Life in the 1800s

I wish I could have stopped my daughter’s suicide.  If I could have stopped her from hanging herself, even if I didn’t succeed, it would mean that parents have the power to keep their children who are struggling with mental illness alive.

Parents don’t have that kind of power.

Before antibiotics and immunizations and public health awareness, the death of a child was a tragic, but commonplace event.  It was so commonplace as to border on the expected, and families had many, many children with the hope that at least some would survive.

A family living in the United States in the 1800s would not have understood that their dying child had a condition curable with a round of penicillin; indeed, penicillin was yet to be invented.  Whatever else that family felt upon the death of their child, it is easy to imagine that guilt was not part of the equation. 

A brief 200 years later and we are less humble in the face of illness.  We expect to be able to predict illness, recognize it, categorize it, study it on the internet and subject ourselves to a treatment to fix it.  We are exceedingly fortunate that this modern expectation is realistic for a broad range of ailments that used to kill people by the thousands.

But we, whose lives are touched by suicide, are still that family living in the 1800s.  We don’t know what to hope for, we are humbled by the power of disease, and we grieve deeply.  We also know – even as we struggle to believe – that we are not at fault.

The doctors and scientists working on mental illness today are pioneers that deserve our support.  They are making progress every day.  But mental illness is still - too often - a fatal disease that whispers through a brain, takes root, and destroys all in its path.

And parents are essentially powerless, but to love,  in the face of the fury.