This story in the NYT moved me deeply and for different reasons.
A story about a deeply talented woman who slowly descended into mental illness, dying homeless on the street.
Numerous people knew her and tried to help her. No one, it seemed, could convince her that she needed help. She was convinced she had things under control until the day she died.
She had been molested by a step-father after her mother remarried. It was a secret she kept from only a few people.
Paranoia and erratic behavior started sometime in college and became worse as she grew older. She was never formally treated for her abuse, never saw a counselor, never processed anything, never had medication. The abuse literally killed her.
I am hopeful as brain science and especially neuropsychology continue to grow, we'll begin to understand better the different between mental illness and symptoms related to trauma. No I don't consider them the same.
Nakesha most likely wasn't someone with mental illness. I'll just say that; I'll take a risk. I will wager that if she'd grown up in a house without abuse, I'd put serious money down that today she'd be some version of what everyone saw: a talented woman with unlimited potential in multiple areas.
We are still being educated about and understanding the role trauma plays in mental illness. This example: a pilot is training to fly commercial airplanes and in a freak accident, is tragically blinded. No one would wonder why he's no longer training to be a pilot. Cause/effect.
If someone is molested, especially as a child by an authority figure, they will have issues. They can be on a spectrum from successfully managing the damage to suicide, but it changes your brain.
So yeah, she was ill, but shouldn't it be, she was molested and the mental illness started when she could no longer keep her shit together? The two are connected.
No one will know if she would have become paranoid and erratic without being molested. Guaranteed, it played a role.
How we talk about things matters. Mental illness to me feels like something you catch, like the flu. It's sort of hard not to get it in the winter. You can take some precautions, like getting a flu shot and washing your hands, but yeah, it's out there. Could be you next, super random.
Much of what we call mental illness are symptoms of trauma, not genetic directives of how your life will unfold. I'm uncomfortable calling myself mentally ill. I've been traumatized. I'm a trauma survivor; I'm not ill. In fact, I'm strong, I'm a survivor.
Nakesha was a survivor too. She lived as a homeless person for almost twenty years after leaving college. She carried her trauma all those decades, and understandably, she never escaped it.
I'll be glad for the day when we all understand this, when we're all more clear about the cause/effect of trauma on the brain, of what molestation does to identity formation, when parents get kids out of situations of abuse no matter what the cost.
The only thing positive for me about this story is my heart didn't start racing; I didn't get triggered. I'm recovering. I could so easily have been Nakesha. There's only a few things that kept me from going down a very, very dark road. I'm slowly regaining my life, but what a cost its been.