I originally started this blog as a glib response to a college journalism class assignments. My professor was introducing a “New Media” unit, and she gave my classmates and me a project in which were supposed to examine various pages, note the formats and styles and locate a specific niche that we, as individuals, could fill with our own Blogspot, Blurty or Wordpress accounts. As a 21-year-old psychiatrist’s daughter with no discernible hobbies other than editing her college newspaper, spending copious amounts of time with her boyfriend of three years and drinking equally copious amounts of beer at a local karaoke bar, an obvious subject was mental health awareness. However, I cared too much about karaoke night, $5 Miller Light pitchers and my significant other to devote much time – or effort – into such a serious subject.
The night my assignment was due, I spent an hour browsing the Internet for various mental-health related headlines, copied and pasted three news links and came up with “witty” titles (for example: “Hilary Clinton is not my Anti-Drug— She Is My Prozac”) that would hopefully distract my irreverent, pun-loving, ex-hippie professor from the fact that my blog contained little to no substance. I finished early, sent my professor the link (“Oooh, not crazy, just medicated - that’s a clever name!” she had chuckled during the previous class), and although my memories of that long-ago Fall night are somewhat fuzzy, I’m almost positive that I returned to my dorm room and tossed back a few Blue Moons while watching trashy prime-time soap operas with my nine roommates. It was a common occurrence at the time.
Guess what? The following week, I learned that I’d received a B-. I was a bit miffed, but I couldn’t blame anyone other than myself – especially not my irreverent, pun-loving, ex-hippie professor, whom I adored. So after I received the slip of paper with my less-than-steller grade scrawled across its front in bright red ink, I shrugged, tossed it into a recycling bin, and, again, I don’t quite remember what I did after class ended, but I’m pretty sure the night’s activities had something to do with beer.
In any case, I never got around to purging this Blogspot account. Perhaps I subconsciously knew that mental health awareness was a subject that interested, fascinated and impassioned me far beyond the confines of a college journalism class assignment. Or perhaps I left this blog to float around in cyberspace, empty and abandoned like an old refrigerator expelled from a Russian satellite, because I was just plain lazy. Who knows? And more importantly, who cares?
I’ve recounted this anecdote in my blog’s first earnest post for two reasons: Firstly, to explain the post below this introductory entry. I can’t bear to delete it -- the writing is just so clueless and glib and evident of pre-graduation/college-senior immaturity that I laugh out loud whenever I nostalgically pour over its contents. Secondly, to remind others, as well as myself, how much I’ve changed since the drunken Fall nights of college youth.
My psychiatrist father died unexpectedly from a heart attack on July 3, 2009 – less than two months after I received my B.A. He had spent the previous evening watching Larry King Live, eating copious amounts of Rocky Road ice cream, and dozing on the couch with my mother and his two cats.
It’s now October 1, 2009.
I’m still stunned.
Occasionally, the grief feels so overwhelming that it pours out of me, ceaselessly and without warning, into personal journal entries, phone conversations with friends and through my eyes (in the form of literal tears – I’m a sucker for wordplay, even though my sadness is no joke). However, I have become sick and tired of letting random currents of grief wash me adrift. I need a purpose, a project. I need a way to harness my sadness and turn it into something productive. Something good. In short? Let's extend a cheesy, oft-used metaphor: If my grief is an ocean, this blog is my metaphorical surfboard. I need something tangible that’ll help me ride the waves.
I have never gone surfing. I'm no Keanu Reeves. I'm way too klutzy, plus I live in the suburbs. But hey, a girl’s gotta start somewhere…right? And a cheesy metaphor - or a Blogspot account- is a good place to begin.
Ralph W. Fawcett was a man of science. A man of reason and medicine, intellect and purpose. He was a psychiatrist. I am his daughter. He was a medicine man. I am an English major. His life’s goal was to cure mental illness. My new life goal is to use my writing as a vehicle to educate the ignorant about his profession. And, of course, about his illness.
Taken from the Biblical Gospel of Luke, the following quote encapsulates my father's life: “Physician, heal thyself.” A physician, Ralph W. Fawcett also spent half a lifetime suffering from Bipolar Type II Disorder. For those readers ill-versed in psychiatric terminology, Bipolar Disorder consists of periods of excitability (mania) alternating with periods of depression. According to the National Institute of Health (NIH), "People with Bipolar Disorder I have at least one fully manic episode with periods of major depression, [whereas] people with Bipolar Disorder II seldom experience full-fledged mania. Instead, they experience periods of hypomania (elevated levels of energy and impulsiveness that are not as extreme as the symptoms of mania...[that] alternate with episodes of major depression."
My father’s illness made him a better psychiatrist. He understood his patients’ hardships because he had experienced their medicinal side effects and mood swings firsthand. From the 16-year-old high school students weathering his or her first depressive episode to the seasoned, 50-year patient who came of age in an era of straight jackets and padded cells, Ken Kesey and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, my father could relate with them all in a way that many physicians could not:
He was one of them.
As my father, Ralph W. Fawcett made me aware of mental illness at a very young age. As his daughter, I gradually became aware of the stigma surrounding mental illness through whispered relative comments, friends’ reactions when I spoke about my dad’s illness and, of course, through watching television shows and reading novels depicting the mentally ill as raving lunatics. Nearly every societal representation of a mentally-ill individual characterizes him or her as an irrational, emotional, imbalanced pill-popper who swallows Zoloft like vending machine candy to fill an emotional void that can only be filled through hours of intense, tear-filled psychotherapy, a recovered memory of molestation buried in unconscious childhood memory and/or an eventual reconciliation with an estranged parent or sibling. Of course, the formula occasionally varies. On late-night TV, the mentally ill are vengeful psychopaths. In James Patterson novels, they are delusional, murderous criminals. Sometimes, the mentally ill are portrayed as batty and lovable— like Monk, or Monica from Friends or even Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes, whose imaginary tiger friend could be viewed as a schizoaffective delusion.
(Pause as I wait for someone to fight me about the Calvin comment…)
Yes, depictions of the mentally-ill can vary tremendously. However, they all share one underlining unity: Never, ever, do they show the sufferer as really and truly human.
(Except for Calvin, perhaps…? Okay, I’ll be serious here.)
Pardon my French, but this is merde.
I wish to help eradicate social stigma against mental illness and psychiatry through informed, objective, well-researched and (hopefully) humorous blog entries. Above all, I want to show the mentally-ill as PEOPLE – not diseased patients. For this purpose, I am blessed to have been born the daughter of a mentally-ill psychiatrist. Through him, I learned not only about the science and treatment behind mental illness, but also of each and every sufferer's inherent humanity.
Therefore, I’d like to dedicate this blog – my newest project, purpose and passion – to the greatest physician and father a psychiatric patient or daughter could have ever experienced: Ralph Willard Fawcett.
I love you, dad.
