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The holidays are a time of joy for many. For others, particularly those with mental illness both diagnosed and undiagnosed, they are a time of struggle with depression, Seasonal Affective Disorder, and substance abuse.
Getting help for the substance abuse and for the underlying mood or other mental disorder can be a life or death matter. He was the life of the party, the guy who spiked the punch at the Senior Party. He used his sense of humor to cover up his dyslexia, which in the fifties was more commonly known as stupidness. He was a good boy, though: an Eagle Scout, a Boys Stater, class president two years. He was voted Man About Town by his senior class of 1955 and he dated the most beautiful sophomore cheerleader. He always had pocket money, not because his dad was rich, but because he got a job at the furniture store when he was twelve. He wasn't going to work for his dad. He decided that if his dad wasn't putting gas in his car (a 1940s Hudson) or clothes on his back, then the Old Swede wouldn't be telling him what he could and couldn't do. He was South Dakota's James Dean, started smoking at 14 and drinking about the same time, since Whitey Lusebrink would sell him beers under the counter and way, way off the books. Back then you could drink 3.2 beer at 18 so what was the big deal? With a September birthday, he turned 18 in the first weeks of Senior Year. That made him instantly the most popular guy in school. This was the fall that Bill Haley and the Comets Rocked around the clock. It crept up so insidious and perverse. Here was the town's Golden Boy, his mother's pride and joy, who went on to college and an advanced degree in counseling, with a deadly addiction hidden so deep no one knew. His wife, whom he married at 33 when he was finaly ready to settle down, had no idea. She saw a brilliant counselor ready to save everyone from themselves in the age of narcissism that was the late 60s and early 70s. He began a stunning career where he pulled inner city teens literally off the streets and some of them grew into the people God meant them to be. Some of them relapsed. Some of them died.
The copyright of the article The Bottle in the Closet in Mental Illness is owned by Amy Hillgren Peterson. Permission to republish The Bottle in the Closet in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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