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23 March 2007 

Dear Peggy, 

Thank you for your letter and the copies of the two articles you have written. I appreciate knowing how active you have been in the fight against the stigma surrounding mental illnesses.

Like you, I am watching closely the progress of Senate Bill 558, The Mental Health Parity Act of 2007. The staff of The Carter Center Mental Health Program has been working directly with staff in Representative Patrick Kennedy's office monitoring the progress of parity legislation in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. We are seeking their advice on how best I might help and then will act accordingly. 

I am pleased to know we have such eloquent advocates like you helping to improve the lives of Americans who have mental illnesses. 

With best wishes, 

Sincerely, 

Rosalynn Carter

One Family's Journey into Hope

This is the story of my family and I when we joined schizophrenia research at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

I lived with a mental illness most of my life. Along the way I met fiercely loving and loyal families, mostly through the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Greater Orlando, who stagger under the great weight of mental illness.

I will always take comfort knowing my family and I contributed so much valuable information to schizophrenia research it is gathering momentum even to this day.

Eventually, other families will never have to bear the burdens of this illness.

MY FAMILIES JOURNEY INTO HOPE

The Genetic Study of Schizophrenia;
National Institute of Mental Health

It has been several years since my family
and I found a description of the Genetic Study of Schizophrenia in the  “Advocate”, a quarterly publication of National Alliance on Mental Illness.

This research is an ongoing study at the
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland.

Researchers are looking very closely at the genetic and non- genetic factors that raise the risks for schizophrenia.

Of eight siblings, I am the only one with a schizophrenic disorder.

Our family applied to this study knowing that this research is generating information giving neuroscience the keys that
are beginning to break into the complex biological codes of
schizophrenia.

At the time, my brother’s business interest was providing computer technologies to researchers studying the genetic abnormalities within the full and complex human genome.

He recognized the neuro-imaging and genetic technologies as the most advanced tools of neuroscience in the world.

We embraced the opportunity to benefit others with this disorder.

This particular study, one of several, compared the genetic differences between siblings who are affected by schizophrenia and those who aren’t.

It was an opportunity for seven siblings to add an unusual wealth of information to research.

We were accepted into the study and welcomed as respected and valued partners in this pioneering research.

The National Institute of Mental Health arranged our flight schedules, hotel bookings, and testing days to maximize the rare time we had to spend together.

The study was a fast moving two days of detailed magnetic resonance imaging, interviews, and neuropsychological testing.

Other than a routine blood draw, there was no invasive testing.

For our family, the long road to the genetic
study of schizophrenia began almost three decades before.

I was hospitalized in 1975 after a three year slide into a psychotic
illness.

I fell into the hands of a psychiatrist who psychoanalyzed my hallucinations and assessed my entire family as“schiziophrenigenic”

Despite the fact that neurobiological anarchy was sweeping through my brain like a forest fire, realitybegan to dawn
on me by 1979: I had seven brothers and sisters and none of them were like me.

They were all working, going to school, or were in college.

We were of the same parents, and we were all raised by a courageous and hard-working single mother who loved us all.

I was different from early in life.

As a young adult, hallucinations and depression were taking over my entire life.

None of my brothers and sisters had ever
been brought to their knees by visions and voices and depression that paralyzed even my will to live.

I knew my family was not doing this to me; there was something wrong with my brain.

I found another psychiatrist who remained with me for twenty-five years as a constant source of expertise and encouragement.

Looking back from 2009, I call the primitive and hopeless psychiatry of the 1970s the “dungeons of the day.”

Old Freudian ideas that twisted the psychiatry of schizophrenia away from the brain onto blaming families were still widely held.

It was a dated era still spun with mythically monstrous mothers named and blamed as “schiziophrenigenic mothers”

The psychoanalytic psychiatry of the 1970s perpetuated the influence of a century of Freudian ghosts that linger to this day as
the deep shroud of shame, guilt, and misunderstanding that continues to obscure the neurobiological legitimacy of this illness.

Before we left the NIMH, I talked to the lead investigator of the study.

I told him what it was like for me coming from the “dungeons of the day” 28 years ago to be working with the NIMH as a
full and respected partner in research that I never thought would happen in my lifetime.

At the time, I was told that five or six genes increasing the risk for schizophrenia had been discovered.

There are now many more genes suspected to have a role in this illness.

