I have been reading about Mitchell Wilson, the 11 year old boy with muscular dystrophy who was attacked by a 13 year old and had been bullied for a long time. The grieving father has connected his young son’s suicide to this attack and incessant bullying.
I don’t know if bullying is on the increase. I don’t know if we are becoming more mean-spirited than we were generations ago, when I grew up in the 1950’s. But, I am concerned that we are narrowly focusing on bullying rather than adding bullying to a list of emotional stressors that can trigger an episode of mental illness.
When I visited Jacqueline Long at Trellis she talked about the different abilities we have to deal with stress. We are all born with physical health and mental health. At any point in our lives we can lose our physical health; a heart attack, a car accident. We can also lose our mental health. She suggested we think of our mental health like tea cup. Some of us are born with an empty cup and some of us our born with a cup ready to spill over. As we go through life, we face stress. Each bit of stress adds to the tea cup.
I was an anxious child from the moment I took my first breath. By the time I was 13, I was having anxiety attacks over tests at school. As adults we deal with relationship problems, financial difficulties, work issues. The stress fills the cup until one day there is too much, like the straw that broke the camel’s back, and our cup runneth over, and we are in a mental health crisis. Those of us born with a cup already close to full will be more pre-disposed to a mental health crisis than someone born with an empty cup.
I have already written about providing our children with coping skills to deal with bullies. Some of our children cannot cope with the stress of being bullied. The emotional stress reaches the point that the tea cup overflows and this child has developed a mental illness. We have to look at bullying as another type of emotional abuse and not in a separate category. We need to think of bullying as a pre-cursor to mental health issues so that we do not overlook the signs and symptoms of suicide.
One of the problems is that we just can’t accept that a child would consider taking his life. But our children are taking their lives. We must not let stigma blind us to the needs of our young ones. Mental illness is not a weakness. Mental illness is a brain illness. There is a physical change in brain chemicals. Therapy can repair the damage. An episode of mental illness does not automatically mean that one will have a mental illness for life, any more than an episode of the flu indicates a propensity for the flu the rest of your life.
Learn the signs and symptoms of suicide. All the professionals I interviewed in the series, The Many Voices of Mental Illness, spoke about youth suicide. Take the time to listen and learn. And please share your stories. The more we talk the less fearful we will be of the statement, I have a mental illness.
