Doing Well

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I am doing well

except

I am really tired most of the time

 

I am doing well

except

My hands tremble noticeably

 

I am doing well

except

I am a ball of anxiety

 

I am doing well

except

sometimes I am so anxious I tune out which makes me more anxious

 

I am doing well

except

I get overwhelmed at the drop of a hat

 

I am doing well

except

I would rather be numb than feel some emotions

 

I am doing well

except

I have trouble sleeping through the night

 

I am doing well

except

I spend my life on-line

 

that is what I mean when I say I am doing well

Some Coping Skills

Psychiatric Hospitalization- The feeling, not the story.

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I’ve only been hospitalized once, although there’s been multiple times when I needed it.

I always had a curiosity about what it’d be like in a ward.

The background story is: I had/have issues with self harm. And when it was at its worst, I cut myself deeply. Deep enough to see the tendon and to be rushed to the ER. Long story short- my parents found out and asked what they could do to help me. I told them I needed outpatient care and they said okay. I called the local psychiatric hospital and they said I could come in any time for a psych evaluation so I could start outpatient care.

I went in for my evaluation and left 5 days later.

The hospital had decided that I was too unstable/unsafe after my self harm incident, so they required me to stay. I remember sitting in the evaluation room, staring at the window. It was dark and all I could see was my reflection. I don’t know what I felt. It was a mix of wanting to cry, wanting to run out of the place, wanting to scream that they couldn’t do this to me. But mostly, I just felt defeat. Eventually a lady retrieved me, asking if I was okay. She informed me I could go back to the lobby. I ran back in there and hugged my friend, sobbing as I told him they weren’t letting me leave. I could feel everyone in the room staring at me. But at this point, I was certifiably “crazy” so who cares, right?

I won’t go into the details of my psych ward stay. Instead, I will tell how it felt for me.

At first, it was terrifying. It was nighttime when I was admitted, and I told them I wouldn’t be able to sleep since I had a nocturnal sleeping cycle to begin with. I sat, alone, in the one room where you could just hang out. I sat with a puzzle, and tiredly tried to put the pieces together. My mind felt both overwhelmed and slow. Like the puzzle, none of the pieces were coming together.

When everyone woke up for breakfast, I had to face the other patients. I had no idea what to expect of them. A million different versions of “crazy” went through my head. And yet, I didn’t expect them to be … so much like me. They seemed normal, for the most part. But what stood out was how friendly they were. I was invited to sit and share my story.

I grew comfortable in the hospital. I knew my parents must be upset, I knew that my dad was probably having anxiety over it. Anxiety that would make him angry, that would make him yell at my mother. And what about my mom? How would she feel? Scared? Or would she feel like it was completely unnecessary? Would she be mad too?

But honestly, those questions barely crossed my mind. Because I knew I was safe from them. I knew that while I was in here, they couldn’t really hurt me. My dad wouldn’t yell at me. They’d awkwardly visit at visiting hours. Just to clarify, my parents have never been physically abusive. But I do fear their tempers. Mostly, I fear the control they have over my life since they’re completely supporting me through college.

It didn’t matter though. I was hospitalized, they couldn’t do anything about that. Plus, I could control all communication with them. I felt safe. Everything was so routine, we’d wake up and take our pills. Then we’d eat breakfast and go on a smoke break and go to group therapy and then a smoke break and then group therapy and so and so forth, all day.

I was able to talk about my problems and I was able to bond with other people who were going through exactly what I was- not necessary a “mental crisis” but more like we were all stuck here, and that brought us together.

I put the pieces of that puzzle together with the help of the other patients. We’d sit and talk and figure out the puzzle together.

On maybe my 2nd or 3rd day in the ward, I was given terrible news. News too long to explain right now. But news that shook me and turned my life upside down. I felt as if the walls of safety had been broken down. All it took was two police officers and suddenly I didn’t feel so safe anymore.

You see, the world had stood still for me. During my stay, nothing could hurt me. I was impermeable. The outside world could do nothing to me. But those police officers proved me wrong. The outside world could come in, it was just me who couldn’t leave.

I stopped socializing with the other patients, I curled up in bed. Sobbing until there were no tears left. At once, I felt like the hospital was both a prison and a sanctuary. I couldn’t leave, I couldn’t take care of the responsibilities the police officers had informed me of. But still, I was safe from myself. I was safe from my family, friends, everything.

I felt the desperate need to leave, I had things to do- immediately. But I was so sick from the news that I wanted to stay. And the staff agreed- I needed to stay. My 5150, or a 72 hour forced hospitalization, was changed to a 5250, where they could keep me for longer. I stayed an additional two days.

