The Other Side of Madness

Robin’s suicide hit me like a wrecking ball. I hated her for asking me to commit a felony; I hated myself for not coming through for my friend. (I have often wondered what she would have done if the situation were reversed- if I had asked her to help me die- would she have risked a prison sentence for my sake?) Worst of all I have been thrust into a devastating paradox. I have been trying to be glad to be alive, while at the same time trying to believe Robin is in a “better place,” two equally monumental ideologies that simply did not align. I’d be lying if I said I did not envy her terribly; every spiritual belief I can muster suggests she has been set free, leaving me behind to carry the torch of her ultimately futile crusade.

However at the very least her death has slapped me awake in terms of my treatment. Robin died alone, unloved, mourned only by strangers. (Her sister and daughter disposed of her remains, cleaned out her apartment, and settled her affairs, without doing her so much as the courtesy of an obituary, much less a funeral or memorial service.) Robin was by no stretch of the imagination apathetic or complacent in her care. She advocated for herself and others more vigorously than anyone else I have ever known. (Hell, she probably had our governor’s number on her speed dial.) So how could she have died as she did? Unable to pay her rent, afford decent medical care, or perform even the most basic maintenance on her car; all the while hopelessly waiting for Section 8 eligibility; Robin was a college-educated musical genius with unlimited untapped potential simply reduced to languishing alone in her apartment all day, occasionally breaking the monotony by blogging on MySpace.

I’ve realized I must do everything in my power to avoid Robin’s fate. Living for 50 years and not being able to so much as pay my rent or buy my own food, looking into the gaping maw of old age and deterioration without health insurance, retirement, or anything in the way of security, has simply become unacceptable to me. For the time being I am willing to refrain from suicidality, but at the first sign my life is heading in Robin’s direction, I will absolutely do myself in. Until then, something keeps me going, and it certainly isn’t love of life. It’s now come down to a simple matter of winning or losing, and giving up my battle to stay alive would effectively be handing over the game to the endless parade of hacks and sadists who have orchestrated this almost epic comic tragedy that has been my health care.

It would be alarmist to suggest Robin fell through the cracks specifically because she was such a gadfly, were it not for the fact that I have recently been blackballed from my local mental health center and dropped by my counselor and caseworker, all without explanation. At the start of January I was issued a letter stating my services would be terminated if I did not contact the MHC by the 18^th, and though I set up an appointment with my case manager at least a week before this deadline, I was informed this “did not count” and that I was no longer a client… just in time for me to finally bite the bullet and decide to file my disability and SSI claims, thank you very much! Now I’m flying solo in an atmosphere of bureaucratic paperwork I cannot even begin to understand.

My caseworker said I should consider re-enlisting for services at the mental health center, including not only counseling and case management, but also “Adult Day Treatment,” (the lowest common denominator of human warehousing), because someone from all three branches of therapy must sign off on my progress (which was the first I’d heard of it). When I asked her if ADT was really necessary she said it wasn’t, but when I asked if it would hurt my disability claim she told me it would. In any case the implication was that if I wanted to tap her expertise I would have to brave the Montana winter highways to waste my time at an adult day care center 3 towns over when I could far more easily do so in the comfort of my own home.

I can’t prove the mental health center is cooking the books, or that my caseworker is either blackmailing me into unnecessary services or making them so preposterously inconvenient that I will be compelled to give up on treatment altogether; all I know is that ever since I refused to commute 80 miles, three times a week, with gas money I didn’t have, to attend addiction therapy, the quality of my services at the MHC had begun to dramatically plummet. For two months my appointments had been repeatedly cancelled to fill my slot with “higher priority” patients (even though I had clearly expressed I was feeling suicidal following Robin’s death), and after putting up with this bullshit for several weeks in a row, I miss one appointment each with my counselor and case manager while my car was broken down, and suddenly I get axed.

It all seems symptomatic of the circumstances under which I was “discharged” from the state hospital, after refusing to be relocated to another ward so that my attacker could continue to abuse the female patients there with impunity. It seems whenever a person with mental illness tries to have some modicum of control over his or her treatment, no matter how worthless, impractical, dangerous, or traumatic it may be, that person is declared untreatable altogether.