Uncle Lee

My Uncle Lee died when I was about fourteen or fifteen. I say, died. Actually he took his own life. I was old enough to hear at least some of the adult talk that week. Uncle Lee had gone into the garage, started the car and died in a carbon monoxide sleep. My mother’s younger brother, he couldn’t have been much more than 30 years old. He left behind a wife and three little girls, my cousins.

This was one of my first experiences with death – certainly my first personal experience with suicide. I wondered, why? Being only on the sidelines of this terrible family drama, I was left to draw my own conclusions.

I remembered the last time I had seen him at one of our houses for a family gathering. He’d been walking around, as if in a stupor, seemingly totally disconnected from what was going on around him. He stopped and looked at me – no smile, no frown, no words, just looking – and then he turned and walked away.

Thinking of the picture of him in a sailor hat, I remembered that he had been in the navy. In conversation, I learned that he’d been to Vietnam. Maybe it was only on this information that I decided the experience there must have led him to take his life. PTSD, long before it was given the acronym.

Only a decade or two later did my mother share with me that he had had Bipolar Disorder. His detached behavior had been because of the medications he was on. He had known how he was, no emotions, no interest. And he didn’t want his family to be tied to this highly medicated him. He believed they’d be better off without him.

So sad, even now. Such a waste of life.

I think of Uncle Lee – and quite a few others – whenever people talk about mental illness, particularly when I hear about the stigma of mental illness. What I have long wanted to know is, what is it about mental illness that creates in us the urge for silence and secrecy?

Too often, people are slow to seek help for fear of what other people will say. Or, if not what they will say, then how they say it (which is often more cutting than the other.) If you get a toothache, you go to the dentist. No one condemns you or tells you it’s your fault. Nobody expects you to suck it up and get over it. And that’s just a toothache! Mental illness can be debilitating!

So, what I ask is, what do we have to do differently in order to stop this absurdity?
What can we change?
Are you willing to talk differently if it means treating another person as if she (or he) matters and is valued and welcomed, NO MATTER WHAT?!

“More than 90 percent of those who die by suicide had 

one or more mental disorders.” 

(Mental Illness FACTS AND NUMBERS, The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), March 2013.)