RIP Anne Heche

Medicine.

It will alert people when people are off their medicine.

 

Years ago, I worked with kids in a Dual Dx unit. Part of our routine included taking them to an AA or NA meeting off campus. That year, a newly minted lawyer was hit by a drunk driver while walking to her office from Keefauver Federal Courthouse. She was very pregnant at the time and the driver pinned her against a lightpost with his car. As she screamed for help, he exited his car and fled the scene with his car still in gear, still pressing her against the pole. Her husband, also an attorney in Nashville, lost his wife and child that afternoon.

A week later, our clinical supervisor sent me to take the kids to a meeting. I was not then nor am I now in recovery. This is important to note because I can observe meetings since I am taking minors to them, but I cannot comment on what is said to my clients. All I can do is report what was said to someone who has more letters after their name than I do and is in recovery.

So we were at this meeting and someone decided to share their feelings about what happened. They felt sorry for the driver and stated that no one was showing any sympathy for him. The local media had given him a lot of space and time to express his thoughts. Most of the verbiage coming from him showed him brushing off what he did beyond, "Ah'm sorey. Ah didn't mean to do it." The more he talked, the more any sympathy anyone had for him chipped away. His tone changed to "What 'bout me? What 'bout mah pain? It iddin lahke Ah meant to do it. They were lawyers. They had everything. I got nothin'. Mah lahf has always been hord!"

I had been warned this was getting echoed all over the recovery community and I would most likely encounter it when I took the kids in.

My group consisted of eight kids, one of whom wanted to get sober because she hoped to be a mom after she went to college, another was a teen boy whose life now centered on his baby daughter. He and his mom were taking care of his little girl and she was his main motive for getting his life together. He was the first to walk out when pity for the drunk driver started and seemed to spread among the adults. I moved my chair close to the door, made eye contact and stayed within reach and sight while the others attended the meeting. Finally, my littlest, feistiest girl spoke up.

"If Bill Hall (local weather guy) or Barbara Mandrell hit her, would she be any less dead?"

The facilitator stared at her for a moment and then said, "Y'all need to leave until you learn some compassion."

I didn't see how this had shaken them up until we were all back in the van.

"You can't talk about this, can you Miss Oscar?"

No, I couldn't.

They talked for a long time about fairness and lack thereof. Some of them said at one point they might have done the same thing.

The general consensus among them was innocent people shouldn't be punished for someone else's bad life and nobody gets off the hook for bad choices. Little Feisty didn't have much to say. I asked her for her thoughts and feelings. She shrugged.

"I agree with what we said and did." There was a long pause, "and I f*****g hate Barbara Mandrell."

Having shared that, I admit that I do feel sympathy for Heche. There are more people like her than many realize. They often fall through the cracks of an already overloaded CPS system and live with being blamed, not being believed and sometimes are sent into even worse situations if they trust anyone enough to say what happened. Thing is, if children whose own childhoods have been stunted by bad parents can parse the idea that they bear responsibility if they hurt someone, it looks like adults could learn this as well. Would we offer the same amount of latitude if the traveling nurse who killed seven people earlier last week shared the same life story?

 

To be clear, the "latitude" we are talking about here is "her death does not make me happy." As latitude goes it ain't much.

Would I offer the same latitude to the traveling nurse? Absolutely. As far as I know I've never actually seen Anne Heche act in anything. I know who she is because of the Ellen thing. I don't care about her any more than I care about anyone else. The situation with the traveling nurse is terrible, and given her record I would imagine there are some pretty enormous issues with her mental health. That doesn't mitigate what she did and she pretty clearly can't be trusted out in society.

 

It’s still stigmatized if you say you visited a mental health professional. I don’t expect my primary care doc to be able to diagnose an ACL tear. I wonder how much is about PCPs who think they can toss a couple pills a patient’s way for a short-term fix, when that patient needs to get specialist help.

 

Officially official

 

She was beautiful, whatever her troubles were.

 

Failure of empathy is the story of America.

 

Why are we supposed to have empathy for people who don't seem to care about others?

 

No one asks to be mentally ill, FFS

 

Good question.

I'm going to keep my terms very general here.

Lack of empathy is a sign someone isn't well. A. Whitney Brown once referred to people like that as "unable to think beyond the confines of their own skin." I think it's pretty apt. These people who seem to be in free fall all the damned time usually have folks who love them. The problem is, they're worn out. They feel battered from years of being the source of their narcissistic supply. Phone calls from them are more like performative monologues where they revisit how everyone is horrible except them, no one appreciates them, and then come the lies about what they've been up to. No one but them feels anything or at least as deeply as they feel it. Everyone else is "a piece of shit." People who have dealt with the Anne Heches of the world know they can set the clock by how many minutes it takes for the mask to slip and for things to get very dark very quickly.

Love has its limits. After a while, people start to back away. Phone numbers are blocked. Sometimes legal remedies are sought to make them leave friends and family alone. There is a sense of relief when they are gone from the lives of people who tried to love them. They never figure out why they have lost so many people from their lives, why people walk away from the bitter monologues, the cruelty, and the incessant blaming.

Specifically, I do feel for Anne Heche. She wasn't well. On the ground, she was probably sweet and charming at times. There are others who might not be inclined to talk about the destructive path she made through her days that culminated with turning a stranger's life upside down.

 

re A. Whitney Brown: I unfailingly always thought him to be full of shit. This in no way should be connected with the take on Anne Heche -- although I do understand why people have trouble just shaking their head and saying, "Well, that's mental illness for you" when it collects a level of collateral damage.

But yes, I think A. Whitney Brown was full of shit, and remains full of shit to this day. Worst SNL "correspondent" ever.

I know this will be met with a handful of "A. Whitney Brown was a visionary" replies. So be it.

 

I’m not a movies person, so all I ever knew about Anne Heche was she was in a relationship with Ellen DeGeneris. But holy shit, this was a LOT of trauma packed into one life.

Emily Bergl