
Hughes with his mother, Sylvia Plath not long before her death.
Nicholas Hughes is gone, by his own hand, leaving us behind to wonder what we might have done.
Almost inevitably in this stigmatizing culture [.pdf], more. For the son whose poetess mother took her life while he was still so young, the son who shared a passion for fishing with his poet father whom he loved -- more.
This is no judgment of his friends and family but rather a plea to a nation which still pervasively discriminates against and unjustifiably shuns the mentally ill.
The "low self-esteem, isolation and hopelessness" which are the fruit of our prejudice against mental illness are excruciatingly painful to the already besieged, and are exacerbated by self-enforced, societally encouraged silence.
That combination can be a death sentence [.pdf] for people who could have become well, productive and happy again. People who all share the neuroplasticity which can permit the sick to become whole again and which can make the well, ill.
Let us resolve make right together that which has for so long been wrong.