What I Learned From My Sister
The pain of the world can reside inside one individual and when it does the whole world feels it.
It’s difficult to describe the horror of watching a loved one go insane. Psychosis is a parabolic infusion of all the pain of this world put into one person’s mind and body.
The day my sister had her initial onset of mental illness, she was in a state of full-on paranoid psychosis. As the accounting from my father and a smattering of other people present that day goes, she was painting a circle around her car in a city park and screaming about aliens and atomic bombs. After an entire childhood of dealing with this type of behavior from his mother, my Dad did what he knew to be the standard protocol. He went into the Probate Court in Oakland County and filed a pickup order…kind of like an invoice for a local grocer, only this is for a human who is going to get checked into a local hospital.
The police arrived on scene and somehow coaxed her into the back of their vehicle. I can only imagine this went similarly to how her experience went at the Emergency Room: brute force. She arrived at the ER in a total rage about being forced into their facility against her will. At her admittance she was greeted by three male security guards who forced her to strip her clothes from her body. She was then forced onto a gurney and held down with arm and leg restraining straps.
I arrived on scene at the ER right after this had all taken place. I could hear her screaming from the parking lot as I approached the doors. This was the first time I had witnessed mental illness and really ever even thought about its existence. As a young college student, my focus was on my studies and getting good marks. In addition to these things, I was also focused on my Christian faith.
After the nurses injected my sister with a sedative, I sat there in the silence of the room wondering what Jesus would do in the situation.
I decided to stay with my sister and I thought the least I could do was massage lotion onto her feet as she lay there strapped to the bed in a sedated sleep. I’ll never forget thinking that Jesus would have been really proud of me in that moment.
In truth, if there is a spiritual figure in the universe who was watching that episode of my life, he/she/it hopefully would have been feeling total heartbreak and agony for this trauma, not pride. But I had no context for how to be alive in this world so I clung to the fairytale of the Bible to get me through. I wish I could say it worked but the Jesus story works only as a parable and unfortunately not as a road map for how to exist in America’s 21st century medical protocol.
I remember my sister waking up as the nurses tried to insert a catheter into her so they could get a urine sample. I remember her feeling uncomfortable about the situation and fighting the nurses through her groggy speech. Per their encouragement and request, I stayed by her side and tried my best to calm her down as they inserted a tube into her private space, again, against her will.
After 14 hours, my sister was taken by ambulance to a local psychiatric facility. Her doctor there used me as a point person so I spent a good amount of time talking with him about my sister’s “condition.”
After two weeks, she was released from lockdown and I picked her up. I took her to my favorite spot behind my college where there is a little sand bank nestled beside a creek. I still remember her saying that was her favorite place in the entire world.
I thought that would be the end of our whole traumatic ordeal but, as these things go, traumatic events lay the framework for future traumatic events. In our country, we call this “mental health care.” If this system is designed for one thing, it certainly isn’t to take care of our mentally ill.
Emily went into and out of psychiatric facilities for over a decade without getting one step closer to normalcy. Each experience dug a hole deeper into the dark pit of despair for her and, I would argue, for the whole world.
Society has constructed an idea of what normalcy looks like and mental illness doesn’t doesn’t fit into the paradigm. We use our normal paradigm to try and create normalcy in people who are not. We look at mental illness empirically as we do with most things. We see someone acting out of character and use our American might to dredge out the sickness. We dope it and restrain it and when that doesn’t work, we jail it.
With each of these attempts we collectively dig ourselves deeper and deeper into the despair that inevitably comes from such an abusive endeavor.
After all the years of participating in these “healthcare” systems out of desperation to try and help my sister, she is now filled with hatred for the very air I breathe. A trite response to this hatred that I often get from other people is “it’s just the illness; she doesn’t really hate you.” After years of the unrelenting trauma that my sister and I have endured, it’s amazing to me to get this kind of response. But that’s what we as feeble, fragile little human creatures do: evade pain, even if it’s true.