The empowering character of this progress is a
clear and bright light of new hope and promise moving at light speed in the right direction.

It is a privilege to be part of this revolution in neuroscience.

I believe that with more study volunteers
like my family and I, the complex puzzles and codes of mental illnesses will be mapped out and solved in our lifetimes.

Looking back at the NIMH study, I can see my brothers and sisters in the full light of their loyalty and love.

They were all indicted as “schiziophrenigenic” 34 years ago, but when this illness threatened to take me
away from them, they rose to the challenge and held out their hands to me in the moments that I otherwise would have drowned.

Six of them were younger than I was when
this illness swept out of hell, yet they have travelled this distance with me unafraid.

They have made my life richer, funnier, and filled to overflowing as a sister, an aunt and a friend.

Without them, it would have been a dark and difficult journey.

With them, we walked this 34 year road out of darkness into daybreak.

Peggy J. Symons

National Alliance on Mental Illness of Greater Orlando

Peggy J. Symons  © Copyright 

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR    Orlando Sentinel

Mental-illness stigma still prevalent | Letters

June 03, 2022 at 1:30 pm

The appalling school shooting in Texas has left us staggering backward and demanding answers to the upsurge in violence overtaking the nation.

Unfortunately, the words “mental illness” were spoken practically in the first breath of breaking news, reinforcing the chronic slippage of mental illness into violence as if they were cause and effect.

Research has repeatedly confirmed that individuals with mental illnesses are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators.

In fact, many are dying of neglect, suicide and life-limiting medical conditions.

Their hidden suffering is completely covered over with the misplaced perception they are violent, not vulnerable.

Until there is a revolution in the way we view mental illnesses, we cannot escape the slippery slope where prejudice overtakes truth and questions about the real causes of violence fall away unanswered and without insight.

Peggy J. Symons DeLand

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Advertising Hope   Oct. 30, 2020

A couple of weeks ago I was briefly watching TV and an interesting advertisement popped up.

It was an ad for a new antipsychotic medicine directly marketed to people living with schizophrenia.

The ad portrayed people with this illness engaged in normal, everyday activities, as it should.

After decades of plowing through stigma, stereotypes and discrimination who would ever think any company would consider people with schizophrenia an attractive market?

In the not too distant past, TV ads aimed at attracting the business of people with schizophrenia would slam the door on the product and the advertiser.

The retail cost of the medicine is $ 1,470.26 for 30 pills which is nearly $50 a pill. But at least the ad is a new vote of legitimacy for schizophrenia.

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Red Flags Covid-19 and Schizophrenia

Research published in the January, 2021 Journal of American Medicine found that after age, schizophrenia is the second highest risk factor for death and severe illness from Covid-19.

People with this disorder are contracting Covid-19 at a rate10 times higher than the general population and dying at a rate 3 times higher than other infected individuals Covid-19.  

The article cited vulnerability to Covid-19 caused by immune system dysregulation inherent to schizophrenia.

Researchers carefully excluded other life limiting factors associated with schizophrenia, including general poor health. The specific susceptibility to death and severe illness may be a clue to the nature of Covid as well as schizophrenia.

Other mental illnesses, including anxiety and depression do not carry similar risks.

The deadly connection between Covid-19 and schizophrenia may seem an obscure issue but coronavirus infections are still occurring across Florida and the nation.

This research could be a window into a tidal wave of very specific and tragic loss of life.

People with schizophrenia rarely enter health care settings waving their own red flags.

The most important way to mitigate this death toll is to see it.

This may be a major public health issue.

Here is the link to the research article:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2775179

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AVOLITION

Hallucinations and delusions are larger than life.

They are filled with characters, harlequins and images of hell.

What most people don’t know is that the worst of psychotic symptoms tend to rise and retreat.

But even hallucinations and delusions with all their horror and fury do not take a greater toll on our lives than what psychiatrists call the negative symptoms of schizophrenia.

This is where this illness lays its most difficult burdens.

Negative symptoms are caused by a paralyzing breakdown of the biochemistry of the brain.

It’s like having a transmission that is broken inside and the gears won’t work.

Life loses all forward traction.

Days and dates lose distinction and the colors of life fade and blur into chronic shades of grey.

All emotion, will and hope for the future blends into the endless grey.

Nothing matters and nothing moves under the weight of this void.