We weren’t allowed on phones during group therapy, that was our punishment for not going. But I was given special permission to use the phone to sort out my personal life because it simply could not wait. I was given a room with a phone. And I sat down and made all these phone calls, with the occasional call to my mom or to my friends to tell them what was going on.

It was a mess. I felt very stressed out and my memory of those hours I spent on the phone are best compared to the way you feel after crying- broken, defeated, but mostly tired.

Very, very tired.

My time in the hospital was ruined by those two police officers. Had I been able to stay non-interrupted, I imagine the stay would have been rather pleasant. For the most part, I actually enjoyed my stay. My fellow patients were all friendly and their company was desirable. The food was decent enough. I got to smoke cigarettes every now and again. Group therapy was fun to me. Doing the puzzle in our spare time gave me something to obsess.

The puzzle let me forget about all my troubles. About the predicament I’d gotten myself into. I loved that puzzle.

I still remember walking out of my family therapy meeting, eyes puffy and red, sniffling from the tears. And when I arrived to my fellow patients, my support group, they handed me a puzzle piece. I looked at the puzzle and realized they’d left me the last piece. I probably cried, I don’t remember. All I knew was that these people understood me, they understood how important this puzzle was to me. And they had saved the last piece for me.

Ultimately, I loved the hospital. It was a safe place for me. Many of the patients reported they’d been transferred from other facilities, and they said those places were nightmares. I guess I was lucky.

I’ve wanted to go back. To remember the safe feeling, to know everything I needed was taken care of, and that all I needed to do was work on making myself better. But you can’t forget the locked doors. Even though I enjoyed the hospital, the patients and I would scheme on how to act to get out sooner. Once you’re in there, you want out.

On the smoking patio, there was a giant fence that had a green canvas blocking our view out. It rose far above our heads, but I would gaze through the little holes at the corners. A glimpse of the real world, I could even see plants if I looked hard enough. But I also saw another gate.

It is bittersweet. There is no good way to summarize my stay there because it was such a conflicting period. On one hand, I was safe from the world. But on the other, I wasn’t. The world was still moving even though mine had made an abrupt stop.

I needed to be in the hospital. I needed that experience- all of it. I needed the feeling of security. And then feeling that security ripped away from me. I needed to learn that I could withstand all of this.

I needed the hospital to give me a place to experience all my emotions… while keeping me safe from them.

-Quinn

Cults, Witches and Mental Illness

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When I was 15, one of my brothers, who was 21 came home from college because he wasn’t well. He would sit and stare and do nothing for awhile. Later he would start talking but he said strange things and acted bizarre. He could be generous but was also unpredictable. I feel bad now because I was afraid of him for no real reason. He scared me because he seemed unusual.

My parents tried to figure out what had happened to him. He seemed fine when he had left home. They suggested maybe someone slipped him some drugs but settled on that he had been brainwashed by a cult at college. That his new girlfriend had brought him into the cult.

Of course, there was no cult, but the story grew. I was told not to speak to certain neighbors as they were part of this cult. My father didn’t believe in mental illness or psychiatry. He thought the hospitals were like the one in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and discouraged my brother from going.

They also accused people of being witches. It was like mental illness was contagious. It was scary and confusing living in that home.

It can be difficult to be the sibling of anyone with a chronic illness. All the time and attention was on my brother and I felt ignored. My older siblings moved out and i just had my younger brother to confide in. I felt everything was strange at our house and didn’t have any friends over. My brother felt like every family has their own issues and we weren’t that unusual. I think he was able to roll with everything easier than I did.

Sonya Sones wrote a book of free verse “Stop Pretending, the day my big sister went crazy” about how she felt as a sibling, that I read as an adult and could relate to. I didn’t want to be home. I stayed out and used alcohol, other drugs and later sex to escape.

My brother didn’t get treatment except when he would get picked up for 3 day observational holds. This started in 1979 and it may have been easier to be taken in. He would be yelling or saying he was some famous person and the police would take him to a hospital. They said he had paranoid schizophrenia and put him on anti psychotics. Not Thorazine, but similar. All they did was slow him down. So, then you had a slow moving psychotic man. He knew he was not acting normal, so he would imitate people around him, which was even stranger.

