A Middle Passage into mental illness

Most of us would probably say that our contacts with the mentally ill are infrequent -- the homeless person mumbling to himself at the beach, the wild-eyed fanatic we pass on the street who’s shouting threats about the end of the world. We may shake our heads and rail against President Reagan’s mental-health cuts or wonder why these people just can’t get themselves together. But how often do we consider what it’s like to be those lost souls, or someone who loves them and fears for their safety?

Bebe Moore Campbell shatters our abstract notions about mental illness in her fifth novel, “72 Hour Hold.” Told from the perspective of Keri Whitmore, an African American mother, the novel opens with a sense of impending disaster couched in the language of slavery: “Preparation wasn’t possible. And what difference would it have made anyhow? Knowing that the hounds are tracking you doesn’t mean you won’t get caught; it means you have to get to the swamp fast.”

Keri’s fears are aroused when Trina, her beautiful 18-year-old daughter, begins to sneak sips of her mother’s coffee and disappears on an outing in downtown L.A.’s Flower District, only to be found talking to a homeless man and palming something into her pocket. Though we don’t immediately know what Trina’s hiding, we do learn that months earlier she suffered from a mental illness that required hospitalizations and delayed her going to college. This circumstance is at the root of Keri’s unease. It’s a feeling the girl’s father, Clyde, a conservative talk-radio host, does not share. “There’s nothing wrong with Trina’s mind,” he says, rebuking his ex-wife. “She was smoking too much weed and she got paranoid.... Then you go and put her in a psychiatric hospital like she’s some crazy person.”

Keri can’t tolerate Clyde’s denial, because -- as a series of heart-wrenching flashbacks make clear -- the pair both know Trina has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, controllable only with medication, therapy and avoidance of all stimulants, legal and otherwise. So when Trina begins to miss her sessions, smoke marijuana and stop taking her medication, Keri becomes a hostage to abusive outbursts, bizarre changes in appearance and destructive behavior that leave her physically battered and her home a shambles.

“I embarked on my own Middle Passage that night,” Keri says after one hair-raising episode, “marching backward, ankles shackled.” Trina’s behavior also summons Keri’s own demons -- painful memories of her own mother, who suffered from mental illness during Keri’s childhood, and her ongoing anger toward Clyde, who uses his work to escape from his troubled family.

During Trina’s decline, Keri struggles to maintain some semblance of a normal life. She manages her couture resale business while watching an employee deal with her own troubled past. She attends support group sessions and commiserates with a group of sisterfriends whose children all suffer from brain disorders. She reconnects with an ex-boyfriend and debates how far she should let him and his engaging son back into her life. These scenes, rich with surprising humor, keen understanding of emotions and loving snapshots of Los Angeles, lend an important sense of balance to the novel and remind us that life goes on even in the midst of tragedy.

But as the involuntary three-day mental hospital stays (hence the title “72 Hour Hold”) fail to help Trina, Keri feels forced to make a bold decision to turn the young woman over to a group of underground therapists who use radical techniques to treat those suffering from mental illness. The pair’s car trip with a support-group mother and her schizophrenic daughter to a secret facility in Northern California is fraught with tension as Trina tries to escape, the police are summoned and Keri must face the real possibility of being accused of aiding in the kidnapping of her own child. Her back to the wall, Keri must decide whether this unconventional approach is the only hope for freedom from the illness that plagues Trina -- their one chance to, as the coded spiritual says, “steal away home.”

Slavery and its imagery are a startling yet effective method to bring home the horrors of mental illness. In choosing them, Campbell elevates “72 Hour Hold” into something so powerful that it may make reading the book painful, especially for those who would like to deny that mental illnesses such as Trina’s exist. Perhaps that’s because the novel draws on Campbell’s own experiences in dealing with the brain disorder of a loved one (see sidebar), but what is experienced in reading this ultimately hope-filled book is a writer at the top of her form as storyteller, culture keeper and astute social critic. *