For years no one understood why I did not move much, date, go out with friends or pursue a career path.

I simply couldn’t move.

The major showdown of the day was getting into the shower.

Sometimes the shower won and sometimes it didn’t.

Washing my hair would go by the wayside for weeks.

I often slept with my shoes on so I wouldn’t have to put them back on in the morning.

Before a new antipsychotic medicine became available to me in 1998, 25 years of my life folded and collapsed under the ungodly weight of this silent wasteland.

This is the endless place where schizophrenia, this great thief of the night, silences those whose lives it steals.

Without expert psychiatric care and the new generation of antipsychotic drugs life stops here for many people.

Peggy J. Symons          Copyright

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The Call to Conscience

The National Alliance on Mental Illness. Who are we?

We are the nation’s voice on mental illness. We are a grassroots, nonprofit organization primarily run by volunteers. We have chapters in all 50 states and now many other countries.

We know the brain disorders that cause mental illnesses. Most of us live with them or have family members who do. Much of our know-how is drawn from our own life experiences and most of the donations we receive go directly into free services.

We have long set our sights on dismantling the myths of mental illness that generate fear, stigma and misunderstanding surrounding the disorders of the brain that cause mental illnesses. Some of these perceptions are still shrouded in the foggy illusions of 19^th-century.

Mental illnesses are neurobiological in nature, yet they continue to be freely associated with the mistaken idea that severe and persistent mental illnesses are caused by childhood trauma or inflicted by dysfunctional families.

Shame, blame and guilt, the unseen accusers of weary families have spawned a trail of tears for decades. Families have not been supported or educated, instead, blamed and accused. Unable to raise their heads or voices, much of their suffering has been unseen and unheard.

The intrusion of “at fault” authority into the realms of the brain has been deep and damaging; it flat-lined the psychiatry of the brain for decades.

Unfortunately, the myths that surround mental illness are still snapping at the feet of families.

Come with us, the National Alliance on Mental Illness and we will take you into the shadows and margins of America where people with severe and persistent mental illnesses really live; where bewildered families bearing the burdens of mental illnesses have no idea what to do or where to find effective help.

This Is Real World America.

Cost-effective community care and hospital beds have been sliced from underneath the most profoundly ill as states slashed mental health funding.

Hundreds of thousands of people living with mental illnesses are wandering the streets, penniless, severely ill and untreated, or worse, jailed far from the reach of any psychiatric care at all.

In shocking evidence of systemic discrimination people with these disorders of the brain are being jailed wherever they collide with conscience. Usually arrested for relatively minor offenses that are more often symptoms of mental illness than criminal intent; they can’t work the ropes of release so they circle and spin in useless and costly orbits through criminal justice systems already breaking under the costs of criminal justice.

Neither judges nor jailers want them there but there is seemingly nowhere else for them to go.

As funding for vital psychiatric services continues to dwindle, mental illness in America has become a virtual prison with no exit.

As America’s mental health system continues to disintegrate the National Alliance on Mental Illness has honored a call to conscience. We have become the nation’s hidden mental health system.

Come with us and help us break into the nation’s jails and prisons where mental illnesses are now hopelessly locked and shackled.

Join us in our deep concern that the flurry of state budget-cutting means that the newer, more effective psychiatric medicines will be replaced by the old, inexpensive antipsychotic drugs first used in the 1950’s.

Those of us who served time in the old psychiatric wards remember these primitive medicines for what they were, the chemical straitjackets of generations past. The use of these brutal drugs is seared into memory and archived in the truth of the times.

Although some people do respond to these drugs, most of the time they only added to the breaking weight of our illnesses. America must never yield to the temptation to return to the first-line use of these cheap and cruel psychiatric drugs.

Come and stand watch with us as the high-profile tragedies of mental illnesses keep coming and going. Time after time, they grab headlines and hearts. But wait with us while the news stories stop and the faces fade.

Wait with us while the speeches, the horror and regrets just fall away into America’s archives of the forgotten where nothing ever moves or changes.

Come into our offices and shadow staff and volunteers as we field frantic calls from people who can’t access modern medications or find a hospital bed.

Pick up our phones and listen to the desperate appeals of parents who can’t find or afford psychiatric care for the children.

Child and adolescent psychiatric services are disappearing all over the country. Mental illnesses are the single most important cause of suicide. Many of the children and teens who commit suicide have a diagnosable and treatable disorder of the brain.

