Supplements

Commentary

By Liz Quirin

Children of God, One and All

I’ve been to many meetings over the course of my varied career as a reporter. Years ago, I went to a disaster meeting down south with a friend who told me about the meeting. The group was trying to decide how to deal with rising flood waters and what actions to take. When the leader, someone I didn’t know, asked me if I was media, I said I was. “Leave,” he said, and I did. The friend who had taken me to the meeting was shocked, but I assured him it was not the first meeting I had been asked to leave and probably wouldn’t be the last.

Last week I attended another meeting, this one in Belleville and of a far more sensitive nature. It was a meeting of family and friends of people suffering from mental illness. They were gracious and open and did not ask me to leave although I wouldn’t have blamed them if they did. Their agenda, far different from most meetings I attend, did not have quick or easy solutions to problems that will never go away.

These meetings offer support, suggestions and an opportunity to tell their stories, to talk about the journey they are taking that sometimes turns into more of a roller-coaster ride than a trip with a clearly defined beginning, middle and end. Similar to Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, you rarely know what you’ll get from one day to the next. Every day becomes a surprise.

We’re often uncomfortable around someone who obviously suffers with a mental illness. Not exactly afraid, we just don’t know how to act. Often, they look just like the rest of us, and that’s part of our problem. If the disability is physical we seem better able to accept it, to make allowances for it. Who wouldn’t want to give extra time or space to a family pushing a child in a wheelchair? But nobody wants to give way to someone with, say, bipolar disorder, a mental illness few of us understand if we don’t need to know about it.

Parents and spouses of those suffering with mental disorders sometimes sound like pharmacists as they rattle off the medications their loved one takes. And they know how those medications make life better or not for their loved ones. They arm themselves with as much knowledge about the disorder as they can, going to seminars, conferences, digging through hundreds of hits on the internet, looking for information that might help.

What they seldom find outside support groups is clear understanding of what they go through every day of the week. In addition to everything else they must do daily to stabilize their particular situations is educate the rest of us. We need to know them personally, see the challenges they face, internalize their struggles so that we won’t remain ignorant and therefore unable to see them and their family members as their true selves: children of God just like the rest of us.