August 24, 2016
EDUCATIONCAREERS Special Edition
O PINION
The Miserable Catch 22 of Mental Illness
Millions of
Americans are
suffering
J ill r iChardson
I’m depressed.
I’ve dealt with
mental health issues
for decades now.
Nothing fancy or in-
teresting like multiple
personalities or hallucinations.
Just run-of-the-mill boring ones
— good old depression and anxi-
ety, and maybe some undiagnosed
PTSD to go with it.
Mental illness has a stigma, but
most sufferers are like me. Bor-
ing. Struggling. Outwardly pretty
normal. Not a threat to society.
Sometimes we even push our way
through work, relationships, rais-
ing kids, or — in my case — grad-
uate school.
Lately, I’ve been splitting my
time between hating myself and
working on my thesis.
It’s kind of odd to go back and
forth between reading academic
by
journal articles like a functional
grown-up and curling up in the fe-
tal position in bed like a child. If
you saw me in public, you’d never
know anything was wrong.
The bigger problem, for
those of us who suffer, is the
lack of a safety net. If you
have a family who can sup-
port you and help you, great.
But a lot of folks with mental
illness get here because our
families were dysfunctional
in the first place.
There are cases where families
all heal together, and it works out
in the end. The alcoholic in the
mix stops drinking, everyone goes
to the appropriate therapy, 12-step
program, or both, and the family
comes together.
But that’s not always the case.
Sometimes the problems can’t
be fixed. Sometimes, rather than
being your support system, your
family is your problem. What
then?
Well, you have to work a full-
time job just like everyone else, if
you’re lucky enough to have one.
You have to find a therapist, and
go every week — and pay your
bills, do your dishes, and cook
your meals just like everyone else.
Doing all of that stuff while
depressed isn’t easy. It’s no easier
than trying to do all of those things
with the flu — by yourself, with-
out help.
Even with Obamacare’s im-
provements to mental health cov-
erage, getting care isn’t always
easy or affordable.
In the past two years, I’ve tried
five different therapists without
luck. Four were covered by my in-
surance, and for the last one I forked
over $75 cash just to talk to a wom-
an who didn’t help for an hour.
I’ve had good psychothera-
pists before. I believe in therapy.
But it’s exhausting to go through
the process of finding a therapist,
getting a referral, making the ap-
pointment, and then pouring your
heart out to someone you barely
know just to find out they actually
aren’t a good fit for you.
And what are the other options?
If you can afford it, you could
go to a psychiatrist to try antide-
pressants, or try more therapists
at a time. For the suicidal, there’s
hospitalization. For the long-term
debilitated, there’s Social Security
disability. (Not that it really pays
enough to live on, nor does it ad-
dress the actual problem.)
There’s a catch-22 element to
the problem.
I feel unable to do what I’m
supposed to in my life because of
anxiety and depression, and I’m
anxious and depressed about what
I have to do in my life. I’m pan-
icked about making a mistake, so
I become paralyzed with fear and
make lots of mistakes.
And if your response is, “That’s
not rational,” well… yeah. That’s
why they call it mental illness.
I don’t know what the answer
is, but I know the status quo is
not okay. Millions of Americans
are suffering, and sometimes your
very problem, mental illness,
makes it harder for you to reach
out for the help you need.
OtherWords columnist Jill
Richardson is the author of Recipe
for America: Why Our Food Sys-
tem Is Broken and What We Can
Do to Fix It. OtherWords.org.
Books to Reflect Our Culture and Experience
A summer
reading list
for kids
by
m arian W right
e delman
Do your children love
the books on their sum-
mer reading lists? Are your chil-
dren reading about diverse cul-
tures and books that reflect their
experience or history? Children
of color are now a majority of all
public school students and will
soon be a majority of all children
in America yet children’s books
and the publishing industry have
failed to keep up with the rainbow
of our children’s faces and cul-
tures and needs.
Every summer our Children’s
Defense Fund Freedom Schools
curriculum is focused on a superb
collection of diverse books that re-
flect children’s own images and a
wide variety of cultures and expe-
riences. For some children it’s the
first time they’ve seen books with
characters who look like them. For
others the storylines draw them in,
teach them about moments in his-
tory they may not have studied in
school, and allow them to fall in
love with reading in a way they’ve
never experienced.
Children of color need to be
able to see themselves in the
books they read. Just as impor-
tantly, all children need
to be exposed to a wide
range of books that re-
flect the true diversity of
our nation and world as
they really are.
At a recent panel dis-
cussion before nearly
2,000 college students prepar-
ing to fan out across the country
to teach in this summer’s CDF
Freedom Schools programs, a
distinguished group of children’s
book authors and illustrators
spoke about their work and what
guides them in creating books
children will love to read. Often
it’s because they are creating the
books they would have loved to
see themselves when they were
younger.
Doreen Rappaport writes fic-
tion and nonfiction that celebrate
diverse histories and biographies
like her Caldecott Medal winner
Martin’s Big Words: The Life of
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. illus-
trated by Bryan Collier. Rappaport
became an activist in the Civil
Rights Movement in Mississippi
and heard stories she had never
learned or read in the classroom.
“There were other movements
that came along, and I began to
explore and think about all the
distortions of the stories about
Native Americans. And then there
was the Latino movement and
the grape boycott led by [Cesar]
Chavez, where people all over
the United States stopped eating
grapes and we banded together.
So for me, telling these stories is
a way of finding myself back in
history and also correcting all the
distortions that I learned as a kid
and filling in the pieces of the real
story of the United States.”
Author and illustrator Don
Brown started out on the very
same hunt as Rappaport: “I had
two little girls, and I wanted to
read to them stories about real
women who were brave and he-
roic. I couldn’t find books like
that.” He too decided to write his
own, and has since written more
than two dozen books on famous
and less well known historical fig-
ures and events. His latest graphic
nonfiction book, Drowned City, is
about Hurricane Katrina.
Poet and author Carole Bos-
ton Weatherford approaches his-
tory from another angle: Many
of her books are based on his-
torical events spanning the Afri-
can American experience from
slavery through the Civil Rights
Movement, and she said children
are often amazed to learn the sto-
ries she writes about are true: “It
never fails, one of the first ques-
tions is, ‘Did that really happen?’
Well, you know, that’s exactly the
reaction that I want from the kids
— because they can’t fathom that
some of the inhumanities and in-
justices that were part of legalized
segregation and part of America’s
history of institutionalized racism
really happened.”
Rita Williams-Garcia has won
numerous awards for her histori-
cal fiction trilogy that begins with
the Newbery Honor novel One
Crazy Summer — she began tell-
ing stories that were very deliber-
ately not historical. She was writ-
ing contemporary fiction about
girls like herself whom she had
never seen in novels, and the girls
in her audience responded with an
immediate hunger for more.
When Jason Reynolds, the au-
thor of When I Was the Greatest,
The Boy in the Black Suit, and All
American Boys, was in school no
one ever showed him books that
featured his voice or story, and so
he didn’t like to read at all. He now
very deliberately writes books for
other young people: “Right now
what we see in our communities,
we see that the young people of
color are hyper-visible, yet terri-
bly invisible at the same time, and
that puts them in a really compli-
cated spot, and I think all I really
want to do is say, ‘I see you.’”
C ontinued on p age 14
Page 7
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