| "My mother's illness profoundly shaped me,"
Mack said. "For decades I felt shadowed by it, afraid I'd get sick
too." He explained that mental illness is more common than most people
know. One in every five families is affected by major mental illness.
One in every twenty people will suffer a clinical breakdown sometime in
their lives.
"Whenever I do this show," he said, "people
come up afterward telling me about their own mother's illness, or their
father's, their sister's, their son's." Increasingly recognized as
a brain disorder with physiological roots, mental illness is more common
than cancer, diabetes, or heart disease.
Mack thinks of the show as "a kind of calling. It
chose me." After serving in the US Air Force, Mack enrolled at MIT's
prestigious Sloan School of Management, expecting to major in business
science. He took a poetry class for elective credit -- "I needed
an easy A" -- but the course changed his life. Childhood memories
poured onto the page as poems.
Encouraged by his mentor, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet
Maxine Kumin, and by Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney, Mack changed
majors and graduated from MIT's Writing Program.
His poems went from the page to the stage when he discovered
poetry slam. In Boston's thriving poetry scene, Mack became a poetry slam
champion, and represented Boston at the National Poetry Slam in 1998 and
1999.
An audience member at a Cambridge venue invited Mack to
share his work at a local affiliate of the National Alliance on Mental
Illness (NAMI). Word spread, and soon he was presenting at statewide and
national mental health conferences for NAMI and other mental health organizations.
His is in demand especially during National Mental Health
Month (May) and Mental Illness Awareness Week (in October), using the
annual observances to raise public awareness about mental illness, and
to help reduce misunderstanding and stigma.
In additional to traditional theatrical engagements --
including a six week run Off-Off-Broadway -- Mack now performs regularly
for mental health professionals and consumers, increasingly at state hospitals
for the chronically ill.
"He channels his mother," said Dr. Laurence
Guttmacher, chief of psychiatry and acting clinical director at the Rochester
Psychiatric Center. "This is not an easy crowd," Guttmacher
said of his patients. "But they were rapt. Afterward, they said,
'He gets it. He understands.'"
Excerpts from Hearing Voices (Speaking in Tongues) have
been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association
(JAMA), America, the Beloit Poetry Journal, and
Best Catholic Writing, and they have aired on NPR. The play was
awarded a development grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council --
the state's most prestigious award for new theater works.
Asked about A Beautiful Mind,
the Oscar-winning film about MIT Professor and Nobel Laureate John Nash,
whose brilliant career in mathematics was cut short by schizophrenia,
Mack said, "The movie's strength is that it portrays someone with
mental illness in more than the usual stereotype. It brought mental illness
squarely into the public discussion."
"But it's a Hollywood movie with a romantic Hollywood
ending. Recovery from schizophrenia doesn't usually bring a Nobel Prize
(though it should). And recovery is more than return to a conventional
life. For as long as my mother lived, she needed special care. But she
recovered in the sense that after years of living on the streets and in
state hospitals, she found stability and dignity in a community that loved
her for who she was." |
