Embed Doc
Copy Link
Readcast
Collections

CommentGo Back

Download

"Mental Illness" and Society: Me and Them - A Journey fromAlienation to Meaning and Purpose

by Sally Clay

As the judge put it, "I don't believe that a woman who has received electro-convulsive treatmentsshould have custody of a child."

Part I Alienation

This is the first part of a longer piece. In this section Ms. Clay describes her initial experiences of alienation before she begins her search for the titular meaning and purpose.

The Thomas Todd Company was an old fashioned print shop in the Beacon Hill area of Boston. I was hired there shortly after I came to Boston after two years in a mentalhospital. The business was on the fifth floor of an old building with marbled floors andlofty ceilings, and my desk was at the front of a cluttered and somewhat shabby office.Behind me were the salesmen's desks, and beside me were the production manager andthe assistant director. I was hired as a kind of Gal Friday, to answer the phones and togreet customers and type their bills.I was starting all over again.

Tabula rasa.

During the second year of my stay at theInstitute of Living, my husband had announced that he wanted a divorce. He alsowanted custody of our two children, and he wanted to keep for himself the house in theBoston suburbs, with most of its contents. A few weeks later, when I was dischargedfrom the hospital, I could not go home to Sudbury. I was obliged to move into a smallroom at a YWCA residence for women in downtown Boston.It was the late Sixties, with revolution all around, but I had struggled to be a goodhousewife and mother. In the affluent suburbs, the Woodstock Festival was only a news bite over the radio. I was never able to rhapsodize over appliances and recipes, as didthe other housewives in my town, and as was the culture promoted by all of themagazines and TV shows of the time. I did not feel like one of them. I envied the beatniks and flower children that I heard about on the news, but I always knew that Iwas not one of them, either. I had tried the bohemian route when I was in college, andthat had only led to a massive nervous breakdown.Starting from scratch was not new to me. After my manic breakdown in college, andsix months in a mental hospital, I found that my college would not take me back.Without a college degree, and with no hope of pursuing a career as a writer, my beststrategy for survival was to learn how to type and to find a husband.

I had thought that marriage would give me the belonging that had eluded me in myschool days. Although my husband knew of my previous hospitalization, we both pretended that it had not happened. But it was always there. I still held onto the brokendreams of a writing career, and I still remained perpetually on my guard with friendsand neighbors, afraid that they would discover that I was a mental patient.I felt that I was only going through the motions as stepmother to my husband's son, andthen mother to a daughter of my own. I could not believe that I was really a mother,much less a worthy one. I spent hours beside the radio, listening to the music of revolution and news of the Woodstock generation. I managed to fill up my days withtrivial tasks, and stayed in the house most of the day, with no close friends and noinspiring projects.A couple of years after my daughter was born, I was desperate for some meaning in mylife. I began again to fall into extreme mental states, creating my own inner revolutions.This led to numerous hospitalizations in a local sanatorium, and finally to a long stay atthe Institute of Living in Connecticut. The first part of each hospitalization involvedcrashing from my manic high and finding myself locked into what was euphemisticallycalled a "seclusion" room. A better term would be "isolation."A manic episode is essentially a reach for meaning. The energy, colors, and images of such an episode are often joyful, but they may also be terrifying, and they may be adanger to oneself and others. But the energy of mania is the energy of life, and theintent of mania is to make some connection with cause and effect in the world. Bycontrast, a mental hospital is an institution with the intent of extinguishing that energy.A seclusion room, with its locked door and blank walls, is not a padded cell; it is a tombfor the spirit.I was locked into such rooms for hours, and sometimes for days and even weeks, withno human contact. It is hard to describe the sharpness of despair that I felt as I lay alonein those rooms. To realize the depth of my rejection and isolation from other human beings was frightening, and it was beyond weeping.Once my mania had been extinguished, I spent the rest of my stay at the Institute of Living - almost two years - in a state of suspended animation. Technically, I wasdepressed. But there was no feeling, and no energy, to this depression. In the clinicalnotes that I obtained a few years later, my doctor referred to my condition as an "almostterrifying emptiness within her."This terrifying emptiness followed me upon every release from a mental hospital. WhenI first came to Boston, just walking into the corner store to buy a pack of cigarettes

filled me with the fear that I would again be rejected and treated like a freak. At theYWCA residence, I dreaded leaving my room even to go to the cafeteria downstairs.Again I spent hours glued to my little clock radio, listening to the music that I lovedfrom afar, as an outsider. I remember listening at that time to "American Pie."

Bye, byeMiss American Pie.

What finally brought me back to life was the love of my daughter. During most of thetime that I worked at Thomas Todd, I fought with every ounce of my strength to be withMeg. When I first moved into the YWCA, it was a battle just to be allowed to see her. Iwas not allowed to see my stepson at all. But my husband's pulling the rug out from mewhen he asked for a divorce, jarred something in me. I realized that being away frommy children for two years had done terrible damage both to them and to me. I wanted tomake it up to Meg, and I wanted to make sure that she knew that she had a mother wholoved her and who wanted to take care of her.My father, who was a lawyer himself, referred me to an old classmate, one of the toplawyers in Boston, at the most respected law firm in the city. But I did not receive muchhelp from the legal system. From the start, my attorney informed me that my chances of regaining custody were slim because of my history of mental illness. He generallywould not answer the telephone when I called him, and my case was allowed to drag onfor over two years. I constantly had the feeling that he, too, considered me hopelesslymentally ill and therefore incompetent.In the meantime, I once again began to feel useful, and halfway human. I was lucky tohave found the job at the print shop. The Thomas Todd Company was a respectedorganization, one that had been founded in Maine by Thomas Todd the elder, and nowwas run by Thomas Todd, his son. Mr. Todd was a big, gray-haired man with hair growing out of his ears and a wry smile in all circumstances. He created a familyfeeling among all of us, and I soon felt at home there. I became good friends withMarie, the production manager at the desk next to mine, and in the course of our work she taught me all aspects of the business, and the fine points of printing compositionand production.I never did develop the confidence in my skills to allow me to handle a printing job onmy own. I was able to answer the telephone politely and inform customers of the statusof their orders. But even in this work that I enjoyed, I struggled with an invisible barrier between myself and other people. Even with Marie and Mr. Todd, I was constantly onmy guard, afraid that I would reveal my inherent defectiveness.This alienation did not continue at home, however. I found a pleasant apartment inBrookline, one that was in a neighborhood with lots of children and good schools. Theapartment had a second small bedroom that would be suitable for Meg when she came