We’re allowed to say one but not the other – how do we describe that state of mind that sees things that are not there, doesn’t see things that are, hears demons at the window and harpies at the door: a state of painful mind, a state that hinders or undermines function within the generally accepted norm. Does this mean we are allowed to use ‘normal’ as a judgement criterion? He/she isn’t acting ‘normally’. He/she isn’t seeing things the way everyone else (?) is, and this causes distress and disturbance – and possibly danger – to the sufferer and those in contact with her/him.
Both my parents were mentally ill, in the era when it was still possible to use that language without drawing the attention of the woke police. Both were patients in mental hospitals, which only a generation before had been called asylums, or ‘loonie bins’ in schoolboy slang. My mother worked in one, and my father considered it part of his ministry – he was a Church of England priest – to visit the ‘sick’ – the mentally ill  – in the same hospital where my mother worked and where he ended up a patient.  Before he was unwell, he and his priestly colleagues and friends would have beer and sandwiches on a Tuesday lunchtime in each other’s studies and discuss the relationship between mental illness and their failing church. At least I think that’s what they discussed. There was also a lot of talk about the book Honest to God, written by John Robinson, then Bishop of Woolwich, published in 1963. I didn’t read it but will now (maybe). It changed my father’s life, or at least my 12-yr old self was wholly aware that it was a Big Thing for him and his clerical mates.
Some woowoo theories on the causes of cancer maintain that stress and suffering in early life is what brings it on. Not just stress and suffering but particularly that kind of stress and suffering that results from ‘keeping up appearances’, pretending. Pretending that all is well when it’s not. Maintaining smiles in all difficulties.
My father died of myeloma, which is cancer of the bone marrow, and if we go by the woowoo diagnosis above (whose bite-you-in-the-bum downside is, if you can’t conquer it by mind control then what’s really wrong with you), but he spent some weeks in a mental hospital from which he emerged to leave both the church and his marriage.
My mother’s ‘mental illness’ came after my father left her for a woman 30 years his junior – who happened to be the daughter of the chief nursing officer of the mental hospital in which my mother worked and my father had been a patient. She wasn’t a patient at the same mental hospital, but one up the road. She had a ‘breakdown’, but when she came out she never really got back up again. All her life had been about pretending. She considered the expectations laid upon a clergy wife far outside her commitment to her husband, bitterly resented the role not only of clergy wife but of housewife generally, and found her only refuge and sense of herself in her work as chief physiotherapist in said mental hospital.
They were both ‘ill’ in the period when mental illness, or as we would call it now ‘mental health issues’, still came with social stigma attached. My mother tried to get round this by constantly asserting that mental illness was just like any other illness really, or a broken leg or whatever. Easily fixed with the right drugs. Thankfully, that benighted opinion no longer holds water, and wasn’t any use to either of my parents at the time of their suffering. In both cases, my father’s depression and my mother’s erratic, not to say paranoid, behaviour, were as far as I can see the result of living a lie. It’s a dramatic cliché which in this case happens to be true; the strain for my Dad of trying to keep his faith alive in a crumbling institution, and for my Mum of pretending that all was well with her marriage, led them both to deviant behaviour – I use the word without judgemental flavour – that to some extent put both of them at risk, and without question demonstrated their difficulty, if not inability, to deal with ordinary every day life.
I would find my Dad asleep in his armchair when I came home from school at 5pm, his after-lunch nap having occupied four hours of the afternoon; my Mum was a secret alcoholic, constantly disappearing into the ‘larder’ (we lived in a big old house that she complained about not being able to afford to run) to take secret nips from the sherry bottle, and emerging in warrior mode ready to do battle with the pots and pans.
All it takes it to admit to oneself that there is mental disturbance. Then you can seek help. Easier said than done. Psychiatry has moved on, obviously, a great deal since the 1960s; both of them would have benefited from therapy, both singly and as a couple. Certainly in my father’s case the issues went way back to his early infancy and childhood; although his family was not ‘posh’ or wealthy (his own father was also a Church of England priest), he was sent away to boarding school at the age of 7, something that ‘professional’ families did in the 1920s as a matter of course. The scars remained.
Yes, they were ‘ill’ in the sense of unwell, in the sense of being unable to cope. I baulk at the term ‘mental illness’, and think in many ways, despite the advances in psychiatry and social attitudes, that we still have no effective way of managing, as ‘mentally fit’ people, our own attitudes.
Perhaps the only useful trick to conquering that challenge of management lies in the old joke: ‘He suffered from anhedonia and alexithymia, or as a professional psychiatrist would say, he was just plain bonkers.’