Marlon Bain's letters to Steeply — "What would you call a parent…"
What would you call a parent who is so neurasthenic and depressive that any opposition to his parental will plunges him into the sort of psychotic depression where he does not leave his bed for days and just sits there in bed cleaning his revolver, so that the child would be terrified of opposing his will and plunging him into a depression and maybe causing him to suicide? Would that child qualify as “abused”?
Context
Bain's answer to Steeply's question about "abuse": a parent whose psychotic depression — bed for days, revolver-cleaning as ambient suicide threat — makes the child hostage to the parent's mood. The clinical vocabulary dead-center, and depression rendered as a family-system weapon: the sufferer's despair outsourced as the child's terror.