With no hope of help, many of these families are living with wrenching helplessness as they watch these treatable illnesses claim their children. For these children and families, daylight is turning into twilight.

The National Alliance is scrambling to support these families and provide them with information and strategies on early-onset disorders of the brain.

Out of the chaos of mental illness in America, the truth is rising to the top to be told.

Chronic underfunding, low priorities and the “politics of exclusion” have left our nation’s mental health system in a state of rubble and ruin.

Decades of ruthless state budget-cutting have created a powerful undertow of disappearing services and lost lives.

One in five individual’s struggle with these disorders of the brain, that is twenty per cent of America, yet remain little more than an ill-defined and optional constituency of conscience. Without powerful lobbyists or large campaign donations, it seems our political influence is reduced to nods and nothing.

What we do have is the power and influence of sheer numbers and the inalienable truth that mental illnesses do not diminish our humanity or dim our inheritance as Americans. 

But without action and reaction powerlessness perpetuates itself and injustice remains encamped.  

The time has come to shake off the stigma that has silenced us and shake the dust of discouragement from our feet.

Come and join us as we lobby the U.S. Congress and the state legislatures for equal representation and for funding of critically necessary life-sustaining medications and effective services.

Above all, the basic unit of empowerment in America is true to its value: every person, every vote and every election matters. If we are vigilant-if we vote and make ourselves heard-the “politics of exclusion” will have to yield to the politics of inclusion and conscience.

My deepest desire is that all of America will see the light of our humanity and proximity.

This is the light that will reveal the deep shroud of silence and stigma that continues to cover the lives of those who are living with these disorders of the brain. When the light comes and the shroud falls away our names and faces will be known; we are your neighbors, your loved ones and your friends.

Peggy J. Symons © Copyright 

National Alliance on Mental Illness

Our services are free and our helplines are open. 1-800- 950- NAMI (6264)

info@nami.org TEXT NAMI to 741741. In crisis call 911 or 1- 800-273-Talk-(8255)

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR    Daytona Beach News-Journal

January 12, 2020     Mental health changes

The Jan. 14 opening of the Florida Legislature is an opportunity to spotlight several bills concerning mental illnesses, including decriminalizing these illnesses.

Nationally, we are spending $80 billion a year to criminalize mental illnesses. The cost of housing a person with a mental illness in prison is three times greater than the cost of community level psychiatric services. Even so, there are nine times as many people with mental illnesses in prisons than hospitals. Suicide is a disturbing cause of death in prisons.

Hidden facts also reveal double the number of women with serious mental illnesses in prisons than men.

Some have a history of trauma, including sexual assault. This also applies to girls in the juvenile justice system.

In addition, it is worthy to note that 50 percent of women with schizophrenia are victims of trauma. This gender disparity is a red flag.

Decriminalizing mental illnesses is a vision whose time has come. Stigma is becoming a dying dragon as increasing numbers of celebrities, sports giants and ordinary people are coming forth to speak of their experiences with a mental illness, which are disorders of the brain.

This outreach is vital; without personal stories these illnesses would be nothing but facts without faces.

It is difficult to face the facts on suicide and mental illnesses and not shrink from their terrible truth, but they cannot be softened without losing their urgency to inaction.

The spirit and intent of every bill that would alter the course of mental illnesses should be locked into law before they fall away without action.

There is no reason Florida cannot take excellence in the way we treat mental illnesses to the top of the nation. Our losses, including preventable death, are too great to do anything less.

Peggy Symons  Deland

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Forgiveness

That Forgiveness is not a virtue taught.

It is a place deep in the Spirit where Love’s

Most difficult battles are fought.

It is a place where darkness

Is transformed by light,

Where sins of the heart

Fall away as if they never stood.

This is the way of the Lord

And this is where He lives,     

Forgiveness is His Greatest Gift

“My Son will Show you the way.”

Copyright Peggy J. Symons

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I wrote this vision of hate years ago when I was writing a book on surviving post-traumatic stress disorder.

I recently recognized its value as a picture of hate and its power to deceive.

Hates Last Dance

At first, dancing with hate was fun. It was dressed in fatal attraction and counterfeit light. It had top coats and tailor-made accessories cut to fit and fit to cut.

