Choices

Leonard Pitts is one of my favorite syndicated columnists.  Today the paper ran his recent column in which he addresses one of the subjects I suggested I might be able to offer something special about a couple of posts ago.  His column, in our paper, is titled:

• “No one should have to ‘tough it out.’  A ‘reporter’ makes mental health a political issue.”

He is disgusted by Neil Munro who chides/heckles officials, even the president, at news briefings and events.

• Munro writes: “Americans have typically responded to stress and sadness by urging stoicism, hard work, marriage, prayer and personal initiative…”
• Pitts responds with: “In other words, we were self-reliant.  We toughed it out.  And, if I could write this the way I want, I would tell you in detail about a friend who was self-reliant.  She toughed it out.  Right up until she shot herself.”
• “One sighs at the thought of some daughter reading this and believing her dad chose to be that way [mentally ill]”

I don’t know about others but I wouldn’t choose to be mentally ill.  I wouldn’t choose to panic, like I did this morning just trying to buy a few groceries at Kroger’s.  I wouldn’t choose to have been on the verge of a dissociative fugue state after viewing the most recent Star Trek movie.

I wouldn’t choose any of this.  Nor would I have chosen to be raped, hit by a car and dragged down the street, or to lay my mother down on the grass when she died giving aid to the victim of a racially motivated attack.

The exercise of choice implies the ability to assert a modicum of will into any given circumstance. Will, at the very least for humans, further implies the ability freely to employ some level of moral reasoning to the situation or circumstance and to be free to behave in accordance with the outcome of these deliberations, whether considered acceptable or not acceptable in the view of others.  (Incidentally, I do not, even cannot, believe that humans are the only sentient beings capable of the exercise of choice as outlined here.)

When we are brutally abused, subject to potentially mortal suffering, or witness to events that rip through one’s sense of being, we cannot exercise any of the aspects of a choice of will.

Mental illness a choice?  PTSD a choice?  Depression, whether induced by events or chemistry in the brain, a choice?  Not a chance!

As Leonard Pitts said:  “The notion that mental illness — and mental illness — should be toughed out is asinine.”

Are you sure?

“I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?” – Chuang Tzu

Yeah, I know, what metaphysical dribble!  Have you ever found yourself in a dissociative fugue state?

Once I was found behind a dumpster.  Not really communicative but quite frightened.  Fortunately, I was found by an expert in trauma counseling.  She’s been called to many disasters — 9/11, Katrina, etc.  She helped me up to her office and worked with me until I was able to give her my own therapists’ name.  They both then worked with me, trying to get me “back to myself.”

Now there’s a question.  Am I the person most people see and work with each day?  Or, am I the terrified survivor behind the dumpster?

Some would insist I’m the one who goes to work each day and performs all the expected duties.  Others insist I’m REALLY the one behind the dumpster.  When I am stripped down to the core of my being, I am unable to cope with even the most basic of personal needs.  Still others contend I am both.

So, then, the above quote is not so goofy after all.

Each day I display normal, highly functional, tasks as an educator of graduate students.  My therapist tells me I have learned exceedingly sophisticated adaptive behaviors.  “Adaptive behaviors.”  Normal = adaptive.  Really?  When I am in a dissociative fugue state, I am responding to stimuli based upon learned behaviors of self-protection.  Maslow postulates I am securing my physiological needs and need for security — the foundational layers of the hierarchy of needs.

So, you tell me.  When am I really me?  When I am seeking to establish the most essential of human needs or when I am struggling to relate to the outside world in adaptive ways that protect my inner self seeking need-fullfilment?

In the modernist approach to reality I grew up in, the answer is both at the same time.  But, in our best epistemic theories today, that is, what we characterize as post-modern, it depends upon the narrative being played out.  My colleague has written a book about reality and “anti-reality.”  Which narrative best defines my experience?

This is serious stuff for those of us with PTSD.  Add depression to the mix and run through the same evaluative process and the initial quote begins to make more sense than the daily narratives I pass through each day.