My sister’s hatred toward me can be explained through the summation of two words: abuse and trauma. One is the action taken against “the illness” (abuse) and the other is the outcome of these actions (trauma).
But Lydia, surely you’re mistaken, the system didn’t “abuse” her, she’s the mentally ill one, remember?
For what seemed like a lifetime, I tried to buy into this narrative. I didn’t want to believe that the system that was supposed to be helping us was causing our family further trauma. That would be contrary to all the good things we are taught about society: “The professionals know what they’re doing. Listen to your doctor. Take your medicine.”
After a decade of enduring my sister’s devastating story, I finally started seeing the situation a little more clearly. I’ve learned that beginning from that first day of her onset, my sister’s “mental illness” was a reflection of all the pain and trauma that exists in the world. What I’ve learned most recently is that the pain felt from my sister’s mental illness is not just felt by her but rather by the entire society that perpetuates her pain. War, domestic violence, corporate greed: it’s all pain and it’s all connected. Each time a human life is treated as a commodity that has to fit into the society’s paradigm, the pain grows.
Our greatest worry is that we might have a person among us who shows us the devastation of our abusive actions. I believe the day that my sister went into that park, this is exactly what we were seeing. The trouble was that we don’t like looking at the pain of our existence straight in the eye. We’d rather call it literally anything other than what it is. So we name it psychotic, depressed, manic, bipolar, schizophrenic.
I gave up on that Christian story some years after my sister’s onset. I couldn’t get through the narrative that if you just pray, god will provide for your needs. But every once in a while a verse from that old storybook will pop back into my head. Lately the one that has been coming to mind is this note from the book of Matthew:
Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.
There’s something so incredibly true about this message. I’ve seen it and felt it first hand. The difference is that “me” is not some heavenly deity sitting in the sky. The “me” is all of us.
There has been a lot of talk lately about our society needing radical empathy. It’s a cute call to action that some people think will change the world. If you can just learn to put yourself in other people’s shoes then you’ll watch the world change.
Wrong.
The world doesn’t change through the seeing eye of another person. The only thing that can truly change in a society as radically disconnected as ours is being deeply connected to the individual self, in all its pain and all its glory.
What’s my authority on the subject of empathy, you ask?
I can answer this through my story of empathizing with my sister. I have no social work degree nor a grand experience of living among the buddha. But what I do have is over a decade of pouring myself into a state of empathy for the sister I so desperately love.
I can tell you with certainty, my empathy did not change a thing.
The only thing that I have come away knowing is that my sister’s pain is no different from the pain each and every one of us feels. The problem, however is not that we feel this pain. The problem is that we live in a culture that breeds power and control. Instead of sitting with the pain, leaning into it, and allowing it to be felt, we seek power and control over its very existence. You do this to the same degree that I did out of empathy for my sister all those years. The only difference is I made my escape from the pain look righteous and you probably make yours look normal.
I devoted my entire life to finding a solution for my sister’s mental illness. I even doubled my student loan debt to try and become a psychiatrist. After that plan left me totally wiped out I took my empathic, righteous plan back to the Probate Court and filed a petition to become my sister’s Legal Guardian: the ultimate power and control move. My sister may never forgive me for trying to be the empathic hero of the day, and she would be absolutely right not to. Out of my attempt at empathetic hero work I accidentally became the villain.
Today I’m working hard on all the pain that came out of this story. Some days I don’t even know how to begin so I don’t get out of bed other than to meet the minimum requirements for subsistence. However, I’m proud of myself for allowing the pain to exist and I have a hope that this will make me stronger, healthier, and happier in my next chapters. The story comes with a bit of a happy ending too. Out of it, I learned what I believe to be one of the most important lessons our culture is yearning to actualize:
We do not have power and control over anything. We have only the opportunity to become present and accepting of each moment we are gifted out of life.
