As a baby reporter in Texas, I covered what we euphemistically called mental health services in the state. These "services," reserved for the dangerously ill, involved brief, groggy hospital stays followed up with a handshake, script for enough pills to stun a moose, and best wishes: See you soon!
Unless something worse happened, the patients were bound to be back. And just as surely, whenever I'd return to the newsroom after a trip to one of the state-run mental hospitals, my editor could be counted on to joke, "You didn't catch anything while you were there, did you?" Schizophrenia cooties, I guess he meant, or bipolar bugs.
The national conversation since the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut., has reminded me of that guy, whose fear of mental illness may or may not have been treatable. And our still under-informed, over-anxious understanding of mental illness — or of any cognitive or neurological difference, for that matter — suggests that we haven't come very far in the decades since he snickered about depression being contagious.