Rethinking Addiction
Rethinking Mental Illness
When I fill out the forms at the doctor’s office, I have to list it all out:
-Two suicides.
-Alcoholism.
-Depression.
-Anxiety.
For my family history.
I think a lot about how my family’s lives and my family story has been so heavily shaped by mental illness.
And yet, has it?
Is it really mental illness?
I know that that seems like an “obviously! duh!” moment.
What else do we call a family with two suicides in it?
But—
I often times wonder…if my family had addressed their traumas—what happened to them and got proper professional help, addressing it—
If I would still have to fill out those forms this way?
To note them down, as permanent, as they are defining me.
In noting them down, it seems that they are purely genetic, that I can inherit them, that they are my branding: untreatable, a life sentence, a death sentence—
They did come to be, defining endings, but I don’t believe it was because entirely due to their mental illnesses, but because of what they did to address them, because of their life choices.
I also reject the permanent of it, as I look at how different I am in mind, since getting help, and I often times think—
It didn’t have to be this way.
Is it addiction or was it a coping mechanism, a numbing effect with alcohol, to disassociate to deal with the trauma of watching his brother burn to death in his car accident, weeks after returning home, safely, from the Vietnam war?
Is it depression or was it trauma from the abandonment of her mother when she was 13 and being thrown in foster homes and around to relatives, where no one wanted her? It is depression or was it trauma from losing her only full blooded sibling at age 21 to suicide? To promising to watch over her two infant daughters if something “should happen to her?”
It is depression or was it the trauma of his father putting a rifle in his mouth and blowing his brains all over the living room? Knowing this, and finding the remains, as we all stood in empty living room, where his couch was was.
These are the untold stories of my parents’ younger lives, that indelibly shaped them.
This is the story of my brother.
All of them must have been intensely traumatic.
And these are only the highlights. These are the ones I know.
There are other stories that I do not. That I will never know.
And I am certain they did not receive the counseling they needed, that they deserved, to get help to address their trauma.
So, is that mental illness? Or is that mental preservation from unspeakable horrors of life? Are these the coping mechanisms and the symptoms that resulted from their lived, embodied experiences of trauma and however much more intergenerational trauma that we don’t know?
The labels of mental illness are sometimes helpful, but they can be deceptively misleading. It can be undiagnosed and untreated trauma as well.