhere thinking you may be a danger to yourself (suicide) or to others (physical violence) and you can be involuntarily “treated.”

My father was recently in a hospital for problems with his heart. The doctor wanted him to stay for observation and then be transferred to another hospital, an hour away, by ambulance. My father refused this as unnecessary. My mother was so angry with him she picked up all his stuff and left him there, thinking it would keep him from checking out of the hospital (it wouldn’t have). When a second doctor agreed that dad was right, then and only then did mom settle down enough to “let” him get dressed and go home.

I told him he is damned lucky he’s never been diagnosed as mentally ill. Refusal to comply with a doctor’s orders in that situation could, if desired, be viewed as being dangerous to self, and dad could have spent the night (and, legally, the next several days) being “involuntarily treated” on the psych ward. If the Treatment Advocacy Center has their way, and protections are weakened, my dad might have been held involuntarily simply because his immediate family — his wife — decided he was being “crazy.”

Again, the Treatment Advocacy Center says over and over they’re not talking about you. Not your rights, just the rights of that pesky kid or aunt of yours always making with the crazy. They only want to disenfranchise those people. The “sickest of the sick.” Why should those people have rights and protections? Shouldn’t you, the sane one, be able to force them to take psychotropic drugs even if they don’t want to, or put them in a hospital ward involuntarily with no pesky legal niceties? If not you, then a doctor? If not a doctor, then a lawyer, or a special counsel, or TAC?

When Max Blake turns 18 (if he makes it to 18), should he have rights like a real person? Isn’t that scary and dangerous and bad? It’s too expensive to keep him locked away, too visibly cruel. But forced involuntary treatment, that’s just making him take substances into his body that can make him sterile and diabetic and stupid and tired all the time and, most importantly, easy for the sane ones who know best to direct and control.

The Treatment Advocacy Center: forward thinking visionaries who only want your kid’s civil rights erased so you can control him. Never allow him to be an adult, that will solve the whole messy business.

Intelligent response to the Max Blake story can be found here and here.

The title is an allusion to a song by Tori Amos, but it does seem like something is in the air. Those spring-time suicidal urges are making themselves known. Not me, thankyouverymuch, but an astoundingly high number of acquaintances and even strangers-we-come-across have mentioned, or elaborated on, suicidal ideation in the past week or two.

Sometimes I say something directly to people about it. Mostly I don’t. I don’t have a lot of wiggle room here.

One of the Roses (the one in charge) first tried to kill us all when we were fourteen or fifteen, desperately unhappy and feeling trapped in a way shown very well in the movie “Dead Poet’s Society.” From my safe distance of many light-years, I can assure us all it was a pretty sad attempt. There was no internet to research painless or effective ways to make the body stop. That first stab was stereotypically childish and naive. We were sick for a couple of days. No one even knew we’d done it.

It was not the last time. Gods no. I never personally perpetrated the violence du jour, but for several years I deliberately baited Rome and verbally shot down any hopefulness or sudden movements toward life she might make, knowing quite well she’d slide down and down again. [Or do I remember it that way to think I had some kind of control?] Life seemed hard and hopeless and pointless, and I was tired, but could console myself that if there was a suicide, it wasn’t my choice. See how clean my hands are?

The fact that we’re still alive puts us in a category many people view with great contempt. Almost everyone, it seems. It was Rosemarie who was interested in continuing to live, all of us continuing to live, and she payed a high price for taking action to perpetuate our survival.

I’m aware this may change, all too quickly, but at this moment I can say quite sincerely that I am glad we are still alive. Our life, my life, is not Disneyland. I get frustrated; I get tired. Our emotional states can be extreme. We have to struggle to reach ludicrously (embarrassingly) minimal goals, and function with any autonomy or mastery. Lately we’ve been having a lot of discussions about whether we really deserve to be alive. What’s our contribution? Ironically it’s Rosemarie who agonizes most over this question.

So my footing to advise other people about suicide is not solid. Philosophically and practically, I have a problem with forcing, shaming, and even arguing strongly to convince people in general to stay alive. I’m glad I don’t have to make those kinds of decisions, because faced with a despairing, suicidal adult human being, I can’t say “You have to stay alive.” That is not my call, and I don’t think it should be anyone’s call but yours, or mine.

Would I be here if people hadn’t forced us to stay alive? No. Hypocritical much?

What I always, always want to say is this: Please don’t kill yourself. Please don’t. Please don’t remove yourself from this world, because we need you. We need people who feel things deeply. We need the wounded; we need the scarred survivors’ strength. We need those voices to speak if things are to improve - or even just not get worse for the vulnerable ones who can’t be heard, and there are always and will always be more vulnerable ones.

Please don’t kill yourself. Try something else, and if you can’t think of what else to try, then wait. Hold on. Whatever it is that has you pinned will change. Everything changes. Everything ends. If I have come to a point where I am glad to be living, even if it’s transient, you may too. I would have told you with great certainty it could never happen. I would have generated a list of reasons it could never happen. And I’d have been wrong.

Life is hard. It’s hard for everyone, I think. It’s a lot of other things, too. We’re all going to die soon. While we’re alive, while you’re alive, live.

I never say this. Sometimes, occasionally, an abbreviated version. It’s complicated. Who am I to say these things? Who am I to bid anyone endure great pain for the hopefully future good of the human race or a single member of it? A passing stranger who hears you and wishes you well, and has no power whatsoever to do anything for you, but wish.

LEATHER look I’m standing naked before you don’t you want more than my sex I can scream as loud as your last one but I can’t claim innocence oh god could it be the weather oh god why am I here if love isn’t forever and it’s NOT THE WEATHER hand me my leather I could just pretend that you love me the night would lose all sense of fear but why do I need you to love me when you can’t hold what I hold dear I almost ran over an angel he had a nice big fat cigar “IN A SENSE” he said “you’re alone here so if you jump you best jump far” … Tori Amos