He talked to many voices.

He walked in as I was indulging in my daily drink at Starbucks.

He said, “Can I sit here?”

I said, “Yes, of course,” and he sat down across from me.

His conversation began immediately to the invisible people only he could see and hear. He muttered in a monotone, a quiet voice, as if he was far away.

I listened as I flipped through a book. He chatted with this person, and that, he swore now and then, but not in anger, he laughed, he asked questions, he used hand gestures.

He was very clearly in the midst of a pleasant visit with a group of people who were meeting in his mind.

I was glad, for him, that the voices weren’t causing him pain or anguish or scaring him. That is a heart breaking thing to see.

He seemed like he was happy, engaged, interested, in his imaginary world, at least for that moment in time.

He was fairly clean, leather jacket, boots. I felt no threat from him at all.

But as I listened to him, talking into the air, his brain tragically mis – firing, I thought, “This is someone’s son. He has a mother. He has a father.” I thought about their grief, their incessant worry, their sheer pain raising a son who may well have been “normal” growing up.

He may have played sports, smiled at girls, studied in school and then, something changed.

A flip switched in his mind. A breakdown. A snap.

Then the voices came and lived in this man’s head.

How horrible for him and for his family. How positively terrifying to feel yourself slipping like that, to battle reality vs. what is in your head, who is in your head, taunting you, scaring you, taking YOU away.

Why did it happen? Why him? Why so many people?

Who knows.

But I felt for him, sitting there across from me in Starbucks, I felt for his family. That could have been me. It could have been you. It could have been our kids.

And, maybe it is. Millions of people deal with family members who they love and adore who have a mental illness of some sort. So many people themselves deal with it every single day of their lives.

In a bitter moment, I thought of the billions of dollars we spend on weapons to kill other people, to invade other countries, and I thought of our broken mental health system.

It’s not right.

It isn’t.

We should take good care of each other here in this country and we’re not taking good care of our people with mental illness. Go to any city, any town, anywhere, and you’ll see some of these suffering people, like the man across from me, on the streets.

They do not belong on the streets. They should not be there.

It’s not safe.

Having a mental illness is like having pneumonia in your mind. We treat pneumonia. We need to treat this.

We need to put mental illness at the top of our list. We need to dump more money into research, into medications, into fixing and helping and curing and treating, with inpatient and outpatient care.

And for those who can’t beat it, we need to provide healthy, happy, safe places for them to live so they’re not on the streets, wandering, in danger, prey for criminals.

For the man across from me, talking to people only he could see and hear, a complete cure might not come in time.

But it might.

And that’s what we have to hold onto, hope for, advocate for.

Why?

Because he’s worth it.

He is someone’s son