Not Always Easy To Recognize Mental Illness

For the average person, learning about mental illness in its many forms is an ongoing process from our earlier years right up into our later lives; and in most cases, its likely not a chosen "course of education," but rather a mandatory subject put onto us by life and by our day to day dealings with others and ourselves. As I've written here before, none of us is "sane," whatever that really means, and we all have our eccentricities, feelings of despair and moodiness, but everything tends to be more about degree and frequency of problems. Just to be clear, I'm NOT a mental health professional in ANY way, but I've encountered a lot of people with problems over the decades, so my "education" came from experience, not schooling. 

Decades ago when I was in college (a branch campus), there was a female student named Louise. It's been so long ago, I can't recall some of the details, but she was a bit older than what most people likely think of as "typical college age," and by that I mean, if we say early 20s are "typical," she was more like mid to late 20s.* She had been a student at the school for a few years (I'm sure I once knew the exact number, but that knowledge has long ago slipped from the grasp of my mind), and she knew the teachers and the school administration. In fact, Louise even filled in for the main administrator's secretary on occasion (sickness or some vacation days). She also periodically worked in the school bookstore, which also involved answering the school phone when evening classes were in session. My point is, she was knowledgeable and trusted by the school's administration. I was president of the student body and many students were upset with the possibility of the school losing its affiliation to the main campus of the college. We protested! And as the matter was to be discussed in a committee of the state senate (not the United States Senate), we decided to charter a bus and go to the state capital and protest and try to have our say. Well, there was one problem ... MONEY! After all, we were students and like many students, then and I'm sure now, we weren't exactly rolling in money. Well, those were the days of privately-owned bus companies around the country facing serious financial problems, which eventually saw these transportation companies be reorganized and given a certain amount of public funding. The bus company we wanted to use was in bad shape financially (although the public didn't know all the details at that time), so the head of the company didn't want to make any discounted deals with us, or so we thought. 

 

Louise was not only a long time student at the school, she was involved in a lot of student activities, and she had a connection to this particular bus company because a family member worked there (or had worked there, I just forget), and she knew the head of the company. If I remember right, we were $50 short to charter the bus, an amount equivalent to more than $310 today. Well Louise came to us and said she had talked with the head of the bus company and he had agreed to give us a discount. We took the charter, I spoke to the state senate committee, the bill came, we paid it and everything seemed fine. Now ... when Louise told us about the deal with the bus company, she said the bill would be for the non-discounted amount, but that we only needed to pay the discounted amount and the head of the bus company would apply the discount then. So months went by and not long before the new school year started, the head of the bus company called me and wanted to know where the $50 balance was. I told him what Louise had told us and while he said he did talk with Louise, that he had never agreed to any discount. (Note: By that time, the financial problems of the bus company had become much more public, and the head of the company was asking city council for help, saying the company would go bankrupt if help weren't provided. Notice, there was no macho talk of "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps," or of "thoughts and prayers," trite sayings left to be dispensed to the poor ... oh, the bus company WAS poor! I wonder how all of this works then?) In the meantime over those months since we took the charter bus, but before the head of the company asked about the $50, Louise had also shown open signs of emotional/mental problems, but they were not obvious at first, and remember, we were young college students, generally lacking experience in any such matters.

 

Louise had a "crush" on one of the teachers, but nobody thought anything about such a thing, as other students expressed similar talk about teachers, even going back to junior high school and high school. The thing was, she started telling us "stories" about another professor, a married man, and the stories eventually became about the two meeting for sexual encounters. None of us was terribly shocked; after all, we had all been teenagers in the rambunctious 1960s and we were cool with all of the goings on, and the professor involved was known for making sex references in his classes, bringing chuckles from his students. Then one day the administration office and the neighboring conference room were closed off by police, and an ambulance was outside. It turned out Louise had used the school account at one of the florists to send flowers and plants to a number of faculty members. When there was a big meeting the school would typically order flowers for the conference room, and because Louise periodically worked in the office, she had access to the account at the florist shop. Louise suffered a nervous breakdown that day and they had to restrain her (straight jacket) to get her out of the building. At some point after she was released from the hospital, she slit her wrists, but someone found her before she bled to death. After that she was often very subdued and disengaged, perhaps from medication? I saw her once after college, but unfortunately, a few years after college, she succeeded in killing herself. The "affair" with the one professor was all made up and to my knowledge her stories about him never damaged his career, and he died not all that many years ago, age 90 or more. So this was a lesson I learned at a relatively young age about people with more than a little quirkiness or a few eccentricities. Louise could tell you a story that sounded totally real, with exact conversations she had with the head of the bus company, or with the college professor, but the gist of the conversations were made up; they were delusional. 

 

* Because this was an "urban branch campus," the students for day classes "tended" to be more typical college age, and the class offerings also tended to be more typical first and second year college classes, while a good percentage of evening class students were often anywhere from a few years older to several years older, with some of these students taking specialized classes to keep their particular work status within their profession, or to work toward advancement within their profession. The evening classes had a number of more typical third and fourth year classes, and even a few class offerings for graduate students.   

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WORD HISTORY:

Din-This word goes back to Indo European "dhuen," with the notion of "to make sound or noise;" thus also, "to make loud noise, to roar." This gave its Old Germanic offspring the noun form "duniz," meaning "sound, noise," which gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) the noun "dyne/dyn," meaning "noise," and the verb form "dynnan," meaning "to make noise, to reverberate with noise." The noun form then became "dynne/dinne," with the ending 'e' being pronounced "ah/eh," before the more streamlined version "din." The other Germanic languages have (note: the Old Germanic form provided the basis for many of the forms in the continental Germanic languages, but they were also influenced in the Middle Ages by an entwining of the Germanic form with the form that became English "tone," which is Greek derived, thus some of these Germanic languages have at least some of the same meanings as "tone," and some spellings were influenced. English "tone" is from a completely different source): German "Ton" (once spelled "don"),^ Low German "Toon," Dutch "deun/toon," Icelandic had (still has?) "dynur," Danish had "døn," which seems to be dialectal for earthquake, perhaps from the notion of reverberating sound(?), Swedish has "dån" (boom, roar). 

 

^ German has two words "Ton" (all German nouns are capitalized), with the one related to English "din" meaning "sound, accent, shades of color."