Hate and its fashion show locked eyes with me and the dance erupted in a deadly duet. Point for counterpoint, in the thrill and glamour of pirouetting with hates hands I twirled and whirled in the bright lights of the dance. The dance spun, it rocked, it rolled and it burned. But hate hit the dimmer switch and the dance floor dropped.

Even as the lights began to fade I didn’t realize anything was amiss. The music on the ballroom floor had such a righteous ring I didn’t even have a subtle sense that the floor was dropping or that I was dancing to the deadbeats of hate and a falling floor.

But when hate dances it doesn’t write its name on its shoes until it is too late to put out the fire in its feet.

When darkness fell over the dance floor, the music stopped and the night stood still. Hate pulled off its nightshades and dropped the thin socks that hid the fire in its feet.

As the flames in its feet got brighter, my poisonous partner stripped off its topcoat; there were diamonds on its back.

Thank God, the Son of Forgiveness yanked me off the ballroom floor just before this blind date with hate was my last dance.

Copyright Pending

Peggy J. Symons

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National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

We can all help prevent suicide. The Lifeline provides 24/7, free and confidential support for people in distress, prevention and crisis resources for you or your loved ones, and best practices for professionals.

1-800-273-8255

Bullying: An Appeal to Hero’s Hearts

This is a story about the heart of a hero.

I attended a Catholic school for several years. By seventh grade I was clearly struggling with a mental illness. But all of us wore the same socks and uniforms and I was never bullied in a school atmosphere that required respect for other students.

Transferring into the public-school system was a shock. Between wearing a uniform for so long and cluelessness and I had no idea what to wear the first day of school.  I looked in my closet and pulled out a red skirt, a purple blouse and red sneakers along with socks. I had no idea at the time, public school girls didn’t wear socks or red sneakers.

From the first day I was a target for ridicule and rejection. Among other things I was quickly labeled with the name of a bear on a TV show. When I was taking a shower after gym class the kids took the clothes I put on a hook outside the shower and threw them into a sink full of water. Before class they took my books and put them on top of the public address box near the ceiling where I couldn’t reach them before substitute teachers stopped it.

In November, my mother allowed me to walk up to the neighborhood shopping center to buy a jacket. I bought a blue size twenty jacket although I was a size fourteen because I thought I was getting more material for my money. Looking back, wearing the jacket to school was a mistake; it was so big I was probably floating in it. The other kids spotted the ill-fitting jacket immediately and it became the object of more ridicule.

One time, uninvited and unexpected, I sat down at a table in the cafeteria with a group of popular students.

One boy was so embarrassed his face flushed red and he left the table. No one wanted to be seen with me. I was weird, overweight, had unwashed frizzy hair and could not relate to the other kids.

I felt totally alone even though there were hundreds of students in my school. I could not find friends on my own because I had difficulty communicating like everyone else.

The bullying and rejection hurt me as if I was being stabbed by a knife. I could not fight back. I didn’t know how.

Let me tell you about a boy named Bob. He sat next to me in math class. He was friendly, popular and a good student. I was the weirdest, ugliest, most unpopular kid in the school.

But Bob talked to me in full view of the other kids risking his own good standing with them.  He joked around and treated me the same way he treated his other friends.

About half way through the year he invited me over to his house to look through his new telescope. I saw the moon up close and how bright the stars were through the lens of the telescope and the respect of my friend.

Finding friends in kids who are being bullied is the truest test of a hero’s heart. It is doing what is unpopular or even laughed at.

Like Bob, heroes have the courage to split off from what other kids think and reach out to kids who are being torn to pieces by bullying because they have a mental illness; kids who can be rejected and avoided as the weirdest kids in the whole school.

It’s easy to see hero’s when they run into burning buildings to pull others to safety or come to the rescue of someone who is drowning. It’s harder to see the hero’s hearts of kids who see the helpless pain and desperate loneliness of bullied kids and pull them to safety in the hands of friendship.

When Bob reached out and befriended me he rescued me from the torment of rejection, loneliness and hopelessness.

I lost track of Bob after high school but I will never forget a hero’s heart because my friend turned towards me, instead of away. He pulled me into the safety of complete acceptance. 

I will never forget Bobs kindness and the risks he took to be my friend.

I will never forget my hero.

Peggy J. Symons Copyright

The Gift of a Captive Mind Continues to be Written.

The original title of this book was Mental Illness: Notes of a Native in the Night. Over time, notes became stories and then pages and chapters.

