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While your comment about "nothing good coming out of Indiana" may have been an expression of dismay, there may in fact be a kernel of truth.
Many years ago, when I was living in rural northeastern Indiana, I met a guy who was working on his dissertation in -- IIRC -- clinical psychology. In the course of his research into the advantages and disadvantages of various types and venues for treatment, he discovered some surprising statistics regarding the incidence of untreated mental disorders in various regions of the country. According to his research, the rural four county corner of north-eastern Indiana (Steuben, LaGrange, Dekalb, Noble counties, which was where I lived and, perhaps not insignificantly, where Dan Quayle was our congresscritter at the time) had the highest rate of untreated mental illness in the country. As a result of those findings, he changed the subject of his dissertation and began researching specifically the non-treatment of the mentally ill in rural Indiana as compared to other areas of the country.
I do not remember the guy's name; he was a guest speaker at a class I took at the local college. I have often wished I could recall his name and find out if any of his work was ever published. As he described to our class the research he had done and some of the case histories he had uncovered, I began to see many, many, many parallels to people I knew in the area and could confirm by talking to members of my husband's family, who were multi-generational residents.
There was apparently a kind of tradition that persons with mental illnesses or problems or whatever were simply kept at home, out of the way as much as possible, but not really treated, in part because admission of a mental illness was considered a "blight" on the family's reputation.
Although I was not a native of the area, my husband is, and he still tells stories of being harassed at school or just encountering in public some of the people who probably should have been in some kind of treatment but instead were kept at home. In some cases, these people were tragically abused -- locked in attics, etc. -- and in other cases they were a true danger to themselves and others. In one case that I had personal experience of, an adult male whom I can only describe as developmentally disabled routinely lost his temper and assaulted his caretaker father, who not too infrequently ended up in the hospital, while other family members were recruited to care for the son. Although the other family members recommended that the son be at least evaluated, the father adamantly refused. It would "stain" the family name.
In another case with which I had personal experience, a neighbor family ("neighbor" meaning they lived a mile down our country road from our house) had a son who was developmentally disabled and probably had other problems as well. Although he had gone through the public school system as far as he was able, at sixteen he was just kept at home. when the other family members were present, he was taken care of, watched, and controlled. When they weren't -- work, school, etc. -- he was on his own. When he got bored with television, he would often leave the house and go exploring, entering the other houses on our road and just randomly going through them. He was never destructive, just messed things up. No one ever told me about it, so I was stunned when I came home from work one afternoon and found that the house -- hubby and I were living with his parents at the time -- had been invaded.
When the situation was explained to me, I kind of exploded. "My God, what if I had come home and he was still in the house!" He was a very large individual, and I was not. But the response was just that oh, well, everyone was sure he wasn't dangerous, and anyway everyone was just "used" to him. No doors were locked, ever, because if they were, he'd just break a window or whatever to get in. In other words, even other families in the area accommodated him, without ever considering possible risks to him or to themselves, rather than address the problem. That his illness was a danger to himself was evident in the fact that on the day he entered our house, the temperature was below zero, and he had been seen walking down the road in jeans, a tee-shirt, and worn sneakers -- no coat. My in-laws house was over a mile from his.
Anyway, I could go on with the instances that I later experienced there that really confirmed to me the PhD candidate's thesis of more people being untreated and kept at home in this area of the country than any other. Although that four-county area is at the eastern corner of the state over by Ohio, and Hammond is in the northwestern corner by Chicago, I suspect many of the same "traditions" may have played a part.
Just a bizarre observation from
Tansy Gold
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