A columnist’s lament and House of Hope
Those of you who enjoy reading opinion pieces really should check out the column “IamGenM” for works by my friend Hyacinth Tagupa from a national broadsheet. A really deep and serious thinker, she’s written on a wide range of topics, including but not limited to: childhood, education, feminism, the media, politics, ordinary life (in Mindanao in general, and in Cagayan de Oro in particular) and of course, writing itself.
One of the causes that Hyacinth holds dear is mental health, and especially depression. In one column, she writes: “The fact is that mental health conditions are as real and valid as physical ones. One persisting misconception is that mental illnesses are concocted to excuse poor decisions and behaviors. When someone has no motivation to get out of bed and has lost interest in activities, these behaviors are still often attributed to laziness or lethargy, and so rarely taken as symptoms of depression, which they are.”
Shortly after Linkin Park frontman Chester Bennington took his own life last year, Hyacinth had this to say: “It is unfortunate that it had to take the death of a well-known Sun.Star Cagayan de Oro accepts articles, contributions, comments and just about anything worth publishing that happen within your community. Hand-carry them to the SunStar office at the ground floor of Unit 5 BM Building, Dabatian St. Carmen, Cagayan de Oro City or send them through email at cdosunstar@gmail.com or cdosunstar@ gmail.com. Please include your complete name and address. You may also send us text messages through 09264149606. Headlines of news stories published at SunStar are also available in our website www.sunstar. com.ph/ cagayan-de-oro. person to spark this conversation again, and to again lay bare the myths surrounding mental health. Paying attention to these issues is not idealizing it, and neither is suffering from them. On the contrary, if we pay attention to the objective, unsentimental facts, we’d understand a little better that there is nothing romantic about someone wanting to die.”
Having spoken with the psychiatric nurses at the House of Hope Foundation in Lumbia, I’ve learned that while it’s truly very sad that people with mental conditions get committed – if not neglected, ostracized, or worse, abandoned – in no small part due to the stigma that comes with being diagnosed with such illnesses, even more unfortunate is the fact that the humble yet ever-faithful House of Hope isn’t just the major mental institution in the region, it’s the only one. And this is to say nothing of how most nurses shy away from a career in psychiatry because it can only pay so much for the long, thankless, and sometimes dangerous hours they must work.
Nevertheless, true to their institution’s name, the House of Hope nurses persist in their work while at the same time hoping that the current administration would give mental health more consideration than it had been given in the past. That could mean more subsidies for the upkeep of charitable mental institutions such as theirs and incentives for psychiatric nurses like increased salaries.
But while all this remains a “maybe” and not an “indeed it is the case” for mental health institutions and practitioners, only God knows how many people in this country suffer silently, too ashamed to seek out help and too doubtful of the remedies available to them that they instead continue to lead, as Henry David Thoreau famously put it, “lives of quiet desperation.”
(To be continued)