As I wrote, I began to see the value of The Gift of a Captive Mind filling out the academic presentation of mental illnesses.
The Captive Mind doesn’t contradict the facts and statistics essential to the academic press, instead, it writes between the lines with the actual experiences of living with these illnesses.

In the end,The Gift of a Captive  Mind becomes a gift for every mind.
It tunnels through a lifelong illness and comes out into the places we are all alike in one way or another.

Whether or not we have a mental illness we are all running the same rapids.
But it is also important to know these disorders can be persistent, biological and there are currently no cures. So, it is not possible to tell the story of a Captive Mind and put false faces on these illnesses lest anyone who walks this way become discouraged in their own struggle to survive.

Like many others I live with sufficient remnants of this illness and its habits of reemergence that I would never leave any impression I have walked completely away from a serious mental illness in some act of high- held virtue.

During the time The Gift of a Captive Mind was written, I finished a book about thirty years of posttraumatic stress disorder and finding my way out.
It took thirteen years to write. 

Someday, I hope it will lead others out of the captivity of Post-Traumatic Stress.

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Mental illness treatment left out of Parkland shooting

Make mental illness treatment a priority

Intense media coverage of the school-shooting rampage that left 17 people dead is creating a detailed picture of what happened. However, there are missing tornadoes in the multitude of these accounts.

The hardest hitting is failure to spotlight the magnitude of suicides associated with mental illnesses. People are ending their own lives at a rate over double that for homicides and at numbers that exceed traffic fatalities. Ninety percent had a diagnosable psychiatric disorder, including concealed depression.

Without fully assessing the shocking death toll of those with mental illnesses, there is no cohesive vision to bring the treatment of mental illnesses to the forefront of legislative priorities.

Relatively small bumps in funding sideswipe the truth: Mental illnesses in Florida are seared with hopelessness. We remain immovably present at the bottom of the nation for per-capita spending on mental illnesses in spite of a deep need and some dedicated lawmakers who have already tried to pursue a path forward.

Given the staggering death toll associated with these common disorders of the brain, we can’t do anything less — not without compromising the right to life.

Peggy Symons of  DeLand, Florida

  February 26, 2018

                Capturing Esmine Green

Esmine Green: The Violence of Indifference

I have come to bring Ms. Esmine Green out of the shadows of lost hope and cries of unheard anguish.

On June 19, 2009, Ms. Green was taken by ambulance to Kings County Hospital in New York City acutely ill with schizophrenia.

She sat and waited over 24 hours until blood clots formed and killed her.

Although she writhed, fell out of her chair onto the floor and died, she was ignored until a worker finally came over, pushed her with his foot and saw she was dead.

Evidence of her death and the circumstances in which she died were immediately scurried away in falsified documents. Ms. Green died waiting for help that never came.

I will never forget the brutal force of indifference to her suffering or the global news and outrage covering her 24 hours in hell.

I also knew Ms. Green would be quickly and completely forgotten-and she was.

The helpless horror of the way she died disappeared as fast as it burned the news but conscience and accountability were standing by with a note pad.

Everything was video recorded and subsequently obtained by the Americans for Civil Liberties Union.

The city settled with her family for two million dollars but what price was paid for the violence of indifference?

Ms. Green was not a captive of bygone era; she was captive of a place she didn’t matter.

We should not forget her story; she left red flags flying over indifference. It is the nucleus of neglect and the crown jewel of hidden abuse.

Peggy J. Symons  © Copyright 

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Hope

Hope is a fragile flame and a bright light.

It is easy to give and even easier to take away.

Once the flame of hope is lit it must be carefully kept and kindled.

When hope burns brightly there is fire in its feet and the breath of life is on its lips.

There is purity in its purpose, vision in its light and healing in its truth.

Whether we teach, write, counsel or mop the halls the hopeless walk we are all called to be hope givers and keepers of the flame.

Blessed are the hope givers.

Peggy J. Symons  copyright

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THE DYING BIRD

Sometimes violence is in the eyes of the beholder.

This is a true story.

I had taken my friends dog to the vet. As the dog and I were settling our account at the front desk, a young man came through the front door. His hands were cupped together, he was holding something. He looked to be in his twenties and was obviously mentally ill. He had long, dark hair flying everywhere. He was also dressed in rags, I had little doubt that he was homeless as well.

