A canary hovers over the cuckoo’s nest

In addition to the other foci of this month, mental health is one that is locally and nationally emphasized. In proclaiming May as mental health awareness month, the governor called on residents, government agencies, private entities, businesses and schools “to work together in raising awareness and understanding of mental health and mental illness.”

Nationally, the theme for this year’s observance is MIND your health, focusing on the mind-body connection. It highlights the latest research that clearly links our mental and physical health. The March 2005 issue of the National Geographic Magazine, a publication not generally known for chronicling edge research, affirms that “the mind is what the brain does.”

Nobody talks much about mental health and illness these days. Those who are personally knowledgeable find it too painful, and the academics find the discipline a wee bit too complex for simple and neat 101-college-level introductory courses. To pigeon-peg human behavior without correlation to the neuroscience of the brain perpetuates such debilitating notions that autistic children suffer from maternal poverty of warm hugs when still young. The cult of self-esteem in our schools suffers from the same shaky foundations with disastrous result if such packaged programs like MegaSkills, Virtues, PeaceBuilders, and the like, are treated as prescriptive dosage of authoritarian morality rather than as tools for enhancing human consciousness.

I took an aptitude test in the 11th grade, and to my horror, I was informed that I was abnormally over-achieving. Even today, when the word “abnormal” is casually used to characterize a child’s behavior, it can have deleterious consequences. It cost me a scholarship level of assistance later, just because I ignorantly worried about my mental health.

In 1997, University of Toronto’s Edward Shorter wrote A History of Psychiatry, From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac. It is a provocative retelling of the history of one of medicine’s most volatile disciplines, from its wild and wooly beginnings to its decorous enthronement among the soft lights of Park Avenue consulting offices.

American Post-WW II comedy was replete with jabs at psychoanalysis. It was fashionable for a time to babble on Freudian and Jungian analysis, and later, Carl Rogers feel-good therapies. Seeing an analyst and taking 50 minutes off “to lie down” on the “couch” became a symbol of having arrived at the economically upscale, educationally sophisticated, and psychologically sensitive crowd of the American Northeast and the nation’s urban dwellers.

Cinema entertained us with the antics of escapist McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) and the soft-spoken but coldly monstrous villain Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). Adam Sandler on-anger-denial and therapist Jack Nicholson would tickle our bones with our contemporary miscues on anger. Of course, for the pharmacologically dependent state of mind, we’ve always had the ancient mythology of Shangri-La (liquid-induced longevity), which has since been reincarnated into the wild and wooly world of Matrix Revolution, of altered states of being and the simultaneity of parallel universes.

The evolution of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, (4th edition DSM-IV published in 1994, still currently in use) reveals the decline of psychoanalysis as therapy. Cultural anthropologists, social activists, and practical metaphysicians have since adopted consciousness-raising methods as more suited enhancements to interior voyages and journeys. Psychoanalysis as “the optimization of experience and the enhancement of sensitivity” sounds more like the description of the Ignatian Retreat up Maturama House, or even the weeklong annual culminating event for the 6th graders at San Vicente Elementary School.

My family imploded 1996 when the reality of two autistic children shook the foundations of a marriage, at the time, snugly settled within the relatively safe and economically stable confines of the Federal bureaucracy in D.C. My wife decided to make a go at life by herself and our two autistic children sans husband’s presence. Not to absolve myself from responsibility in the dissolution of that union, its demise nevertheless was shrouded with a more complex aura than just the failure of a couple to balance the family budget, or to amicably settle the battle of drawers in the connubial bed.

Already suffering from utter incapacity to understand, let alone, rationally deal with autism, I took a deep sojourn into the realm of body-mind research. In Shadow Syndromes, John J. Ratey, M. D. and Catherine Johnson, Ph.D., wrote that people tend to attribute their problems to bad parents or low self-esteem or lack of will power, when in fact they are struggling with a mental condition of chronic sadness, obsessiveness, outbursts of anger, inability to finish tasks, disabling discomfort in social situations. These and other forms of serious mental disorders affect the very course of our daily lives. I was back to my 11th grade fear of the “abnormal.” In 2001, Ratey published his monumental guide to the BRAIN, whose main thesis is confirmed by the aforementioned National Geographic article, your MIND is what your brain does.

Two years ago, I was labeled as suffering from Personality Disorder NOS (Not Otherwise Specified). Deemed to exhibit behavior usually attributed to a histrionic, narcissistic, and antisocial personality, this diagnosis is a result of a 90-minute interview with a mental health practitioner. The value of the report was greatly diminished when it became evident that it was a callously recycled forensic template with someone’s name still in the report, slanted towards the legal, and lent itself as a tool for administrative misuse. Happily, I had long transcended the 11th grade fear of the illness, and have since shifted to being focused on the health. Sadly, my professional esteem of callous practitioners has touched the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

The need to be aware of mental health and the reality of mental illnesses is a feature of our contemporary life. The list of disorders is endless. Anxiety (stress, fear, compulsion, obsession, post-trauma), disorders (psychotic, personality, mood, eating, childhood, and substance-related), not to mention dementia and autism. These are now cover story grist to our weekly magazines.

This month’s emphasis is on the health, not the fear of the illness.The brain is subject to the same influence and dysfunction as other organs, a dynamic, highly sensitive and robust system that adapts to its natural and chemico-plastic environment, even as it is guided by its genetic programming. Awareness on how it functions is every individual’s responsibility. Behavior “left to the guidance of the Lord”, or to the “Devil-made-me-do-it” machinations, are no longer responsible options. Physical/mental health is one; physical/mental illness is another. As my 6th graders are wont to say: Life is nothing but a series of choices. Choose wisely. MIND your health!

As individual education plan (IEP) are now required of special education students, I’ve decided to chart my own individual mental health plan, and begin with an affirmation. Being a unique, unrepeatable histrionic, narcissistic, antisocial personality of the only kind the likes of which never existed before and will never exist ever again when shelf-life terminus arrives; I will nourish my brain. This month of May, and all year round, I will MIND my well-being.