Thread by @spatula75

I've been reading "The Center Cannot Hold" lately, and something in the prose reminded me of an incident to which I bore witness in 5th or maybe 6th grade which reminded me of how far we've come understanding mental illness (though we have a long way to go yet) 1/9 #mentalillness

I was attending a school for the gifted, and in those days there were few enough of us that we all got bused to this school once a week with other kids from all around the county. 2/9

After lunch one day, one of my peers who I knew but not well had what could best be described as a psychotic episode. He began laughing to himself and singing, "vomit, vomit like you're sick" repeatedly. Our teacher was, of course, appalled at him and asked him to stop... 3/9

...but as he was not in control of his actions, he didn't stop, and apparently *couldn't* stop. Her reaction to this was to become enraged and haul him off to the front office to be disciplined for his disruptive behavior. 4/9

I was probably 10 or 11 years old at the time, yet it was CLEAR to me that he was not in control of himself, that this wasn't something he WANTED to be doing, but he was being driven by some unseen mental force to do it anyway. 5/9

To the teacher, though, he was just "bad" and needed to be punished for it. I never saw him at the school again. The following week, she mentioned him and said that he'd sung this nonsense phrase all the way to the office and kept singing it once there. 6/9

And yet at no point did it ever occur to her that there might be something legitimately and seriously wrong with him neurologically, biologically, or psychologically. To her, it was simple: he was bad and had to be punished for it. 7/9

Needless to say, I think hers was the wrong approach, and at the time I wondered how on earth it could be that a 10- or 11-year-old kid could see it, but none of the adults in this school seemed to get it. 8/9

I hadn't thought about this incident in *decades*, but I hope that somewhere along the line, someone took a notion to see a more nuanced picture of that kid and got him the help he needed. 9/9

#mentalhealth

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