Mental health
YOU might have seen this one bone-heap of a boy with a big sack stuffed with rusty tin cans and plastic bottles. You were perhaps irked as well when he clung on the jeepney rear. He was some good distance from the junkshop, the day’s rounds carried him to the city’s outskirts.
This riled up the jeepney driver, too, he pulls over to shoo the guttersnipe away. Bad day, you see, so he drove a kick to the boy’s thigh. But that hardly counted as hurt. It was life as it was and hardly surprising. There was no mercy; whatever mercy meant anyway. Time toughened this nut to the core. Domestic life was worse, some grim fiction of sorts. In the few times he had gone to school, he saw no connection between what was taught and the conditions at home. You have seen this boy, or at least as some passing vision as you went about your day, worrying about work or reading news that your beloved congressman said “Aye! Aye!” to death penalty.
Pretty sure you saw that boy, and probably forgot about him as he shied away from peripheral vision. And yet his invisibility does not dissolve the line that connects that ordinary day to the eventful strangling of a victim by the roadside or when bankers and coffers are riddled with bullets.
My undergrad education in psychiatric nursing taught me that psychopaths don’t arrive in crime scenes without a traceable causality. The mind is a mesh. The complex wiring of the human psyche is not shaped solely by life’s circumstances, but by chemical imbalances as well. In there is a grand cytopolis (cell city) where police work doesn’t always succeed. The real “Inception,” the character Cobb in the movie should know, takes place in reality, not in a dream state. You probably looked down on failed individuals for being so defeated in life, but you have no idea of the million short circuits in their brain. Some of them beyond repair or reform, unless perhaps by some incredible hypnosis or dark sorcery. As a teacher, I often wonder that if we allow students with physical disability some leeway, why not those with emotional disability, too? The itinerant, introverted bipolar who, after a long absence, shows up and shine the brightest in class?
A humanistic view tells us that society itself is just as guilty in impairing individuals in their feeble age, and we ought to share in the guilt each time a crime blows up in our faces in primetime news. If we are to hang a criminal to death, all of us should be next in line.
Literature shares the view. In fact, that is literature’s magical gift to humanity – a deeper comprehension of human nature. Characters don’t pop out in stories like chipmunks from a hat. The brief arch in which they exist as we read them only highlights the more telling moments in their lives. We’re hinted of back stories or dished with flashbacks if only to shed some context, some explanation on their current nature. A deed only makes sense in light of the past. That even as narrative ends surprise us, they are unarguably inevitable.
So I am one in the push for a national mental health policy, and that at once means an opposition to reintroducing capital punishment. An Al Jazeera interview during the campaign season showed candidate Duterte (playing “tatay” to commercial sex workers by the roadside) saying prostitution is a health issue. Pretty impressive, and if only he could use the same tack in arguing that drug addiction or even criminality are also mental health issues. That will be the day, one policy speech stripped of the old cussing.
Sen. Risa Hontiveros, in pushing for the Mental Health Law, cited a research that said one out of five adult Filipinos suffer from mental or psychiatric disorder. Some strange math leads one to believe that this is wrong, especially in the case of the legislative majority.