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Like the rest of America, I sat down on my couch with a bowl of popcorn to watch the 20/20 interview with Charlie Sheen . Over the last few days, he’s become the most quotable person in the entire world. All you have to do is say tiger blood and you’ll get instant laughs. But after watching last night’s special, I’m not laughing anymore. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Charlie Sheen is mentally ill. (Just watch these clips and you’ll see what I’m talking about). And while we wrote about this on Monday, it’s gotten only more serious in the past few days.

And it doesn’t look like it’s going to get better anytime soon. He’s being enabled by his porn star goddesses, his publicist quit, and he doesn’t think he has a problem. If this was your relative, your parent, your friend, you wouldn’t be laughing. You would be scared. Because whatever is going on with Charlie Sheen is scary. While this is great entertainment for all of us sitting at home, it’s no longer a joking matter. We’re watching the unraveling of a human being happen in front of our eyes…and when something bad happens….which seems inevitable at this point, we’ll all be guilty.

Everyone who is now following him on Twitter will be guilty, everyone who ate up these interviews will be guilty, and the reporters who interviewed him for ratings will be guilty. If this was your friend who suddenly went off the deep end, you wouldn’t be egging her on, you would be uncomfortable and uneasy and you would try to figure out how you can help.

But how can we help Charlie? We’re not the big media companies, we don’t really know him, and we don’t know how to help him. And while I cheered this morning when I heard that his kids were taken away, I still felt uncomfortable knowing that he’s still not getting the help he needs.

So what can we do?

We can stop clicking on the Charlie Sheen links our friends send us, we can turn off the interviews, and we can respond to people saying “he’s crazy, lol” by responding “yes, he’s crazy, he is legitimately mentally ill, and mental illness isn’t funny.”

What do you think of about Charlie Sheen? What do you think about the way mental illness is portrayed in the media?

A few summers ago, I worked as a CIT at a day camp I had attended as a child. You’d think that going to work at a place that was a major part of your childhood would be pretty awesome, but those eight weeks proved to be an utter disaster. I try not to think about it and, so far, I’ve been fairly successful at suppressing those memories.

But this article in the New York Times reminded me of a particularly nasty piece of work I encountered during my counseling duties that summer. She was the mother of two abnormally hyper and mischievous twin boys who I had to supervise on the bus every morning and afternoon. Frankly, the kids were easier to deal with than this woman. She makes the helicopter mothers mentioned in the article appear to be merely “concerned.”

In addition to supervising a group of kids at the camp, my older brother and I were bus counselors on the vehicle that transported campers in our area. Every morning as the bus approached her house, the crazy woman would come outside wearing her pink, flowery robe and greet us with a sickeningly sweet smile, only to go completely apesh*t on us that afternoon. She would yell at us the moment we pulled up, blaming us if she got a call that day from the camp about her devil spawns’ misbehavior.

I’m pretty sure she was bipolar, because one moment she would be calm, and the next she would be screaming like a banshee about how the camp was lying about her boys’ behavior and how we should be fired for not doing our job. She called the camp director just about every day to complain about us and the lousy job the boys’ group counselors were doing. I fought the urge to tell her that her parenting was the problem, not our performance. Read More »