Conclusiones preliminares

Meeting the shadow of Shamus once again lead me towards an understanding of something of the shunning my son had experienced in the last few years of his life. This feeling of shame, sometimes on behalf of myself, sometimes on behalf of my son, overwhelmed what remained of my inner feelings of fear: all sense of fear vanished – and the feeling of pain in my stomach vanished too. My grief had been tamed, it had become manageable. Not vanquished, but rendered manageable. A feeling of grief remained, but it was now a clear-cut emotion. It was simply grief, unclouded by fear.

However the feeling of shame persisted. In the figure of Shamus, the shadowy fear-driven spectre of shame my son had invented in a psychotherapy session towards the end, I saw personified not only shame, but also stigma, and silence/silencing – the kind of silence that surrounds taboo topics such as those addressed in my son’s story – depression, mental illness, suicidality, substance use, dual diagnosis, psychosis.

When my son died, a friend suggested I buy a new address book. People will drop you, she said in a matter-of-fact tone. In a small town like mine, to step out into the world is to step onto a very small stage and the process of othering can be

painfully obvious. Sometimes the unfriending I have experienced has been a sudden shock. It is as if I am …

And that is what I do not know. In this feeling of being shunned, I experience the becoming of stranger, as it dawns on me that I might be perceived to be a parent responsible in some way for her son’s death?

Whether or not these thoughts had any foundation in truth, the process of being made to feel other was happening to me, as gradually I turned from friend to stranger in some contexts. Shunning is a way of societal punishment well described in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel, The Scarlet Letter. While society might dress the other in the invisible garment woven of societal gossip and hearsay, that garment is normally composed of old news and past facts now superseded by a new reality – but sadly the old attitude prevails.

Stigma, like social distancing achieves no therapeutic purpose. Instead, it can compound feelings of shame. In the wake of this thrusting of judgment upon someone afflicted by mental illness – and upon their families – all I can think of now is the word “loneliness”. The powerlessness of the one shunned is exemplified in their silencing. There is no one to speak back to, no one to defend a case against. No one sets out to become an addict. Knowing the shunning will happen and is happening, a young person shunned complies, is complicit with, the silencing. Is it any surprise young people sometimes slip back into old habits, into bad company, if only to avoid the loneliness?

While this thesis does not delve into the issue of my son’s friendships and peer relationships, some degree of loss of friendship groups was apparent to me as he battled his mental illness and addiction problems.

In our small community, the process of connecting, as opposed to the process of othering, becomes clear-cut in relationships with those involved in drug-related issues. Connecting with people involved in difficult issues seems to be too hard for some people, a difficulty or resistance that bears the hallmarks of othering – “others of similarity, others of difference”(Chang, 2008, p. 133). Aware that this shunning is sometimes done with an intent to help those thought to be “doing the wrong thing”, I turned to the literature to see how young people so rejected are affected, to learn that cures lie in the opposite direction to shaming and shunning, which not only

exacerbate the very social isolation that is symptomatic of problems (R. E. Hoffman, 2007), they also entrench barriers to help-seeking (Clement et al., 2015). We might just as well exhort someone with depression to “pull their socks up” and get over it.

In his last year I arranged a mentorship for François. I have since come to think of this period of mentoring as a way of filling the gap left by not attending university – as a kind of home-schooling for university-aged youth. “J” was decades older than François, and proved to be a mentor who could feed François’ intellect in a way that brought him out of the fogginess that his psychiatric medicine seemed to produce. “J” would visit our home for a couple of hours a week of sustained rigorous conversation. They would both read a novel in advance of their meeting and discuss it in depth in the course of an afternoon. François would stay up all night finishing a novel, say by Umberto Eco or J. M. Coetzee, to discuss with his mentor the next day. These conversations – quite literally about “life, the universe, and everything” – were ostensibly centred around a literary work or a movie, but they free-ranged into

philosophy and religion, and also into other issues François would have found hard to talk with us about. Despite their age difference, they shared a keen intellect and sense of humour. Occasionally their discussions would spill over into animated discussions with other family members, and we would catch glimpses of the “old” François once again. Sometimes their conversation would come to a halt if I walked through the living room to the kitchen, and resume once I had closed the door again.

François was deeply engaged in the studies they undertook together and this was one of the few times in the week I could really be sure my son was happy. I knew from my time in youth studies how important mentoring relationships could be for young people. In 2000, the literature focusing on mentorships and underachieving gifted young men was “almost nonexistent” (Hebert & Olenchak, 2000). The benefits of mentorships for young people with mental health problems is outlined in several studies (DeWit, 2016; Jivanjee et al., 2009).

Chapter 5