Saturday, August 20, 2022

North Shore Notes: Fallen angel

Stevenson Memorial by Abbott Handerson Thayer (Smithsonian)


      When actress Anne Heche was declared dead Aug. 11, nearly a week after crashing her car into a house in a fiery wreck, my reaction was to note her age, 53, note mine, 62, and mutter a silence prayer for the nine years, and counting, that sobriety gave to me. Because if I didn't give up drinking at 45, that could have easily been me. Not a particularly profound thought, nor one I'd ever share here. I try not to ring that bell too often. Which is why I'm glad that North Shore Bureau Chief Caren Jeskey rings it loud and clear in her report today. 


By Caren Jeskey

“I wasn’t born with it either. I had to learn to be crazy.”
         —Anne Heche
     If you’ve seen Anne Heche on stage or screen, chances are you were transfixed — a wan, elfish creature with talent and wit. Like Kathryn Hahn and Parker Posey, Heche had an alluring, mercurial quality that made it hard to look away.
     Somehow I’d missed the melee between Heche’s angels and demons, until now.
     Her life was an uphill battle starting with abuse by her father in a household where the truth was not allowed to be spoken. She was an extreme nail biter, and in her memoir — that’s now selling for upwards of $500 — she wonders “why people didn’t look beyond the spotted bloody clumps” of her fingers “to think there was something hidden there, perhaps family secrets, perhaps pain.” Maybe they did, but they did not know what to say.
     It’s terrifying to think of how such pain, unhealed, can turn into fire and brimstone right here on earth, in sunny southern California. 
     In a guest appearance on the Adam Carolla Show in October of last year it was clear that Anne was in trouble. She was skin and bones, jittery and slurring. She poured disorganized words forth with pressured, impassioned speech that was hard to follow.
     In May of this year as a guest on a show called Women of Impact, she was just barely holding it together. Host Lisa Bilyeu lavished praise on Heche. “You sit here an Emmy winner with your own podcast looking like you love life.” 
     “I do,” Anne unconvincingly replied with a smile and vacant eyes. She went on to charm her host with a Hollywood mask. She offered words of false or maybe hopeful wisdom, as though her waking nightmares were a thing of the past.
     Over the years Heche spoke of her alter ego, “the half sister of Jesus Christ. I created another entity that was from Heaven. Celestia is the reason I believe I survived. She was the consistent love that allowed me to know that I could get to the other side of my abuse.” Probably disassociation. We now know that Celestia’s powers only went so far. They may have comforted Heche, but they did not provide her with the real help she needed.
     On Daily Blast Live, the hosts said what a lot of people were thinking. I cringed as I watched it, knowing that more stigma is the last thing we need. Host Al Jackson casually mentioned “I stopped drinking. I am doing yoga,” just before he addressed their expert guest, Dr. Drew Pinsky. Jackson insinuated a problem of his own with alcohol, then moved right on to analyzing another’s life.
     This is what we do. True self awareness — really sitting with and being completely honest about who we are — is a lot harder to bear than focusing on others’ deficits and failings. This is the root of stigma. Not seeing that we are all human and we all need help in one way or another. It’s not us and them. It’s just us.
     Jackson continues: “I am glad you are bringing up mental illness. It’s a buzz word in our society now. Anne Heche said since 2001 she’s been dealing with mental health issues. We are all sympathetic to mental health issues until it affects you. Until somebody with mental health issues comes plowing into your front yard or my front yard.” Then it’s “I don’t care about your mental health issues. My kids are playing in my yard. How do we as a society show empathy for this but also not forgive it?”
     This is a timely place to say that I have driven drunk. I know “good” people who have, and who still do. I see it all the time. “I’m fine,” they say. I said. It takes a lot less then one realizes to be an unsafe driver.
     If we are going to make society safer from people who are living in addiction and mental illness, we need to see and care about people, not see others as illnesses to be avoided. Or we can try to hide, but it’s getting harder. “They” might be us, and if not, they are just one or two degrees removed.
     Per Zeinab Hijazi, the senior mental health technical advisor at UNICEF: “One in seven kids under 19 years old experiences some kind of mental health disorder around the world. Mental health [issues] remain stigmatized and underfunded in almost every country, rich or poor. Even before the pandemic, far too many children were burdened under the weight of unaddressed mental health issues, including that one in four children live with a parent who has a mental health condition, and that really half of all mental health conditions start by age 14 and three‑quarters by age 25. But most cases, while treatable, go undetected and untreated.”
     Just assume that you know nothing about mental illness. Even as a psychotherapist with decades of experience I have more to learn than will be even remotely possible in this lifetime. Did you know, for example, that “a growing number of psychiatrists maintain that, as a presumed disease entity, as an identifiable state, schizophrenia simply does not ‘exist?'"
  
