Mindful March madness

It is that month of NCAA hoops hoopla, when the campus frenzy bursts into the inhibition-shedding Spring break, with the Final Four extravaganza gaining media exposure and partisan intensity similar to that accorded the World Series, the Super Bowl, the Olympics combined.

There is another “madness” calling our attention, and the months of March and May are when official attention is given. This other madness is the mental health kind with focus on maternal mental health and mental retardation awareness, the latter being a major disability component of the Developmental Disabilities awareness focus of the month.

Former CNMI Attorney General Robert T. Torres hit front page last month when he reminded the government that after almost a decade, the Commonwealth has yet to treat its mentally-ill in compliance with court judgments, e.g., the Dwayne M. Sibetang and Eria Elliot cases in particular, and the Patients’ Rights Act in general.

Previously, we also had Comedy Central in the news with John Joyner awkwardly playing warden to homeless Peter, save that this did not prove funny at all. Reference to Peter’s shortage of mental acuity was used to explain his “criminal” behavior!

Of course, there is the convenient knee-jerk explanation of the Virginia Tech killings more than a year ago, which prompted yet another study of the causal link between mental illness and violence, the result of which is what had already been known: there is none. Violence begets violence, and though violent acts has often been associated with persons diagnosed with mental illness, the cause-and-effect relationship is, at best, coincidental to the unfavorable general context of mental illness in contemporary society.

The images created by such movies as Psycho, Friday the 13th, and Chainsaw Massacre perpetuate the mythology of a direct correlation between mental illness and violence. Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher’s entertaining depiction of the tragi-comic conflict between patient and nurse in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is reminiscent of reports a dear nurse use to bring home after her duty in the Pediatric ward at CHC, the nurses’ station being beside the entry door to the psychiatric ward.

More recently, Academy Award winning movie, A Beautiful Mind, about the Nobel laureate John Forbes Nash, reflected current state of knowledge that conceives of a quadrilateral separation of the body, soul, mind and spirit, but in reality, are inseparable as any medical practitioner would concede. Residue of the Manichaean dichotomy that divided life between good and evil, in the religions of Judaism-Christianity-Islam of the Fertile Crescent, continues to influence the view that there is “normative” behavior, which is good, and “aberrant” behavior, which is bad. We educate the young to adapt to normative behavior, and we condemn and confine them if they won’t.

The sanity of insanity, however, has gotten a hearing in such novel-turned-movie as Catch-22 where the character Yossarian aims to be classified as insane in order to be discharged from military duty. Paradoxically, to ask to be assessed as insane means one is rational enough to make the request, so a circuitous logic negates the very assertion one is trying to make. Max Klinger in the popular TV-series Mash similarly appeals for psychiatric discharge from the army, the point being, that in an insane war, the sane thing to do is to get out of it!

“Gone mental” is, of course, used in reference to well-publicized Post Office shootings. Filipinos clarify the locale of their domicile if living in Mandaluyong, Metro Manila, i.e., outside rather than inside, the latter referring to the sprawled mental institution that is a residue of the days when mental patients were still subjected to electroshock therapy.

The list of prominent Western personalities who are considered to have been mentally ill includes: Hans Christian Andersen, Ludwig van Beethoven, Winston Churchill, Kurt Cobain, Charles Darwin, Emily Dickenson, Thomas Edison, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Betty Ford, Paul Gauguin, King George III, Johann Goethe, Ernest Hemingway, Victor Hugo, Ignatius of Loyola, Thomas Jefferson, John Keats, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther, Michelangelo, Florence Nightingale, King Saul, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Sir Isaac Newton. Vincent Van Gogh’s creativity is demonstrative of the link often observed between fertile imagination and genius.

Fifty-four conditions of various categories are listed as adjustment , anxiety, childhood, eating, mood, cognitive (delirium, dementia, amnestic), personality, schizophrenia and other psychotic, and substance-related disorders of mental illness. To classify the behavior of each as aberrant needing censure, ignoring the nature of the human journey, is a throwback to the age when we dealt with foul spirits by incantation before subjecting them to the blaze of the stakes, or, not too long ago, wiring them for electrical shocks.

Psychiatrist R. D. Laing revolutionized the approach to psychosis when he made it participatory to the degree that the patient’s account of his/her own condition is an important ingredient in the journey toward mental health. Not only is the stigma of mental illness to be consigned to the era of dinosaurs, the conscious facilitation of the “patients’” active role in attaining the balance and equilibrium of faculties is a critical intervention tactic in the healing process.

The Coalition on the Anti-Stigmas of Mental Illness in the CNMI: A Mental Health Awareness Group for the Northern Mariana Islands is out to promote acceptance, dignity and social inclusion associated with mental health. Jeanne Rayphand of NMPASI (235-7273/4) would be very delighted to direct any inquiries on their activities as well as the services of coalition members toward refocusing all of us on the mental “health” as much as we do on the “illness.”

As a character in Mash commented: “Sometimes the only sane thing to do is be insane!” One given to symptoms of bipolarity, I have recently been accused of foolishness for leaving the security of a job to the uncertainty of a deep and widespread recession. That we have all taken leave of our senses, some more severely than others, is a part of the human condition. The flight of fancy, or the freedom to fight, has been known to guide our response when confronted by a dysfunctional environment. So let us pay attention to the human journey, rather than to the strict adherence to the dictates of social norms. Let us heed Attorney Torres’ admonition to build the structures and systems that allows the mentally disabled not to be perceived as a threat, but also to receive the services that provides the opportunity for each to grasp one’s own personal journey in and out of the world of the sane and the insane.