August 13: Wild Anxieties, Mental Health Problems, Locomotophobia

[E. B. White] was still plagued by wild anxieties and indefinable nostalgia.  "As we grow older," he wrote in one casual in early 1929, "we find ourself groping toward things that give us a sense of security."  He was twenty-nine.  He worried constantly, for example, when riding the subway and commuter trains.  Even on the familiar Sixth Avenue el, swaying with one hand in a monkey grip on the strap, he feared that the train's momentum alongside too close buildings and above too busy streets was reckless.  Andy [White] invented a new name for this fear.  Freud had used the term locomotor phobia, which was sometimes written as locomotophobia as "fear that the engineer is dead," and that as a consequence any moment now you will die in a train wreck.

E. B. White suffered from mental health problems.  As the above paragraph demonstrates, he created things to be anxious about.  A commuter train, piloted by a corpse, hurtling through Manhattan, uncontrolled and fatal.  That's not a normal fear.  Unfortunately, White did not have access to the kinds of treatments now available for mental health problems.  He simply turned his anxiety into art.

The death of Robin Williams has, for the past two days, focused attention on mental illness and addiction.  One of the standard reactions is, "How could nobody have known how serious Williams' condition was?"  Even his wife had no clue of his suicidal ideation.

I am here to vouch for the fact that mental illness is pretty insidious.  It's like a leaky faucet.  Drip-drip-drip.  Slowly, the drip becomes faster.  Dripdripdripdripdrip.  Then, the drip becomes a stream.  The stream becomes a torrent.  That's mental illness.  One moment, my wife was "a little sad."  The next moment, she was cutting herself with knives.

I'm not sure Robin Williams' death will make a difference.  For a few days, maybe a week, everyone will be thinking about the horrors of mental illness.  Perhaps there will be some special reports about the detection of suicidal behaviors and serious illnesses like bipolar or schizophrenia or depression.  Pretty soon, though, some other tragedy will occur, and popular attention will focus its spotlight somewhere else.  Robin Williams will become sad Hollywood lore, like Marilyn Monroe or James Dean.

I hope that doesn't happen.  I hope people stand up, insist that something be done.  Legislation and funding and research about mental illness.  Above all, I would like people to realize that mental illness is not a matter of choice.  Mental illness is a matter of body chemistry, like diabetes or leukemia.  It should be studied and understood.

E. B. White walked around the streets of New York, surrounded by people just like himself.  Anxious.  Sad.  Despairing.  Locomotophobic.  Everyone is touched by mental illness is some way.

Everyone.  Robin Williams to Mr. and Mrs. Smith to Saint Marty.

We need to fix the faucet