How does divorce happen? It’s not a straightforward question. I am not actually asking for your answer. However, it is not a rhetorical question, either. I don’t have a ready answer for you, despite the fact that I have been to brink of it myself.  The end of a marriage is I think one of those amorphous places. You don’t realize you are going there when you are, when you are there you don’t quite know how you got there, and when (or if) you manage to come back you are not sure you ever really left. Once the possibility of divorce rears its head, reality becomes harder to pin down. It is like looking at your arm under the pool and seeing that your arm above the water and the image of your arm below don’t quite match up.

There was a time when you could only get divorced for reasons of infidelity (on the part of the wife), failure to consummate the marriage, or physical abuse. Divorce existed in the United States prior to the Seventies, but it was the “Me Generation” that embraced the idea that divorce was a way to find yourself. Hence, the creation of  “irreconcilable differences,” the most commonly cited reason for the end of marriage since the late 1960s.  Even the very term itself doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. How can two individuals have “irreconcilable differences?” The United States and current government of Iran have irreconcilable differences. The United States had irreconcilable differences with North Vietnam. If war “is diplomacy by other means,” then irreconcilable differences is what triggers that war. But people are not nations. Nations go to war, ultimately, because they can. In any war between nations, one side or the other will eventually win. War is expensive. Eventually, you run out of money, resources, and human lives. Eventually, the loss becomes too great and the nation must sue for peace.

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I always feel like I lose myself a little bit when Jani goes into the hospital. It is like life stops, which is the opposite of how I would feel about this situation if I wasn’t living it. I would think that the “break” must be welcome, but it isn’t. I feel incomplete at best, lost at worst. I suppose that is one of the reasons why I don’t send Jani to residential care. When Jani is gone, it doesn’t feel like life can begin again. Rather, it feels like it has stopped.

What this means is that I have adapted to life with Jani to the point that it is my normal functioning. Only when Jani is growing do I feel like I am growing. Every time she goes back to UCLA, the staff always tell us to “get some rest” and say things like, “Now you and Susan can actually sleep together” in all the ways that sentence can be understood.

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Tonight, Jani is back inpatient at UCLA.

How many blogs have I written now that start that way? I don’t know. I don’t want to know.

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[video: 100x100]

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First let me say that I have received hundreds of emails since “Born Schizophrenic” aired last week on Discovery Health as part of “Psych Week.” Several emails refer to me or my family in the third person, probably because the writer assumes that given the media contacts at the bottom of my website page that I have somebody vetting my email. I don’t. It all comes straight to me. I read every single email I get, but due to time constraints I can only respond to those who write to me sharing their own experiences with a child or other mentally ill family member. So if you sent me an email sharing your own experience, or the similarities between your child and Jani, or asking me for help, I promise I will respond. It may take me several weeks, but I will respond. I also have to respond to emails in order of importance. One of the things that has surprised me the most is that I now get emails from people, both parents of mentally ill children and mentally ill individuals themselves, who are in crisis. I am not a trained psychologist or therapist, but I can’t ignore such emails. Today, for example, I got an email from a teenage girl who told me that she has been diagnosed with depression but that she also hears voices. She told me that the only reason she was even emailing me was because she was too stoned at that time to censor herself. Of course, I immediately wrote back from my Blackberry, despite Jani pulling on my shirt, wanting me to pay attention to Wednesday the Rat,  telling this girl to tell her doctor the truth about what she is experiencing and, failing that, to take herself to the nearest ER and tell them. Will she reply? I doubt it. I have gotten emails like this before and I never get a response back. My point is that if you email me asking for help, I am going to try and help you. Despite the media attention Jani has gotten, we have no more resources than anybody else out there dealing with mental illness. Even after the LA Times, Oprah, 20/20, and now Discovery Health, nothing has really changed for us, except that Jani occasionally gets recognized in public by complete strangers. But we didn’t do this to get help. By the time our story became public, we already knew there was no help out there. We haven’t told our story publicly to gain help or find a solution. We did it to get the word out, to bring attention to a problem that exists, a problem that is much larger than one child or one family.

Fame only matters if you do something with it.

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It’s hard to protest against a war when you are in it.

My last blog, The Safety "Dance", produced I think an interesting and valid debate over the stigma of mental illness.  The blog was written in response to how I have seen people react to the violence that can sometimes be a part of psychosis. It basically a statement to the general public that until you’ve seen it, you will never understand it. And when you do see it, you learn, no matter well-intentioned you are, if you are cut out to be a caretaker of someone mentally ill. As Nietszche wrote, “And if you gaze for long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” If you want to work with the mentally ill, eventually every good quality you have will be tested. You will be tested. And whether you hold, bend, or break has nothing to do with your strength of character. Breaking is not a moral failure.

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There are a few songs that when I hear them on the radio I can’t help but crank up the volume because the song is so infectious. And example is one of the more famous “one-hit wonder” songs of the 1980s, Canadian New Wave band Men Without Hats’ “The Safety Dance.” The song’s melody is bouncy, but its lyrical content and Ivan Doroschuk’s deep baritone make it also somewhat threatening at the same time. The emotional response the song produces in me is one that I can best describe as “euphoric rebellion.” It makes me want to tell the world to go to hell, not out of a sense of antipathy, but out of desire for freedom from judgment. Not surprising, considering the song is in fact a “protest song.” Men Without Hats have become an 80s punchline, largely due to the ridiculous video for “The Safety Dance,” but like all New Wave bands, their origins come from punk. And punk is nothing if not defiant.

The meaning of the song is often attributed to protest against nuclear war, very much on the minds of listeners in the early Eighties. However, this is not true. The lyrics of the song refer to a particular type of dancing called “pogoing,” a form of New Wave dancing that was born in clubs as Disco was dying in the late Seventies. Disco dancing required having a partner, which therefore required the dancers have sufficient space on the dance floor to move together. Pogoing, on the other hand, like all New Wave dancing, was done alone. It involved standing in one place, keeping your feet planted and torso rigid, and thrashing your arms about or twisting your upper body in different directions without moving your lower body. The effect produced looked like a person bouncing their head, chest, and arms back and forth like a pogo, hence the name.

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Every time Jani is released from UCLA, within a day or two my cell phone rings. I recognize the number immediately. Unlike bill collectors, particularly credit card companies, who have a system which can route calls through a number of calling centers so that the same number doesn’t always show up on your caller ID, insurance companies, having no need to conceal their identity, always show up as the same number. This number, which has a San Diego area code, belongs to Blue Shield’s mental health discharge line.

The irony is that Blue Shield never calls before the crisis that precedes a hospitalization. But once your child is out, they won’t stop calling until they get a hold of me.

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“What we’ve got here is…failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it... well, he gets it. I don't like it any more than you men.” – “The Captain”  Cool Hand Luke 1967

The first line of the monologue above is one of the more famous movie lines ever uttered. In the scene in which appears, Luke has been returned to the chain gang after a brief but futile escape. Luke is in a situation where he has no power, but rather than accept it, he mocks the despotic Captain’s affectation of benevolence, which causes the Captain to lose control and strike Luke, sending him sliding down into a culvert where he lands in a heap. Recovering his composure, the Captain delivers the rest of his line, which for him encapsulates the problem: that look fails to understand that his social status as a prisoner means that communication goes only one way, from the person with power to the person without it.

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This is the last night before Jani comes home from UCLA. I should be in Bodhi's apartment, lying in bed next to my wife, because I will not get a chance to this again anytime soon if not ever again.

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