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Mental Health III: You Were Never Sick, Get Yourself Better
The third in a series of five essays about Mental Health to celebrate the dog days of August.
Mental Health II: Suicide is Painless
When you have a substitute school bus driver, it doesn’t much affect your life. When you have a substitute teacher, you know you’re in for an easy day. But when you walk into a room to encounter a substitute therapist, you think: this will be useless.
That actually happened to me in 1990. I was still pushing the Sisyphusian rock uphill against my nature, juggling my own firm with a toddler at home and second on the way. My usual therapist, a mousy woman who was neither effective nor harmful in the futile struggle to be happily straight, was absent. In her place sat a man in his early thirties with thick black hair and chiseled features. If he smiled he might have been handsome, though I intuited immediately I would get no smile out of him.
I figured the next forty-five minutes would be a waste, but I’d already forked over my co-pay, so I rattled off my mental health history. By this time, I could hit the high points in eleven minutes, twelve tops.
“You’ve been telling yourself this story for, how long?” His opening gambit was different. “You are gay. There is…
