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IF NOT THE RIVER




The very notion of “mental illness” is the expression of an attempt doomed from the outset. What is called “mental illness” is simply alienated madness, alienated in the psychology that it has itself made possible.

One day an attempt must be made to study madness as an overall structure—madness freed and disalienated, restored in some sense to its original language.


Michel Foucault



Suicide’s Note

The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss.


Langston Hughes




I remember a poster on the wall of my mother’s office when I was growing up. She was a social worker—sometimes a therapist with a private practice, but while I was a child and until I graduated high school, she worked in the Boise schools. At the top of the poster, it said something to the effect of PEOPLE WITH MENTAL ILLNESS ENRICH OUR LIVES. Beneath this profession, names in various fonts of composers, writers, artists, thinkers who had or likely had one or more “severe mental illnesses,” defined on the bottom of the poster as major depressive disorder, schizophrenia, &/or bipolar disorder. I often spent long days in her office alone while she was in meetings and so grew up staring at this poster. Alone with it, I felt in the pit of me a sensation similar to the one I’d felt as a kid in church or when I did something I knew I wasn’t supposed to. Not one of shame or fear but something of the sacred, of magic or mystery. A charge around “mental illness” long before I understood the ways in which this pervaded my family or how its traces were beginning to make themselves known in the chemistry of my developing brain. The hairs on the backs of my legs rose a little as I read the names. I paid attention. 





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