NAMI and Parents

 

My late parents wouldn’t have been caught dead joining NAMI or attending a NAMI meeting.  Their attitude on mental health, mental illness, and seeking psychiatric help was made clear in their attitude toward me when I voluntarily sought psychiatric help—in doing so I brought shame upon the family!  My relatives had the same reaction.  My parents were clearly what psychologist Dr. Susan Forward called “toxic parents”—parents who were abusive, who were abusers.  Though my parents never physically abused me—they didn’t have to, they intimidated me by their constant screaming at me.  That is, when they weren’t ignoring me completely.  The noted Kaiser Permanente ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study of 1995 delineates this clearly:  abusive parenting can cause lifetime mental health, relationship and addiction problems for the children involved.  And there are four particular classes of parents for whom this is notably true:  parents who regularly denigrate or belittle their child; parents who themselves suffer from mental illness; parents who have serious drug or alcohol abuse problems; and parents who are jailbirds, former jailbirds, or who are engaged in illegal activity.  My parents clearly fit into the first category, and possibly into the second category.  Although I had, according to the latest psychiatric research, a 55% genetic propensity to inherit the personality disorder I suffered from, my parents’ abuse made it certain, I believe we could say, that I had a 100% chance of having psychiatric problems.  Which I did for literally decades.  As I’ve written poetically, it takes only one thing to become a natural parent: “the ability to fuck”!  Biologically, sperm meeting egg produces a child.  Period.  Even when the parents involved are utterly unfit for parenting.  As were mine.  I realize this goes against the grain of official NAMI, but, frankly, Freud was really onto something when he posited that mental illness has its origins in parental failure.  He was indeed at least half-right, and the ACE study confirms it.  NAMI needs to reform its facile view that mental illness is entirely genetic and can’t be helped, and its naïvete about toxic parents and toxic parenting.  Bad, toxic, inappropriate parenting does play a key role in gestating mental illness.  Lest we forget or ignore.