   Did you know that there are support groups for people who hear voices? Where they are allowed to be themselves and are not shunned or locked up? It’s okay to say “I don’t know” and to be curious rather than assume we know what others are going through. We are not the judge and jury when it comes to Anne Heche, or anyone else. We cannot know what it was like to walk in her shoes. It is not lost on me that she traumatized a woman, nearly killed her and her pets, destroyed a home, and nearly harmed others on that fateful day. Her actions were horrible. The extreme problem with her brain, booze and drugs was peppered all over the internet. Why were we not more equipped to notice? And to get in there and help before it was too late? 
     One way to de-stigmatize so-called mental illness is to learn more. Learn as much as you can and start with yourself, your family, your friends, and your community.
“Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.”
                  ― Clarissa Pinkola Estés


 

22 comments:

  1. Know the feeling, Mr. S. Whenever I learn about a death from lung cancer, my reaction is to note their age, appreciate that in spite of Covid I'm still breathing at 75, and then realize what smoking cessation (cold turkey) almost thirty years ago has given me. Because if I hadn't quit smoking at 45, that could have easily been me. And my wife would have either become a widow long ago, or we might have never married at all. I try not to think about that too much.

    I started at 13, in the era (early 60s) when most places would sell to anyone who could walk and talk and pony up thirty cents for a pack of Choke-o-puffs. And I was over six feet tall by high school. That helped. By my forties, I was taking ciggy breaks while shoveling snow. Somehow, I managed not to keel over and die.

    I smoked for 32 years...even after marrying a woman whose mother was wheezing her life away from the effects of three packs a day. She had every lung disease except cancer, which might have mercifully ended a life in hell. When I learned that the lung cancer survival rate is just 10%...I got scared straight.

    Finally, the hostess knocked a cigarette out of my mouth at midnight on New Year's Eve of 1993 and announced to the room that I had just quit. Somehow, I've made it stick for all these years. But the respiratory damage was already permanent, and Covid could have easily killed me last year. That wouldn't have been a possibility if I'd continued to smoke. Because I'd have been a dead man decades ago.

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    1. Wow Grizz. So glad that hostess had an effect on you. Thanks for sharing.

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    2. They are well-to do folks with a big suburban house. We were playing cards one NYE and their snarky puppy ATE my shoes! Nice new ones, made by New Balance. They did not reimburse use. They thought it was funny. They even laughed about it. They are no longer our friends.

      It wasn't only because of the shoes...they've switched sides and joined the Red Team...or would that be the Orange Team? Ironically, the hostess is...a Ukrainian! Go figure, right? Whatta world...

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  2. Our culture, and maybe all cultures, does not encourage one to admit they need to make changes. It’s perceived as a sign of weakness.
    Most people are resistant to change. As a result, things stay the same and eventually get worse. People are often hesitant to suggest seeking help to a friend or loved one, fearing harm to the relationship.
    Anne Heche’s life was lined with red flags. I’m sure there were some who tried to help. I’m pretty sure she knew she needed help but unfortunately she wasn’t one of the few who were able to muster the strength to do so.
    It’s like the joke, “How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? Just one but the bulb must really want to change.”

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    1. Good points; however, I feel it's not really choice for someone like Anne Heche. She'd have had to be shrouded with love, accountability, and high calibre help to get past her particular challenges. As you know, change comes in stages. She moved through several of them but I imagine that she was afraid that she could not get better or maybe that she was not worth saving, as many people are as they walk the shaky path to emotional and physical sobriety.

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    2. Your point is well taken. It is most likely more difficult for someone like her, with her very difficult childhood and rapid rise to stardom to conquer the hell of addiction. I have the utmost respect for anyone who can recover and equal compassion for those who cannot.