When he approached the desk I could see he was holding a badly injured bird in his hands. He asked the ladies at the desk if the vet would take care of the bird.

Whether it was because he was mentally ill or poor or that it was true they didn’t take care of birds, they sent him away with the injured bird in his hands.

As my own tears fell I thought the world has it all backwards; it isn’t always the violence caused by people who live with mental illnesses that steals from society; it is the hardness of heart that sees our humanity and turns away.

I don’t know what happened to the bird or where the young man went, but I will never forget what compassion looks like when it is cradled as a dying bird in the hands of a human being who is mentally ill and homeless.

Peggy J. Symons of Deland, Florida

Copyright  © Peggy J. Symons

Mental Ilnesses and Mental Health: Capturing the Slippery Bridge

Another article on death due to “mental health disorders” captures the slippery bridge between mental health and mental illness.

Reports on mental illnesses ranging from murders to movie reviews are peppered with the words “mental health” freely switched for “mental illness.”

What seems a minor twist of language is a symptom of a broad national consensus to engage the words “mental health” and pretend they mean mental illness.

Misappropriating “mental health” is so deeply entrenched it is difficult to refer to these disorders of the brain without using deceptively uniform language that corrupts the biological nature of these hard hitting diseases.

Stripped of charades, the irrelevant words “mental health” are a wink and a nod hiding an insurgent truth

America’s “mental health” system is fractured, failed and vastly underfunded, leaving millions of people behind with no hope of recovery.

In a travesty of mistaken identities, one in five individuals, including many children, are struggling to survive brain diseases with extraordinary mortality rates but their “mental health conditions” makes it easy to deny treatment and modern medications and then turn away from the death and devastation that follows. We are hiding their hopelessness in a familiar clash of opposing words.

Ninety percent of those who end their own lives have a diagnosable mental illness. Virtually meaningless “mental health disorders” do not drive people to suicide; mental illnesses do.

Switching illness for health allows us to bury this massive loss of life in an avalanche of indifference without bearing the weight of conscience. 

In addition, these neurological disorders are the only medical conditions overshadowed with sufficient fictional license to blur the boundaries between illness and health; a substantial mistake that further minimizes the crushing power of these illnesses and dismisses the suffering they cause as less than real.

Finally, these brazenly contradictory terms become outright ludicrous when we seal our most seriously ill citizens in the “mental health” sections of our jails and prisons.

We are hiding one of the deepest moral failures of our times in jail jumpsuits-out of sight-out of mind.

We have coddled the incongruence between mental health and mental illness too long. It serves no purpose except to hide the way we treat our mentally ill.

The evidence keeps pouring in; the disparate corollary between mental health and mental illness isn’t innocent; it is disastrous.

Peggy J. Symons  © Copyright 

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I am bringing thousands of people with mental illnesses with me.

Many are silenced by stigma and discrimination; others cannot tell the stories of the life and death impact of delays and denials of psychiatric medicines.

The people I speak for have serious mental illnesses. Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and suicidal despair are not mental health disorders. They are caused by real, life threatening, physical ravages in the function of the brain. Ninety percent of those who commit suicide had a diagnosable mental illness.

Before expertly and tediously prescribed modern medicines schizophrenia was either a life sentence or a death sentence; I lost half my life to it.

I failed on over thirty medications before my doctors finally found the right medications at the right doses. Failing on some of these medicines was like getting hit by a truck; hospitalization followed.

It is critical to note many psychiatric medications don’t work the same way; in addition, the function of the brain is individually unique and extraordinarily complex; medications that can save the life of one person can send someone else to the hospital. Carefully prescribed and balanced, our medications can build some beautiful bridges between what is broken by the physiology of mental illnesses and a meaningful life.

For me, as for others, missing one dose of carefully and individually prescribed medication, or the wrong medicine, begins to break the fragile bridges between hope and hopelessness.

In fact, Harvard Medical School found that missing from one to ten days of antipsychotic medications doubles the risk of hospitalization; its three days for me.

It is far easier and less expensive to prevent a psychiatric collapse than have to go back and pick up the pieces of the shattered hope of a meaningful life.

The future is closing in on mental illnesses. Science and suffering will join hands and then move on having created better treatments and medications and eventually cures. Research will eventually free us but for now, granting doctors the unimpeded ability to prescribe the right medicines at the right time at the right doses is the best hope of surviving these sometimes rapidly moving, too often deadly illnesses.

