The malevolent gene of mental illness is? Stigma

The malevolent gene of mental illness is? Stigma

by Michael Enright

Stigma is the open wound caused by fear or ignorance or hatred or all three.

It dehumanizes people suffering from mental illness, for example, and reduces them to a cluster of symptoms and behaviours.

The stigma we attach to mental illness torments individuals, poisons society and can often tear families apart.

In my mother's family there were seven children: the boys, Edward, William and Charles and the daughters, Margaret, Ermine, Elizabeth Mary (my mother) and the youngest, Laura Valentine, called Vally.

Born and bred in Kingston and Wolfe Island, the family was descended from the Folger whaling family of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. My mother was proud of her American heritage and could trace her family matrilineally back to Benjamin Franklin, whose mother was Abiah Folger.

She often talked about her sister Vally, by legend the prettiest and funniest of the girls, who had died tragically young in the great influenza epidemic of 1918.

The Spanish flu epidemic killed an estimated 20 million people worldwide, more than all the combat casualties of the First World War. It killed more than 50,000 in Canada alone.

It was clear throughout my childhood that my mother and Vally were very close, but she never gave me any details of her death.

My parents were married in Toronto in the forties and I grew up in the heart of the city. Living downtown as we did, our neighbourhood was fertile ground for many characters and eccentrics, some of them suffering no doubt from some form of mental illness.

One woman in her mid-forties always dressed, no matter the weather, in heavy black, head to foot, including a black turbanlike hat pinned with a large silver brooch.

She walked very quickly down the street, always looking down, never to the side.

And she talked to herself in a low droning murmur, almost a groan.

Among my friends she became known as The Talking Lady. Every time we saw her scuttling along Sherbourne Street, we trailed after her, teasing her.

We would yell at her, "Talking Lady, we can't hear what you're saying . . . ."

This was my first experience with someone suffering from mental illness, and my seven-year-old response was one of mockery. I and my gang in our childish way defined the woman by her peculiar behaviour; she was what she presented. This dehumanizing is perhaps the most corrosive element of stigma.

One day, when my mother caught me yelling at The Talking Lady, she erupted in fury; I had never seen her so angry. I was more than a bit frightened by her threats of what she would do to me if she ever caught me tormenting the woman again.

We moved out of the neighborhood and I never saw The Talking Lady again.

My mother died in the early seventies, the last of her family, at the relatively young age of 63. About nine months after her death, I received an official-looking envelope from the office of the Public Trustee of Ontario.

The letter was to inform me that the last surviving member of the Folger family was alive and a patient of the Ontario Hospital for the mentally ill, in Oshawa, Ontario.

Her name was Laura Valentine Folger.

I took the letter to my father and asked him for details.

He had known the true story for decades.

My Aunt Laura had not died in the flu epidemic of 1918-19, he said. She had suffered from some kind of mental illness, perhaps developmental delay as well, and, as was the custom in those years, she was sent to a provincial institution.

I sent off a letter to the Ontario Hospital enquiring about a Miss Laura Valentine Folger. I received a letter back from the superintendent's office saying that indeed, Miss Folger was a patient at the hospital, in fact one of the most popular residents in the institution.

I phoned the hospital and spoke to a nursing supervisor.

Miss Folger was now very elderly and was ailing.

Working back, my father and I were able to speculate that she had been sent to the institution while still in her teens.

She had been confined for more than half a century. I made plans to visit her, but because of a number of domestic concerns including the birth of my second son, I was delayed. She died before I could ever meet her.

She was the last link to my mother and to that generation of the Folger family.

Over the years I have thought about those two women of my youth, The Talking Lady who walked the streets muttering to herself and the aunt I never met but thought had died as a beautiful young girl.

The women for me represented two distinct but very destructive attitudes toward mental illness.

On the one hand, to ignore its existence and to shut away those afflicted.

On the other, to mock it, to try and laugh it away in a fog of ignorance and thoughtlessness.

Fortunately, we as a society have closed the chapter on the first attitude: we don't wall up people any more. Oshawa was closed years ago.

But on the second, we haven't done as well. Mental illness carries a malevolent gene called stigma and it can spread like an epidemic unless it is stopped.

It is entirely up to us.