Mental Instability, Trauma and Mental Illness-+*(SubAltern Context: Black)

 in other news...
mental illness is a very real scourge
and made worse for its lack of acknowledgement, treatment and beholding to the sufferers.
saw one of my neighborhood friend have a meltdown today. crying, sobbing, in a paranoic episode. saw him trying to reach out to one of his friends. the same chin...he was kind and loving, and tried to buck him up but when he circled back i had to tell him. the struggle is real. it is not a "snap out of it" thing, which is what he thinks and was telling his friend. It is a mental illness. that needs diagnosis, treatment and medical help and support.

then i sat down and thought of the few males in a three block radius I know of and have seen in various forms of meltdown. four. all in their thirties. and you know there has to be more.
i dealt with this up close once. a friend of mine slammed into post partum depression. her husband had to commit her for three days...in the states...you can do that for that minimum time without formal state medical processing. it was wild. I ended up being the one to step into the family, take care of the house, the baby, make meals, do laundry, while the husband saw after her . it was a bizarre story. these were white folk. how i ended up being the one, i have no idea. but i was.

and it, like sexuality, is a continuum: mental illness. I realize that i have been through so much trauma, I am changed, damaged, altered...very different from times before, and from my pod...they have no clue. i am just the black sheep


that term "nervous breakdown" is what folk talk about.
back in the day they will also use the term "nervous" and "nervous condition"// those are vulnerable sensitive souls for whom trauma, sends them over the edge.

i just watched a new show, From the Bottom Up, those ladies...I look to view more on them..but stories like that are the stimulus that affect people. funny too. I know one of those stories kind of personally. Beatty...she had an affair with Kwame Kilpatrick, who was a friend. we traveled to Israel together in 2000. An affair and larger story that basically, in my mind, shut down a city, Detroit, in some ways.

Life Eh.
what eh meet you eh pass you
take yuh damn time.
and learn compassion
before life drags your ass on some trini asphalt/ and you know the potholes

 

 

Semper Liesl : "Girl! Yuh say so much there. Ah boy!"

Part TWO
Semper's comments takes me to the river to write more...flow..

Because of my experiences, what i have traveled, seen, what met me and what I now know...a possible and very strong sign of something out of balance, if not of a mental and emotional weight is the public tears of a public official during the administration of public duties...like Paula Gopee Scoon. That is a serious sign of hurt, pain, trauma that has not been settled, has no where to go, has not even been given a cubby hole in the recess of one's mind or heart, and is just floating around like atoms waiting to pop. a smaller lesser form of instability. i can tell you about that like the back of my hand.

I feel i can write about this in ways that would shock folk.

Trauma and what it does to us

I think people with severe insecurities are in a form of trauma, who act it out in ways that are just crazy..like always needing to prove you are one thing or another or not a next thing. I have a cousin like that. in her sixties and she feels the need to prove to trinidad world that she is not laventille of where she lives, because the place is so maligned. she is constantly trying to prove who she is and who she is not. at sixty ?> something? really? Trauma and PTSD

I believe now, having spent the day reading yesterday that political party affiliations to what we call sickophants and sycophants or psychophants are all part and sourced of mental illness. a sever level of projection, a warped coping mechanism for stalled disempowered disenfranchised personal lives, so we have this inordinate identification with party and our means of success are defined by arriving to power, access to treasury, domination of the oppositional other, causing cognitive dissonance to severity and rationalization that disavows all logic.

I am now for the first time understanding why that psychiatric text of conditions is so voluminous. the shades are endless