March 24, 2006

Mental illness doesn’t always show

By Erin Halcomb
Tidings Correspondent

Ever since Deborah Weiner died, Steve Weiner’s been saying inscrutable things.

“After my sister’s suicide, I decided I wasn’t going to my grave silent just to look good for other people,” Steve says. Suspenders support his cuffed blue jeans.

Steve Weiner, publisher of the bi-monthly journal “The Suspicious Humanist,” talks about how mental illnesses can be anything but readily apparent. Orville Hector | Ashland Daily Tidings

Deborah was a radio personality and social worker in Santa Barbara. Her death shocked the community, in part because, “she expended a tremendous amount of energy looking like she had it all together,” says Steve, lounging in an armchair.

He sits, a full gray beard abutting his barrel chest, in the community room of the Star Thistle housing complex. Named after a noxious weed, the 12-unit complex indicates stigmas surrounding, and offers subsidized housing to, the mentally ill.

“You never know what’s going on with another person; assume they may be suffering — a lot,” he says. His blue eyes seldom blink when he speaks.

“I decided if I felt helpless, then I would ask for help,” he says.

His friend Rachael Rusch admires him for this awareness.

“It’s great,” she says, “he’ll just lay it out. He’s really thought about things and is very articulate.”

“It’s not that big of deal,” she continues, “he can call and bounce something off me, or I drive him to an appointment now and then.”

Yet these actions earned her the title “Queen of Mitzvah” from Steve.

“Not everyone would do that. Rachael is special,” Steve asserts.

But she contests, “if I experienced things like him, I wouldn’t want to go by myself either.” And she values the opportunity for personal growth.

“I’ve learned by being friends with Steve,” Rachael reflects, “because mental illness tends to be an invisible diagnosis, it’s important to have as much compassion for a person with mental illness as a person with physical illness.”

The malfunction of a leg induces empathy easier than a misfire in the mind. The community room at Star Thistle often harbors this discussion — what it’s like to look “normal” but to think, feel, fear in extremes.

“If you saw us on the bus,” Steve says, our suffering “wouldn’t even occur to you.” He laments that the invisibility of mental illness encumbers compassion, furthers isolation and discredits “how we’re really feeling,” which he says “is like hell.”

“Nothing robs you of your self-confidence and self-esteem like the delusion that you are inadvertently evil,” he says.

Steve fears he commits crimes in his sleep. He suffers from solipsism, the belief that nothing exists except him. Like mental cyclones, fears of earthquakes, the end of the universe and spiteful people on the street “ratchet around and around and around in my brain,” he says.

“My standard line is: ‘Do you hate me?’ I try to stop myself because it can be really annoying and people don’t know how to take it,” he says.

“Even though I know it’s not true,” he says, “I get stuck.”

“I think I’m paranoid because my parents were Communists,” he says, during the McCarthy era. At 14, Steve first visited a psychiatrist with fears of being homosexual and turning into a girl. Over time, many a psychiatrist has thumbed through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Steve.

“I’ve had so many diagnoses applied to me,” he says, now 54.

Yet few admit swift understanding: arthritis, depression, diabetes. Some sound familiar but Steve helps to spell, fibromyalgia and sleep apnea. Others, the disorders — obsessive compulsive, schizoeffective and paranoid schizophrenic — stall acceptance.

But Steve motors on. He ices his bum knee and takes dance classes. The Stanford graduate ingests anti-psychotics and tuna fish sandwiches. He pops 19 pills a day — methadone to migraine relievers — reads and writes.

“I try to overcome my mental and physical illness with writing,” he says.

Steve publishes The Suspicious Humanist, a journal started by his father in Sausalito, Calif., in 1972.

“My goal is to print the Humanist every two months, if I can afford it,” he says. He uses his disability and social security income to print 175 copies. He distributes them to friends, public libraries and coffee houses. The April/May edition of The Suspicious Humanist will include book reviews on “The Four Agreements,” by Don Miguel Ruiz, and “Unholy Alliance,” by David Horowitz,” and an essay on Ashland as a new-age town.

Interrupting Steve, a boy stands in the hallway of the community room. He repeats, “I just wanted to show you, it’s not a weapon.” He holds a wooden knife.

“Come on — let’s go to my pad,” Steve says, lifting out of the armchair. He whisks by the boy and unlocks the door with a “One Human Family” sticker. Once inside his apartment he relocks and exhales.

“That guy has no insight into his mental illness,” Steve commands. Moving into his kitchen space, cluttered with 44 prescription pill bottles, he details, “I called his parents and the police,” after the boy yelled and banged on doors in the night.

A friend of Steve’s knocks on the door. Here to cut Steve’s hair, neither she nor her boyfriend, Grant, long to report on their afflictions. She grabs the clippers.

“I used to live next door,” she explains trimming Steve’s silver sideburns. “But,” she says, breaking into a beautiful smile, “living with a group of crazy people was too much for me.”

She laughs and looks like a college-aged girl, dark hair reaching her waist. “I was the opposite of Steve,” she says, explaining briefly her fears that everyone was evil except her.

Grant, thin with dreamy blue eyes, tucks himself away on Steve’s couch. He confesses softly that nothing seems real. He suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and deals in part, by politely remaining quiet.

Steve digs out $5 to offer his hairstylist. The young couple heads to dinner. It’s impossible not to think: they seem so normal.

Steve cringes. “You don’t know their reality,” he reminds “You only know their behavior.” His blue eyes seldom blink when he speaks.