Not My Father's Son

by Alan Cumming

I began to look into PTSD organizations with a view to arranging a charity screening of the program in honor of my grandfather. I discovered one called Give an Hour that I decided to contact. The premise of this group was that mental health professionals would give free hourly increments of mental health services to returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, and then in turn the people who received this free care would give an hour of their time to some form of community service. I liked the way it was so simple and straight to the heart of the problem, and also that the veterans who were receiving the care were also able to give something back in return. I hoped that in some small way I would be able to help some people in need, ensuring that they were given the professional psychological care that was never available to my granddad. But that wasn’t the only reason. I didn’t quite know it at the time, but now I understand that this event was a gesture to my father too. The more I have talked about him and what happened in my past, with both friends and mental health professionals, the more I have come to believe that he too suffered from some undiagnosed mental condition. It’s not just his violence, his volatility and mood swings, it’s his complete lack of empathy, his seemingly utter inability to consider the feelings of anyone else. And of course my dealings with him over the course of that summer only underscore this. I was not talking to a sane man in those phone c...