Don't Get Me Started: ... On Patty Duke [day 30]

Today, as of writing this, is March 30, 2016 and yesterday it turns out we lost someone who meant a great deal to a great many people. So this post will highlight the achievements and life of Patty Duke, who is best known for being the child star who played Helen Keller in the Miracle Worker and starred in the Patty Duke show.

Actor, Activist and mental health advocate.
1946-2016

Born in 1946 in Elmhurst New York Ms. Duke would play Helen Keller in the Miracle Worker at the age of 16 (in 1963), even winning an Oscar for the role. This made her the youngest recipient of the reward at the time. She'd had plenty of practice. She'd been playing the role for some time on Broadway before that since as a child, she'd been introduced to a pair of talent managers who were interested in her brother.

Beyond her work as an actress Ms. Duke (born Anna Marie Duke) was a powerful and forthright voice fighting to remove the stigma of mental illness. Before our world turned into sharapalooza with social media, she actively sought to educate, help and ensure people could get treatment for invisible illnesses, even going so far as to lobby Congress for improved funding and research into treating mental illness.

I admire anyone who thinks they can make these clowns do something worthwhile!

This empathy likely stemmed from her own life long battle with bi-polar disorder (then known as Manic Depression). Beyond that, it's possible part of her desire to ensure others didn't suffer came from the amount of suffering she herself did. See, her early life and child stardom wasn't fairy tale rosey. Those talent agents, John and Ethel Ross, that helped her get on Broadway? They turned into a pair of controlling monsters once they got their claws in her. Things like bi-polar disorder run in families and her mother also suffered from the condition. Her father was a drinker who her mother thew out of the house when Anna was 6 or so and she struggled with financial stability even before that. Eventually the couple who were managing the young "Patty Duke" (they legally changed her name for acting purposes, trained her to lose her thick New York accent and constantly told her that ''Anna Marie Duke was dead'') started to show their true colors. First they convinced the struggling and depressed mother to let them take over the life and raising of her youngest daughter, taking young Anna away from her mother and family. They too turned into booze hounds. In interviews and books he'd reveal that the couple gave her drugs on a regular basis and that molestation wasn't uncommon at their hands.

Well that got dark! I'd put a meme here to lighten things but it doesn't feel particularly right.

The controlling and abusive behavior of her managers was such that she wasn't even allowed to attend her father's funeral as his daughter. Only as the actress Patty Duke. Things like that forced schism of personality aren't easy for a kid to deal with and the Ross's weren't helping. It was actions like this that would keep Anna Marie Duke in therapy for years.

Over the years Ms. Duke would grow to seek treatment for her mental illness as well as encourage others to do the same. She wanted people to get the help they needed and to not be ashamed to seek it out. Outspoken and driven, she chose to use her trauma as a tool of inspiration for others. She tried to ensure that others knew it could get better. That treatment could work. That medication and therapy could help those like her and by extension all of us, cope better with the pain that doesn't always show itself.