It's been a tough, well, couple days.
I have a friend who was going through a mental health crisis the past few days and is now in the hospital. Since finding out I've been worried, agitated, anxious, sad. I've done as much as I can to help out, share my experiences with psychiatric hospitals and mental illness. And yet I feel so helpless. Like in the case with Adam, I am too far away to physically help out, and that definitely contributes to my feelings of helplessness. I have such strong feelings of empathy towards my friend though. I wish I could make it all better.
On a more trivial note, I've been really preoccupied with RG's economics project for school. Each student is supposed to come up with a good or service to provide at a cost (fake money) for their 2nd grade bazaar this Friday. I goofed. When we were coming up with ideas for something we could make to sell, I thought the bazaar was next week, which would have given us an additional weekend to make these.
We're making Lithuanian straw ornaments. They're somewhat simple once you get the hang of it, made with straws and crochet thread, but they're just complicated enough that I have to help RG with every one. We're supposed to make a minimum of 25; of course he wants to make 40. Which means we have to make 10 a night (since we only started making them Monday night). TK has helped a few times, I've made several entirely on my own, but RG is helping with most of it.
This all counts towards homework stars for the week. And the ornaments are mostly fun to make. But... it's a time crunch. I got so fed up at one point with some of RG's behavior that I walked out of the room with my hands in the air, saying, "not my project, not my problem!" Sigh.
Here's some of our finished product.
I've been thinking a lot over the past several days about the, I don't know, injustice (is that the word I'm looking for?) of mental illness. I suppose it's true about every illness, but I've been feeling a lot of the "it's just not fair" sentiment. My mother-in-law reminded me that 1 in 4 within the population suffer from some kind of mental illness. That is still mind-boggling to me, 1 in 4. And yet, we still have an awful stigma in our culture, we still don't have good universal access to all the necessary mental healthcare. I really hope it gets better within my lifetime.
I guess I keep chugging along, telling the world about my experiences, attempting to help other people with mental illness get through their struggles.
My mom's cousin has schizophrenia. I'd see John at all the family get-togethers growing up, but I never knew that he had it. It just wasn't something we talked about. Maybe it was more understood amongst the grownups but I just always thought he was a socially awkward person. John's parents left him a trust fund to help him get through the rest of his life financially after they were gone. He's actually doing much better these days, living in a group home, getting his medication shots regularly. But he's lived a relatively lonely life as far as I can tell. There are good things out of his story, but I want so much more for Adam. I want Adam to be a schizophrenia success stories, not just merely surviving his illness. I don't know how I got onto the topic of Adam again, but I guess he's been on my mind a lot lately.
I hope my friend doesn't have schizophrenia; I don't think he does, but it pops in my mind a lot when I think of mental illness with a relatively young male. My mother-in-law reminded me that schizophrenia hits 1% of the population. That doesn't necessarily sound like much, but she related it to Adam's graduating high school class of around 800 and how 8 people out of that group likely have it. Eight.
I don't have a good way of ending this blog post; it definitely ended up a little bit jumbled, but that's what you get when I write out my thoughts. Farewell until next time. All you wonderful people out there supporting me now, please keep Adam and my friend in your thoughts.
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