Mental illness and its impacts are embedded deeply in my family portrait. This is a story about how mental health tended to be communicated through the generations.

From a very young age, I was conscious of mental illness in our family. My cousin Bernard, who was actually closer in age to my father, lived with schizophrenia. Treatments were not very sophisticated in the 1940s and 50s.

We would visit his apartment from time to time where he lived with my aunt and uncle. Bernard’s main occupation was to lie on his bed, chain-smoke Lark cigarettes, and watch sports on television. He would acknowledge my presence when I came into his bedroom to say hello, but that was the extent of the interaction between us.

My aunt devoted her life to caring for him, even once he was a big hulk of a man. She was a bright, elegant woman who could command a room with her deep, resonant voice. My uncle worked as the coroner for New York City. As a medical person, he understood that facilities available for his son’s care were often brutal, lacking in humane treatment. As such, neither he nor my aunt could bring themselves to place him in an institution. In her later years, after my uncle died, a hefty male friend of the family would help my aunt with Bernard’s daily care. Bernard did not enter a nursing home until his mother’s death when he was already in his sixties.

The information about Bernard’s condition was imparted to me by my mother. She would relay information from my aunt, my father’s eldest sister, to other family members. I suppose explaining schizophrenia to a five-year-old could be a bit daunting, but my mother believed I needed to understand, even minimally, why Bernard acted the way he did.

I don’t remember feeling scared of him. It was more of a question mark than fear. Why, I wondered, didn’t he get off his bed and play with me? I learned from my mother that it wasn’t anything I had done wrong — no, it was because of his illness.

My mother trained and worked as a social worker. Her mindset was that mental illness existed out there, as in separate from her or by extension, her immediate family. I think now that this was her way of surviving in sometimes chaotic, emotional situations. It was also one of the ways she tried to protect us. In effect, however, she was contributing to the othering of the person concerned, and thus perpetuating a degree of stigma about mental illness. This was not her intent, but it was the impact of her approach.

Another family member, the wife of my father’s eldest brother was considered to be mentally ill. I don’t think I ever met her; she didn’t accompany my uncle on visits to our house. It could be argued that he was a bit nutty. He always insisted that he lived in a tree, and as a very young child, I believed him. But, it was really his wife who was fighting her own battles. 

In my own life, it became clear as I matured that I live with bipolar illness. I have grappled with how much and when to tell my daughter about it. In two important instances, I erred on the side of caution, wanting to protect her. During her grade 12 year, I was hospitalized with severe depression for one week. My daughter was angry that I hadn’t told her about the illness previously. She felt she could have taken better care of herself had she known. The second instance occurred when I read an essay I’d written for a national radio broadcast in which I revealed that I’d made a suicide attempt many years earlier. My daughter was livid that she had not known prior to the public sharing of this unfortunate incident.

These are complicated matters. Although I felt I was protecting her from knowledge she didn’t need to know, she felt differently. For her, both incidents constituted a kind of betrayal, as though I’d not trusted her enough to share my secrets. I don’t see it that way, but I can understand why she did. And, I wonder if a better way to handle these delicate communications doesn’t exist.

One question might be, who is doing the protecting, and from what? My daughter believes that during her adolescence there were occasional periods when I was depressed that she felt called upon to play an adult role. This was not something I wished for, but clearly it weighed upon her. In that scenario, I can see that my silence about the illness did not protect her from the inevitable bumps in the road. Rather, she felt she had to look out for my well-being during those instances.

This kind of wrinkle in our relationship plays out from time to time. As an adult now, she has developed strong boundaries, in life and with me. . It can be painful as we struggle to establish an adult relationship.  Like most things, it’s a process, and we’re muddling through with a lot of love and much-needed patience. I remain hopeful that our conversations about our respective mental health will be characterized from now on by honesty and forthright information – on both sides.

Clearly, intergenerational communication about mental illness can unearth a minefield. Emotion runs high and feelings get hurt along the way. I can only hope that as we speak more openly about mental health challenges, the powerful stigma hiding in dark corners will be found and brought into the light.