A Code Word for Compassion
How often are we taken aback or brought up short by the familiar but vague memory, one that takes us back into the lore created by our earliest family history?
Two weeks ago, while on a solo two hour drive after visiting my niece and her husband who had recently moved to a new home in the boonies, I experienced just such an event. It was raining hard, visibility was low, and I was a bit perturbed by my GPS directing me to take a different route home. As I slowed my speed to adjust for the poor conditions and an unfamiliar road, I glanced once more at the Google Maps screen: How in God’s name does driving along a back road through No Man’s Land make any sense? I muttered. Drifting in and out of the fog that now obscured my windshield, an imposing water tower at last appeared––a welcome sign of life. On its tank in large bold letters was the name of the small town I was about to enter: Manteno.
I was jolted into the past. Manteno had been home to the state’s largest psychiatric hospital until it closed in 1985. Like so many such institutions of its era, overcrowding, lack of adequately trained staff, and charges of unfettered research on human subjects raised serious questions about the quality of care, but by the mid-eighties, dwindling patient numbers and budgeting constraints were the reported reasons for its demise. And while I had been in neither the town nor on the grounds of this infamous facility that had operated for next to six decades, I felt as if I were visiting once again a place I had been many times before over the years—a place which conjured up memories I hadn’t thought about in a very long time.
As a child, “Manteno” was a word my parents used—and always with an exasperated tone. I knew it as the code for “Uncle Bunky’s been shipped off to the loony bin again.” Now, as the car’s wipers scraped with an annoying noise against the windshield, images of this uncle in a state of frenzy and my Aunt Dot fraught with fear and anxiety swamped me. As my car moved slowly through the gray, I cracked open a window and tried to push away these memories. And failed.
How or when my uncle acquired the nickname, “Bunky,” I was never certain, although a family member recently opined that my father likely borrowed the name from an old-time comic strip that featured a big-nosed baby with a flair for the dramatic. Whatever the reason for assigning this epithet, it seemed clear from my Dad’s roll of the eyes and derisive laughter whenever he mentioned my uncle, that he had been the culprit responsible for popularizing its use. And it was Dad, who early on, pegged his brother-in-law as impulsive, an inveterate attention seeker, and a source of embarrassment to our clan with his out of control behavior.
My father clung to this assessment which, despite the fact that when “Bunky” wasn’t on a drinking binge, spending money he didn’t have, talking too fast while telling wild stories, or failing to get out of bed for days at a time (behaviors that were consistent with symptoms of what was then called manic-depressive disorder, a condition that likely explained his need for hospitalization) he was an indefatigable factory worker who provided well for my aunt and their son.
I didn’t question then why these “positive” qualities counted for so little, but in hindsight, this was probably because my father placed such a high value on dependability and allegiance to family, and saw my uncle as an erratic provider. What wasn’t a mystery was how Uncle B.’s recurring lapses in judgment and accompanying inappropriate behavior permanently colored my father’s view of this man.
I recalled, for example, how my Dad had shaken his head in consternation over another of Bunky’s large-ticket-item spending sprees; how he had groaned with disgust whenever a neighbor reported seeing Mr. Attention Seeker race through the neighborhood in yet another expensive new car. Always in these news flashes, my uncle was reputed to have a woman cuddled up beside him. A woman who wasn’t my aunt.
Like so many of his generation, and in concert with the adults in our extended family, my father never spoke of these bouts of recklessness––bouts which were often followed by long periods of torpor––as a manifestation of mental illness. Rather, Uncle Bunk’s revolving-door hospitalizations at places like Manteno were talked about as necessary “time-outs:” punishment for bad conduct that had the bonus effect of affording my beleaguered aunt an opportunity to grab some peace and quiet at home.
And so, while calling my uncle a “nut” was also common, a pejorative word much like “loony bin,” it described neither illness nor suffering. It was even thought of as nothing that could not be ameliorated by a swift pull on the old boot straps. Moreover, the family consensus was that he simply had some big-time character flaws. And because I had been too young to understand the real and more complex reasons for these patterns of behavior that were decidedly confusing and sometimes even scary, it was easy to be swayed by what my family believed: that Uncle Bunky was selfish and weak.
As I fiddled with the car’s defroster and temperature settings as I passed through Manteno, I recalled how my uncle—after being rejected by his family once and for all—completely disappeared from our lives. Long after his death, I came across his three-line obituary, and sometime after that, an old Chicago Tribune article in which I learned that he had been a talented softball player in his youth. How sad it was to discover that my uncle had been both human and cool.
In the hours that followed my drive through the town where he had spent so much time, thoughts about the stigma of mental illness––the mark of disdain often borne out of lack of knowledge and fear––riffled through my mind. But look how far we have come! I reassured myself after arriving home late that night and settling in to bed. Some newer studies on the subject, I knew, reported an increase in public awareness about what mental illness is and how the medical establishment is trying to reduce the ways in which it is stigmatized.
As I pulled back my quilt and climbed in between the sheets, I ruminated on an American Psychiatric Association poll I’d recently read about that had found, not surprisingly, a generational divide with respect to mood related illnesses: millennials were almost twice as likely as baby boomers to be comfortable (62% vs. 32%) discussing their mental health. Wasn’t all this, I mused, further evidence of how much progress we’d made in the battle against shame and discrimination?
Yes—but.
Stubbornly, prejudice continues to surround the realities of mental illness. The stereotype which presumes that the mentally ill are dangerous, for example, prevails. And we know that mental illness continues to get worse when conditions of loneliness and isolation predominate. It remains incomprehensible to many, even those who want to understand better. This was the realization I carried with me that night as I moved slowly toward sleep.
The next morning, the weather forecast looked good and my mood was somewhat brighter. The blanket of memories that had swept over me as I had driven for hours the day before down foggy roads remained in my mind, albeit a bit less heavily.
Preoccupied as I am about mental health issues since my trip––those that arise from my grappling with them because of my own family issues, as well as those I have always had to tackle as a clinical psychologist––I’m not surprised to feel as if I am motoring through a landscape that is alternately marked by both nostalgia and grief, as well as long stretches of hope. And as for the expression “Manteno” and all its meaning implied during my childhood—how I wish now that it had been a code word for compassion.