Potato Survior

Tonight we went to a birthday celebration for a woman who is a cancer survivor. She gave a talk filled with gratitude for all the people who supported her. My prayers and hopes go out to her and her family. My younger sister was a cancer survivor for many years until her cancer came back and she died. However, there is more hope today for cancer survivors. For although there still is no cure, there are effective treatments to overcome cancer and keep the cancer in remission. At this celebration I was talking with a young woman who is a survivor of a mental illness. Like cancer there is no cure for mental illnesses, but unlike cancer there is no remission and, to my knowledge, never a time to celebrate overcoming the illnesses. Besides the disease, persons with a mental illness suffer a stigma from society, something fortunately people with cancer do not need to face. We call persons with a mental illness, mentally ill, but would never call persons with cancer, cancerous. Mental illnesses are associated with a person’s being, unlike all other diseases. Yet one of four persons has a mental illness or knows someone with it and is affected. Insurance companies do not give parity, equal coverage, to mental illnesses as to other illnesses. Even soldiers who fought for our country do not get the quality of treatment for mental illnesses, like post-dramatic syndrome, they receive for other, physical, injuries. When the mind or brain gets sick it is a terrible thing and made worse by our treatment. Is there a lesson from the garden that we can apply to this discrimination for persons with mental illnesses?

Sometimes in a garden a vegetable or plant takes an unusual shape, is not typical and looks different. But unlike a person with a mental illness that may look or act differently, we celebrate the difference. In the Shawano County fair there was a special competition for unusual looking vegetables. In fact in some earlier primitive societies people with a mental illness, persons who heard voices and acted differently, were, like the unusual vegetables, celebrated. Being different in mind was a gift, not a burden. Persons with a mental illness do not need to be seen as gifted, but it would be nice if they got equal treatment as persons with other illnesses. For persons with mental illnesses are lifelong survivors.

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