Fired

It must have been the recommendation that she have her daughter re-evaluated by a psychiatrist and that she be unmedicated for a week or two beforehand. As her daughter's caregiver, she receives money each month because her daughter has been given a pretty severe diagnosis. I wasn't seeing symptoms of schizophrenia and it is exceedingly rare for a child to be given that diagnosis. So I consulted a psychiatrist who affirmed that schizophrenia is extremely rare in children and followed his recommendation to ask the mother to have her daughter re-evaluated.

I left the house for the last time on August 3rd after an intense session where I thought perhaps some headway was made (see the blog entry entitled, "Dear Dad....")but I received a call the following week that the mother did not want me at her home again. My first thought was about her daughter, who at the age of twelve, has already thought about suicide. She speaks with the spirit of her father who committed suicide five years ago. She wants more than anything to have a bond with her mother, but has thus far been unsuccessful in her attempts to create one.

And then I thought about how the mental health system, funded with our tax dollars, passively supports this type of abuse. A child can be given a diagnosis for mental illness because a parents reports symptoms and behaviors and the treating psychiatrist can issue a diagnosis without thoroughly questioning all those who are involved in the child's life. This mother knew how to report symptoms and she knew her daughter would not argue on her own behalf; to do so would mean serious trouble at home when nobody was watching. True that this child had behaviors that were troubling in school, e.g., attention seeking from boys and bullying them if they did not give her attention and refusing to do her work,but I wanted to explain these behaviors thusly:

The child lost her father and her mother is so caught up in her own physical problems and her world of being "the sick one," that she sought attention in bizarre ways, entirely understandable given her circumstances. Her mother had not invested time in teaching her to cultivate her self-esteem and to get noticed because of her artistic ability or her amazing imagination. When this child was hungry, she snuck food because she was forbidden to help herself. Though money for food is scarce in this household, the starvation went beyond hunger for food. This child knew her hunger and fed it by taking anything that might feed it including food, her mother's nail polish or the attention of boys in her class.

I have done my part as a therapist to enable a system that makes children the bearers of mental illness when it should be attributed to the family system, the juvenile justice system or the educational system or all of the above. And I am unwilling to continue my participation despite the fact that this job is my main source of income right now.

Over the past three months, I have declined in my health and consumed too much chardonnay to medicate my shame over participating in a system that uses taxpayer dollars to impute mental illness to children because it's convenient or financially beneficial for their parents or the school or the system itself. I crawl through my front door after a day of being a mental health prositute feeling that I have no energy to give to what I really love. I love nothing more than offering what I have to people who want to explore, discover and learn in partnership with me. And I love to write. Writing is my way of connecting with the world. As Gloria Steinem said, "When I am writing, it is the only time I feel I do not need to be doing anything else." For me, writing is a joyful immersion, the way I play, and the way I engage with a larger audience.

The reckoning with the voice of my heart, which asks me in a beseeching and sometimes frantic tone, "What are you DOING?!" has gotten louder the more I do this type of work. And I can only answer that I have once again given in to my fear of not succeeding in what really gives me joy. I read the first three pages of Julia Cameron's book, "The Artist's Way," and realized that I needed to stop doing everything that felt wrong immediately, regardless of whether it seemed not to make financial sense.

When fear threatens to level me, as it seems to do about every other day, I strain to see through this forest of thorns, and it's all I can do to hang on until the thorns give way to the softness of grass and sunlight. I heave myself onto the grass and ask for peace. I wonder if I have lost my mind and the answer is probably yes. I have not lost my heart though.

As I leave this child with the imagination of the world inside of her, I pray she will find some rest in her own ancestry where imagination was treasured, not mis-cast as mental illness. And I pray that in my brief time with her, perhaps there was one sentence or one moment that she can hold onto that planted a seed of belief in her potential.