These difficult disorders of the brain don’t dwell on either side of a partisan divide; they dwell in families. One in five of us will have a mental illness at some point. No one is immune; not by wealth or estate, male or female, young or old. Stepping up to the Florida Legislature to represent all of us is both honorable and difficult.

Right now, we are at the intersection where many lost lives can become meaningful lives. If we look deeply into the faces of serious mental illnesses we will see our own humanity in these crossroads.

Time is turning in the light of this shared vision. There is a profound communion between hope and responsibility in our hands; what we do now will determine the future of mental illnesses in Florida.

Unfettered access to psychiatric medicines is the foundation of hope and the bridge into normal lives.

Never doubt you are appreciated.

Peggy J. Symons  © Copyright 

CENTER STAGE FOR SCHIZOPHRENIA

THE ORLANDO SENTINEL 
- Friday, March 22, 2002

Author:
Peggy Symons

As the date of the Academy Awards approaches, once again A Beautiful Mind is on the American mind.

The box-office draw of the story of the Nobel Prize
winner John Nash's journey through life with schizophrenia has pulled this
illness out of the dark and dusty basement of non-awareness right onto center
stage. It has created a bridge of shared experience as the story of Nash's life
unfolds with some striking parallels to my own experience of living with a
psychotic disorder.

The frightening intensity of Nash's delusional world
was so authentically presented that I, of all people, thought it was real.

In the three months since the release of A Beautiful Mind, the widely
held stereotypes that we are categorically violent people or "split
personalities" are yielding to the understanding of just how human we are. There is a new understanding that a person living with schizophrenia can have a beautiful mind. People are now asking who we are. They are beginning to
understand our humanity and that this is an illness of intense impact. It is no
one's fault, and it is never a choice.

Neuroscience is advancing on
schizophrenia, but it is a complex, chronic and challenging disorder. It will
give up its secrets slowly. The current focus on mental illness is an
opportunity of immediate relevance to present the needs of mentally ill people
as issues of substance. One in five families is struggling with the brain
disorders causing mental illnesses.

If anyone is looking for us, many of
us are behind the locked doors of prisons. Often we are arrested for our
symptoms rather than for true criminal intent. It is illegal to lie on park
benches or trespass on Dumpsters.

As funding for vital mental-health services dwindles, prisons have become the de facto psychiatric hospitals of the 21st century. Reduced to dollars and no sense, the costs of jailing us are more expensive than it would be to treat us. We exist behind the locked doors of "no access" to effective treatment. We live behind the walls of stigma and misunderstanding. This is where much of our humanity remains hidden.

It has been through the new lens of A Beautiful Mind that we have been given the vision to understand, to value and to respect the inner beauty of so many people like John Nash, walking through life with chronic, severe mental illnesses.
These are our neighbors and our loved ones. Who will see their inner beauty and who will know their names? How do we answer the age-old question of conscience and responsibility? Am I my brother's keeper?

If my brothers and sisters are the most profoundly ill and vulnerable among us, then, yes, the answer always comes back close to me:

I am my brother's keeper.

Memo: PeggySymons lives in Deland,Florida. She is a member of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and the Mental
Health Association.

THE HOPE GIVERS

Hope is a fragile flame and a bright light. It is easy to give and even easier to take away.      Once the flame of hope is lit it must be carefully kept and kindled.

When hope burns brightly there is fire in its feet and the breath of life is on its lips.

There is purity in its purpose, vision in its light and healing in its truth.

Whether we teach, write, counsel or mop the halls the hopeless walk we are all called to be hope givers and keepers of the flame.

Blessed are the hope givers.

Peggy J. Symons ©  Copyright 

 ___________________________________________________

The Gift of a Captive Mind

I am currently writing the Gift of a Captive Mind. It is new.

The only voices in the Captive Mind are those of the narrator. It is not a collection of other peoples stories either.

It is simply written to fill out academic presentations of mental illnesses with the actual experiences of living with them.

The purpose is also to highlight the grief and losses that come with mental illnesses so that the suffering of individuals and families will never be discounted or shuffled away unseen and without hope.

I don’t know when the Gift of a Captive Mind will be finished but the end is in sight.

I have never been part of any other book on mental illness that has any hope of coming into the light of day.