Galley Girl: What got you interested in the subject of mental illness?
Bebe Moore Campbell: I have a mentally ill family member. So I've been coping with my loved one's disease, which is bipolar disorder, for about nine years. That really opened the door for my learning about mental illness, about 72-hour holds, about mania and episodes, and everything that I touch upon in the book.
GG: What kind of other research did you do for the book?
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BARBARA DUMETS
Author Bebe Moore Campbell |
BMC: I'm a co-founder of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill-Inglewood (California). NAMI is a 27-year-old advocacy organization for mentally ill people and their family members. Our chapter is kind of the new kid on the block. In that capacity, I work as a facilitator with the support group, and I hear a lot of stories. We teach a 12-week course on the major brain diseases. I trained for that. So I've learned about this just through my own means, but NAMI has played a critical role in increasing my education.
GG: You compare bipolar disease to slavery. Why?
BMC: Bottom line: you can't get out of either one of them alone. You absolutely need help. In the same way that slavery had absolute control over human beings, mental illness has absolute control over human beings, and in fact, turns many people into completely different people.
GG: Do you have a sense of how frequently mental illness is as severe as Trina's?
BMC: Bipolar disorder exists in a little more than 1.5% of the population — several million people. The latest research says that mental illness is increasing. Depression and anxiety disorders happen more frequently than do disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. One out of four families will face mental illness in their lifetime. These diseases cannot be cured at this point, but they can be controlled with a combination of therapy, sometimes medication. Certainly having a good diet, basic and proper nutrition is helpful. Also, in many cases, designing your life so that it is as stress-free as possible.
GG: Do you find that people have a lot of misconceptions about these illnesses?
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BMC: Oh, yes. I think that the word crazy brings all kinds of connotations to people. We feel that the mentally ill are violent, and some of them are when they're not in treatment. However, mentally ill people are more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators of violence. The other myth is that somehow, this is a by-product of bad parenting. The research shows is that mental illness has a genetic component. So it's more a DNA thing than a parenting thing, although there are environmental factors and triggers, and stress triggers and trauma triggers and drug triggers as well.
GG: Do you think that the African-American community has special concerns about mental illness?
BMC: Absolutely. People of color feel the stigma more keenly. No one, regardless of race or gender, wants to say, I do not have control of my mind. No one wants to say, My family member doesn't have control of his or her mind. But African-Americans and people of color already feel stigmatized by virtue of our race. Therefore we really don't want to own up to something else that could be used against us. So we're going to go into complete denial. The other part of that is African-Americans don't trust the medical establishment. We remember the experiments that took place in Tuskegee, and we know that we're more likely to be misdiagnosed and overmedicated. So we're very, very suspicious of the medical community, especially when they're handing out drugs for the mind, as we should be. But we're putting ourselves in harm's way when we don't press for better diagnosis, better treatment. Because when we go into denial, what's going to happen far more often than not, is that those people with mental illnesses are going to wind up self-medicating with alcohol, with drugs. So then you're going to have a dual-diagnosis problem. And sooner or later they're going to run into the police, and they're going to be incarcerated. We're already disproportionately part of the penal system, and a high percentage of those people in jail have mental illnesses.
GG: All of your books are issue-oriented. How did that become your chosen genre?
BMC: My mother was a social worker, and so I grew up with a lot of social workers for friends. And the era, the backdrop for my life, was the civil-rights movement. So that comes quite naturally to me. To me, there's no point in writing merely to entertain. I have to entertain, because if I don't entertain you, you're not going to continue reading. But if I'm not out to enlighten, or change your mind about something, or change your behavior, then I really don't want to take the journey.