Mental Health Month: Overcoming Stigma and Taboo

Today on #mentalhealthday I want to pay homage to the advances education has accomplished in making society understand mental health is a public health matter and the most misunderstood because it has been arrested and distorted by stigma and taboo. In February of 1987 at the age of 17 and while a junior at Syracuse University, I was forcefully committed to a psychiatric ward in Upstate New York for six months after sharing a suicide dream with a counselor. My first memoir is a testimony of that harrowing journey through a medieval like system of mental health care for which my accent, my Puerto Rican origins, and my imaginary were fertile ground for exploitation. And so today I also want to hold space for the repression, fascism, and cruelty that the history of mental health care has nurtured and the lives it has destroyed through a pharmaceutical driven market economy of public health and by a rampant cultural emotional poverty. In a country where the economic growth is powered in part by supporting unregulated pharmaceuticals and growing illness and not in preventing it, democracy is undermined. A market economy that places money and corporate greed above democratic principles built on the socratic mandate that we are all responsible for all is a threat to democracy. In this context, today I name #NotMyPresident Donal Trump the ultimate symbol of the repressive history of the mental health care system that still imprisons citizens in the stray jackets of opioids, ignorance, bigotry, and anti immigration group delusional fantasies and I remind myself that the solution lies in fostering higher and higher levels of emotional intelligence, empathy, consciousness as Alex Falco Chang--our creative director at www.americasforconservation.org--amazing posters here show. Quote from "The Ladies Gallery: A Memoir of Family Secrets: 

"MARCH 1, 1954. In the afternoon, a young woman together with three men entered the House of Representatives of the United States of America and opened fire. Next day, the front page of the New York Times would show the same woman wrapped in the revolutionary flag of Puerto Rico, her left fist raised high. What the Times would not quote were her words, “I did not come here to kill. I came here to die.” An old battle cry of Puerto Rican nationalism. She would be sentenced to fifty-seven years in prison for assault and conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States.

MARCH 1, 1977. On the twenty-third anniversary of the attack on Congress, her daughter commits suicide in Puerto Rico. The mother is flown secretly to the island for a day to attend the funeral.

FEBRUARY 1, 1987. A gray winter day: the daughter’s daughter becomes a suicidepatient at Hutchings Psychiatric Hospital, in Syracuse, New York. Repetition informs my life. A teacher of mine once told me not to fear repetition, “Just don’t be blacklisted by it.” Well, I am the product of repetitions. Of family secrets. Every family has its own; usually it is the untold family story a child is destined unwittingly to repress, or to repeat. We inherit these secrets the way we inherit shame, guilt, desire. And we repeat."

“Lolita Lebrón’s granddaughter, heir to the most public female embodiment of heroic self-sacrifice in Puerto Rico in this century, has written a memoir full of searing, intimate truths, silences broken open to reveal the personal costs of public mythmaking . . .A momentous act of courage.” —Women’s Review of Books

“This memoir introduces us to a writer bound to make an impact . . . An autobiography as fantastic as any novel . . .It is a mark of Vilar’s art that her story seems warm and alive.” —Boston Globe

“Just as artist Frida Kahlo’s splintered self-portraits and diaries personify Mexico’s proud yet fragmented self-image, Vilar’ s intimate accounts about herself and her family personalize Puerto Rico’s political, social, and cultural wars for its identity.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Startling, raw, and affecting, a painful exercise in which memoir as therapy becomes memoir as art.” —Philadelphia Inquirer, Notable Book of the Year

“Stunning. A lyrical and visionary memoir of depression, Puerto Rican identity, and young womanhood.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)