We're All Mad Here

On May 30, 2014, Morgan Geyser invited her two best friends, Anissa Weier and Bella Leutner, to a sleepover for her 12th birthday. The next morning, the girls went to a nearby park to play hide and seek. But unbeknownst to Bella, her two friends had been planning to kill her for months, as a sacrifice to Slenderman, a creepy internet legend. Morgan and Anissa stabbed her 19 times.

Later, it was revealed that Morgan was suffering from early onset schizophrenia. But Anissa had no history of mental illness. What was it about the combination of these two little girls and their imaginations that pushed them to attempt actual murder for an imaginary man? Did they actually believe, or are they faking to get a lighter sentence?

A meme has been making the rounds, claiming that today’s students’ stress levels match that of psych ward patients in the 50s. But is this really true? Are students today dealing with more mental illness in a less helpful environment?

In 1940s Harlem, Dr Frederic Wertham was worried about the youth in Harlem. So was Reverend Bishop, who ran Harlem’s Episcopalian church. Together, with a diverse staff of volunteers, they opened a clinic in the basement of Bishop’s church. Charging only 25 cents- and nothing if someone couldn’t spare that- they treated children, veterans, and the elderly. They made their mark by pioneering the idea that black people and white people were born with the same wants and needs, and that blacks could respond to mental therapy just as well as whites.

This week we’re talking about how mental health is treated today in the black community- and so it’s not just a white girl telling you facts, we have a guest! My friend Cameron of the Halfway Sober podcast talks about his experience living with a mental illness as a black man.

The presence of African Americans in North America was first documented in the 1600s, and since then, blacks have been “other”ed, physically and emotionally. Believed to feel no pain, black were ignored and experimented on while their psychological needs were cast aside. Eventually hospitals for the black mentally ill were constructed, but help wasn’t always what they provided…