How We Know What We Know - Part I
What life with mentally ill parents has taught me about the power of internal logic
This post is kind of about politics, but it mostly isn’t. I guess that makes it politics-adjacent. But what does that mean? Well, at the very least, it means this post isn’t going to be a typical politics-themed op-ed in which I make a case for or against any particular candidate. It also means it’s not going to involve any sort of analysis about the state of our political polarization or the deterioration in the civility of our political discourse. Instead, I want to tell you a story.
I decided to write this piece after reaching a saturation point with all the campaigning and harrowing messaging that’s been going on around me nonstop for the last 6 months. I never have tried to count, but I’d be willing to guess that I have received several hundred political fundraising texts in the past six months. Approximately one quarter of them have been from my former Congressman in Texas, who’s currently running for a Senate seat, but all the others have been addressed to Charity, Gerard, or Aaron, none of which are names I answer to. Charity and Aaron get a lot of texts from Democratic PACs, and Gerard gets texts from pro-Trump PACs. There seems to be a non-partisan preference for using ALL CAPS and multiple exclamation points. Some texts guarantee an amazing outcome if I donate. Others guarantee catastrophe if I don’t. We’ve had both Republican and Democratic canvassers knock on our door to stump for their candidates and leave us literature (for lack of a better word). Both Democrats and Republicans argue that democracy itself is at stake. Or public safety. Or the economy. Or life as we know it, which, depending on who you are and what you have going on in your life, could be interpreted as either a good thing or a bad thing. And whether we’re watching the Olympics or a U.S. Open tennis match or the weather, the same political attack ads are put before us over and over, second in frequency only to the same three pharmaceutical ads. There are also the social media posts of my real-life friends, in my private feed, where a broad variety of views are presented.
If you listen, just listen, to everyone who’s determined (or merely willing) to share his or her opinion, you begin to realize that earnest and serious people on both sides of the political spectrum fully believe that the other side is the one filled with aspiring totalitarians, haters, fear-mongers, and incompetent buffoons. They all have the TikTok or YouTube videos, Insta reels, podcast episodes, blog posts, and online articles to prove it.
But as I said, I want to tell you a story. So let me get on with it. Here’s part I. Other parts will follow.
I.
When I was nine and my dad was forty-one, he developed major depression—the kind that’s so intense it robs a person of his will to live and entices him toward self-harm. Remarkably, he checked himself into a hospital before he could act on his impulses. This was not something Taiwanese immigrants did in the early eighties. As far as I know, it’s not something they do now. Years later, he would tell me he did so because of his sense of responsibility to my little brother and me. For our sake, he had to find a way to go on.
Two weeks after he checked himself into the psych ward, he emerged with two prescription antidepressants in hand. I remember some of the side effects of his medications, that they made him feel sleepy and irritable. They also made it hard for him to go to the bathroom either way. The latter was a frequent topic of discussion because the problem often threatened to make him late for work. But when I was ten and my dad was forty-two, he started to exhibit symptoms that were more significant than bathrooming nuisances. He developed a thought disorder.
We didn’t know what to call it or even how to think about it. We just knew that he started to perceive things that the rest of us did not: voices giving him instructions, hidden meanings and menaces behind mundane things like planes that flew over our house, coughs and sneezes, the color of someone’s shirt, specific words like “okay” or “sure,” the direction the neighbor parked his car, the pushing of a chair under the table, the clearing of a throat, the jingling of change in the pocket. Three decades, later—a little late, if you ask me—we would learn that emerging research at the time had already started to show that the class of antidepressants he was taking could exacerbate and even precipitate psychosis.
My mother never needed the evidence of academics—neither their retrospective meta-analyses nor their randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trials—to make this connection. She didn’t inhabit the world of n=1000 subjects and statistical significance. Neither did my brother and me. We inhabited the world of n=1, the only n that mattered. She saw the alarming descent of her husband into madness, coupled with only limited improvement in his mood, and drew her own conclusions. In the course of a year, almost two, the psychiatrists and their chemicals had not only failed to make her husband better, but they had also somehow managed to break him. Her trust, tentatively given one year prior to a care system entirely foreign to her, had been irrevocably broken. It would be thirty years before Dad stepped foot in another psychiatrist’s office.
My mother shared her anguish over the phone with her sister, who still lived in Taiwan and worked as a university educator and administrator. My aunt told her she had recently learned about an American doctor who was having quite a bit of success treating mental illness with nutrients. “His book is required reading for a class that one of our faculty is teaching. I’ll track it down and mail you a copy.” Before long, the book Mental and Elemental Nutrients: A Physician’s Guide to Nutrition and Health Care (1976) by Carl Pfeiffer, PhD, MD appeared on our dining table. It became my mother’s bible. She pored over every page, underlining and highlighting, with an English-Chinese dictionary next to it because of the language barrier. When she finished reading it, she contacted the author’s organization, the Brain Bio Center in Princeton, NJ, and arranged to have test kits sent to her. Following their instructions, she figured out how to collect and send his hair and blood samples back to the center for analysis. A couple of weeks later, the good folks at the Brain Bio Center mailed back a highly specific therapeutic nutrient regimen. My mother found everything she needed at her local vitamin store and started him on it right away.
Do you wanna know what? It helped. A lot. My dad’s mood improved. His irritability subsided, and his energy and will to live returned. He found joy in things again—movies, TV shows, playing tennis with my brother and me, watching WWF wrestling. Even the auditory hallucinations went away.
But there were two major things my mother couldn’t fix. One was his thought disorder. He continued to see connections and meanings in things that weren’t there. The other was something we would come to understand in the year of our Lord 2023, thanks to the help of a brilliant and compassionate neuropsychiatrist, as his pre-existing autism and baseline neurodivergence. But man, did she try. She operated as a person convinced of her own ability to reason and nutrify him into a completely new man.
I promptly followed her example. I started writing my dad notes and leaving them on the desk in his study.
Dear Dad,
I wish you would be more like Mr. Kessler. He’s so nice and always has a smile on his face. Please think about it.
Love,
Judy
After a few weeks of this, my mother told me to stop writing them. She said they hurt his feelings. Meanwhile, she had moved on from mere reasoning to far more coercive tactics. The belief in her own powers of persuasion and ability to manifest a new reality morphed from hopeful optimism into a compulsive habit. Then it became something of a fixed personality trait. By the time I was twelve, it had turned into a way of life best described as a daily, relentless, despair-driven, and rage-filled crusade.
Part II is coming in a few days.