A Public Balm for Private Anguish

Who’s behind the door?

Who’s on the other end of the phone?

In a way, that describes a big part of a reporter’s life. We talk to people and far too often hear stories of personal pain that we wish weren’t true. Readers ask us, sometimes harshly, how we can stand to invade the privacy of people who have suffered such things.

In 30 years, I’ve never met a reporter who liked to do it. We’re not genetically coded that much differently than you.

My first assignment as a full-time reporter was to phone a family whose 5-year-old son had drowned in a lake. As I talked to one parent on the phone, the other wailed in the background.

Going through my mind: Do I have 40 years of this ahead of me?

Years later, I heard the story of a Denver reporter assigned to interview a family afflicted with some horrible situation. He knocked on the door and was greeted with a relative’s anguished challenge that he had no business being there.

As the story goes, he said, “You’re right,” turned on his heel and left.

What I’m reminding myself of today is that, far outside the view of most of us, people behind closed doors are dealing with all kinds of problems every day of their lives. For those of us who complain about mundane issues -- the cost of gasoline, a cable TV function gone awry, bad dry-cleaning -- our friends and neighbors are genuinely suffering.

That point has been driven home in the last couple of weeks since 19-year-old William Freund in Aliso Viejo killed two neighbors and then himself. Afflicted with a mental illness and a sense of alienation he couldn’t overcome, he snuffed out his life and those of his neighbors.

To my knowledge, no one has interviewed the troubled man’s parents. One can only imagine, then, what their day-to-day lives were like as they grappled with their son’s illness.

Earlier this week, I told the story of another parent’s 16-year-old son -- who, like Freund, also has Asperger’s syndrome -- and how he narrowly escaped being shot by police after he suffered a “break with reality” and threatened others.

Since those two stories broke, a number of relatives of people with mental illnesses have written or phoned me. The details vary, but every one of them ultimately is a story of coping and worry and occasional despair -- all of which goes on without much notice.

But in those communications, as poignant as they tend to be, lies the value -- if that’s the right word -- behind what happens when reporters walk into people’s homes and listen.

One letter from a parent began, “I, like many parents of an Asperger’s child, have been reading the articles about William Freund with a heavy heart.”

Another woman wrote to describe the bullying her young nephew faced at school, perhaps similar to what Freund experienced. Her nephew and his parents, she wrote, “have experienced tremendous stress, anguish and disillusionment” in dealing with school officials.

Another man recalled an experience in dealing with the mentally ill years ago and, while not specifying the situation, said that what he’d read in the paper about the current situations “helps me to understand the complexities of my own feelings.”

I’ve cited only our most recent writing about young people with mental illness. The stories are but a tiny fraction of the burdens people bear on a daily basis -- and share with reporters. In the last year, I’ve talked to people who lost their homes in the Laguna Beach landslide, lost children to accidents or suicide and have dealt either with their own or their children’s debilitating medical problems.

Most days of the year, they suffer in silence. The rest of us go about our business, oblivious to their plights.

It’s not pleasant being reminded of them, but in looking back on some of the stories, a frequent theme recurs: They’re glad someone was willing to listen.

Dana Parsons can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana

.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.