Sons and parents

[Susan Higginbotham]

Even today, with all of our better knowledge of mental illness and the greater support that society provides, it's very difficult for a family member of a mentally ill person to determine how and when to intervene. Intervene too soon, and you might cost yourself a relationship. Intervene too late, and you might cost yourself a life.

RTL's options were far more limited than ours are, given the much greater stigma attached to mental illness and the fact that what treatment there was was generally asylum-based instead of outpatient therapy-based. We know that Mary was able to live on her own after her confinement in the asylum and that she got through the rest of her life without harming herself or anyone else. But RTL didn't have that knowledge at the time, and I imagine that for the rest of Mary's life, he dreaded receiving a telegram telling him that something bad had happened to his mother.

I'm reading a book now about Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris. I imagine that after the mentally ill Henry murdered his wife, their families wished they had done something more, or different, in addressing his problems. If they had put Henry in an asylum, he would have no doubt found the experience humiliating and degrading--and his wife would have likely died a natural death, and their children spared the trauma of having their mother brutally killed by their father. But again, their families didn't have the benefit of hindsight.