Mental Health Month Featuring Stephen Trimble and Dr. Doug Goldsmith
May 10, 2023 @ 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Event Details
Stephen Trimble speaks about his new memoir, The Mike File: A Story of Grief and Hope, which won the 2022 Human Relations Mental Health Awareness Book of the Year. https://www.humanrelationsindiebookawards.com/results.php
Steve reaches back decades to reclaim his brother’s story, a life that mirrors our treatment of the mentally ill through the 20th century. Are we doing any better now? And how would today’s psychologists have seen Mike and Mike’s family?
Salt Lake City child psychologist, and longtime director of The Children’s Center, Dr. Doug Goldsmith joins Steve Trimble to help answer these questions. He’s able to place Mike’s story in context and can help us to understand the trauma of Mike’s family—and the far better life Mike might have had today.
His memoir was called “…insightful, heartfelt and unforgettable—a love letter to his family and a somber contemplation of what might have been” by Robert Kolker, author of Hidden Valley Road.
Listen to Stephen Trible speak at Kingsbury Hall: https://www.thebeeslc.org/healthcare-stories-of-illness-and-wellness
About his book, The Mike File: A Story of Grief and Hope:
Detective story, social history, journey of self-discovery, and compassionate and unsparing memorial to a family and a forgotten life, The Mike File will move every reader with a relative or friend touched by psychiatric illness or disability.
In writing this memoir, Stephen Trimble set out to reach beyond the mantra he had repeated for decades: “I had an older brother—a half-brother—who left home when I was six. He was diagnosed sequentially as retarded, schizophrenic, and epileptic. He died years ago.”
The Mike File is Trimble’s quest to claim empathy, his memorial to a forgotten life, his journey toward self-knowledge. His refusal to let his mother’s pain and disinclination to talk about her grief render Mike’s life invisible. After writing drafts that ran over 200 pages, Trimble distilled this story to its essence. The Mike File is a small book, 20,000 words, with a tight focus—the most powerful way to tell Mike’s story.
Mike was eight years older than “Stevie.” He was a sweet kid, slow to learn, diagnosed as “mildly retarded.” But in 1957, rage and psychosis overwhelmed him and threatened his family. Mike’s new diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenia, capable of violence. Trimble’s parents had no choice but to commit Mike to the Colorado State Hospital. The author was six. Mike was 14. Mike never lived at home again.
Mike’s heartrending life mirrors the history of our treatment of mental illness in America. He spent nine years in overcrowded Colorado mental institutions. When mainstreamed back to Denver, he rejected his family. Ten years later, at 33, he died alone in a Denver boarding home, undiscovered for three days. The Denver media used his lonely death to expose these “ratholes” warehousing people with mental illness. This brutal publicity exponentially amplified Trimble’s mother’s grief and guilt.
Steve closes the book with his imagined vision of how we could have done right by Mike—an alternative effective version of healthcare for those who struggle with disability and mental illness in America. An alternative that might have granted the author a lifelong relationship with his big brother. It’s a moving conclusion to an unforgettable tale.
About the author:
As writer, editor, and photographer, Stephen Trimble has published 25 award-winning books during 45 years of paying attention to the landscapes and peoples of the Desert West. He’s received The Sierra Club’s Ansel Adams Award for photography and conservation and a Doctor of Humane Letters from his alma mater, Colorado College. In 2019, he was honored as one of Utah’s 15 most influential artists.
Trimble speaks and writes as a conservation advocate and has taught writing at the University of Utah. He makes his home in Salt Lake City and in the red rock country of Torrey, Utah. For more about his work, see www.stephentrimble.net.
Date: May 10, 2023 @ 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Time: 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Venue
- Park City Library
-
1255 Park Avenue
Park City, Utah 84060 + Google Map