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  3. I saw a statistic that, at any given time, 20% of the populace is suffering from some sort of mental or emotional illness. My late brother was one of them. Trying to get him help was one of the most frustrating experiences of my life. I lived in fear that he would get this hands on a gun. The human mind is capable of remarkable things - including profound disfunction. Ignoring this, the GOP and NRA have created a country in which all of us, stable or otherwise, can acquire battlefield weaponry on a whim, with predictable results. Getting guns? Easy. Getting help for mental struggles? Not so easy.

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    1. I could not agree more. As a person who knows the medical system inside and out, having worked in it since the late 80s, and a person who's sought help, it's been VERY difficult to get good, affordable help in this country. Very sad. Tragic.

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  4. Your being a therapist must make you more attuned to hearing for these kinds of things, because I just watched the Corolla interview, and she seemed mostly fine to me. Clearly she was jittery and restless, but I thought she spoke lucidly, and didn’t notice any slurring or incoherence.

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    1. I notice something at about minute 17, though I cannot say with certainty what we were seeing. I must add that it's absolutely heartbreaking to have learned the truth behind the cleaned up appearance and strong words. Not that she did not have beauty and strength, she did, but it was not enough to save her. Some people need a team of help until they are able to live a good, safe life.

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  5. Clarissa Pinkola Estés's recommendation is modest enough, but I doubt that very many of us are even up to making a token effort to reach out to mend those we can reach. I certainly don't and much prefer silence to hearing about people's pain, particularly that of those closest to me.
    The most recent New Yorker includes an article that mentions a bar in which Jack Kerouac used to raise hell. Would that some patron disturbed by his insane hijinks had reached out to heal him. Maybe someone did and got a bloody nose for his efforts.
    I have to comment on the painting as well: surely a most human portrait. Barring the wings and halo, the look in her eye, the pursed lips and the hands on a raised knee display a most unangelic attitude, but I see it more as a healthy appraisal of the world she sees than the bitter rebellion of Anne Heche and Jack Kerouac.

    john

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    1. I didn't meant to drag her into Heche's turmoil. Sometimes picking the right illustration is a struggle. I wanted to avoid fire imagery.

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    2. Valid points John; however, the more we turn away from those who are suffering the less safe we all are, and the weaker the fabric of society. In Hubert Humphrey's words, "the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped.” It's been said in different ways by notable figures. I see your point; trying to speak to a drunk person is not a good idea, or the answer unless you've been trained in deescalation and even then it's not guaranteed. Following up with troubled folks in more lucid moments can work. Sometimes it takes years, and not everyone gets better, but many can and do. Since there is hope we should still be trying, using expert help when we can.

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  6. As I have commented in the past, I have mental health issues, but I’m fortunate to have excellent health insurance, strong support from my wife and sons, support groups & therapists. All of that has led to a happy productive life. However, my experiences have shown me that most people are quick to judge others rather than educate themselves about someone’s situation, whether it be mental, physical, financial, etc. situation. I have experienced this with my parents & siblings, they’re quick to judge and give advice. This post has brought an array of feelings & thoughts for me, too many to respond to here. Thanks Caren & Neil for today’s excellent post.

    Arthur

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    1. I hear you Arthur, and support you. Thank you for taking the time to comment.

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  7. Three people in my life's circle have taken their lives. One from a family tragedy he could no longer endure, another from depression resulting from a disappointment that most people get over. The third was unexplainable. All would never have been seen as candidates for suicide yet still they are gone by their own hands. Whatever the experts want to call it, adding in the living with mental health issues I know, I know how real it is.

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    1. Thank you for sharing JP, and I'm so very sorry for the tragic losses in your circle.

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  8. Even today, nearly 9 months sober, talking to people about my changes sounds hollow to me. I strive to fulfill the new me while trying to set some kind of example.

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    1. Thanks for sharing! Yes. An inside job? 💛

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    2. Last comment was me— Caren

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  9. And that prior comment was me... heydave. My first response is to be overly glib on blog commenting. That is a disservice to thoughtful, meaningful posts. Just wanted to share my fortune in coming across your posts as you guest at one of my favorite sites.

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