The last time he was picked up, it was in a different county. They tried lithium this time. It was 6 years from when he had originally come home. Everyone told me it was like magic. He was back to his old self. I don’t know what his diagnosis was. Maybe bipolar, or schizoaffective like me. I was looking forward to seeing him. But, when I visited him, he wasn’t well. He was edgy and nervous. My mom said they had to adjust his medication, but she was waiting until Monday ( I think I came there on a Friday night). My brother took off and we didn’t know where. He had been talking about hiking at Yosemite. On Monday I got a call that he had fallen at a waterfall at Yosemite and died. No one knows if it was a suicide or accident. People do fall there.

Recently I was talking to my oldest brother and he was saying that he wished there was the information then that there is today. I thought he meant support, but he then said that we would know it was a mental illness and not a cult. I was perplexed that he had believed that. The 1980s weren’t exactly the dark ages. I have had to let go of a lot of anger towards my parents for what I now feel was dependent adult abuse by not getting him treatment, and all the time he thought they were right.

Lori- An Intro

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I have schizoaffective disorder which technically is like bipolar I with psychotic features except I have had psychotic symptoms with and without mood episodes. Simplified it is the moods of bipolar and the thoughts of schizophrenia, or the best of both worlds.

Michael Crawford has a great series of articles on schizoaffective disorder at PsychCentral

http://psychcentral.com/lib/living-with-schizoaffective-disorder/0001564

I had a psychotic break in 2003 when I was 39 where I was having auditory and visual hallucinations. I thought my parents were going to harm me. I ran away from them on a road trip (they wanted to take me away from my children who were 2 and 4 at the time) and  I ended up in a county hospital on a 72 hour hold, or 5150.

I don’t know if I got better and then relapsed or if I had one very long episode with periods of lucidity. It took me about 9 months until I wasn’t psychotic or heavily sedated. I had times when I was doing very well mentally. But, there were a lot of times where I wasn’t.

I started thinking my therapist was sending me messages through the media and that I had a special skill to decipher these messages. I thought I had been split into multiple personalities and later had tests to rule out DID. I do not have that disorder.

I do have depersonalization disorder. It has more to do with anxiety. I tune out when I get too anxious. I will lose part of a conversation and be startled when it is over, but I don’t go anywhere. I also have trouble reading a wall of text so I make a lot of paragraph breaks.

I was very distracted and overprotective of my children because I was worried someone would harm them. I cut off contact with people, relatives, I didn’t trust. I was convinced people were using mind control and everyone was either in on it or clueless. At one point I was hospitalized. I am not sure what I was saying or doing. I thought i was there for research and de-programming. They changed my medication but I downplayed my symptoms. I thought they already knew everything. So, I left as symptomatic as when I came in. That was in 2005.

I don’t remember the year well, but I was pretty delusional. I thought people were sending me messages. I realize now I was hearing their voices, too, but I didn’t realize that at the time. My psychiatrist put me on a different anti-psychotic, abilify. I decided to see someone else. I was afraid I would get hurt in his office. I saw a different psychiatrist who was a lot less compassionate but who raised my anti-psychotic and over time the delusions lessened.

I did a day program, where I didn’t fit in. Partly because of the language I used. I really don’t know the proper way to say I have a mental illness or diagnosis or brain disorder or I’m batshit crazy without upsetting someone. The psychiatrist there changed my diagnosis from bipolar I to schizoaffective, bipolar type, because I was having psychotic symptoms with no mood component. At that point, the psychotic symptoms were my biggest issue.

After the messages stopped, I felt lost. I had no one to guide me, to entertain me, to keep me company. I tried to explain that to a therapist and she suggested I made the whole thing up because I was lonely. I wish socialization cured mental illness. I thought maybe they were mad at me or bored. Why would they leave. Logically, they left because the medication was working, but it was hard to challenge the belief they were real. I still have doubts. I have to put them aside so I can go about my day, but I wonder.

 

Mental illness wasn’t new to me. I had a brother, he passed away at 26, who had an undiagnosed mental illness. I will write more about that next time.

The Hidden Side of Gia Carangi

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A cult has grown around the memory of dead supermodel Gia Carangi, mostly due to the movie of her life with Angelina Jolie in the title role. The film explores many facets of her troubled personality including her drug use, her obsession with her lover, her bisexual promiscuity, and her death from AIDS. Her problems, we are led to believe, stemmed from her drug use which made her irritable, anxious, depressed, hyper, and in the end terminally ill with HIV.

Many have speculated that Gia was bipolar. This could be a strong post-mortem diagnosis given her interludes of manic behavior and severe depression. A Gia Carangi fan site says

Gia frequented New York’s jet-set night spots, such as Studio 54, and developed a heroin problem during the latter part of her life. Because of Bipolar Disorder, Gia experienced extreme mood swings and would walk out of a fashion shoot if she didn’t feel like doing it. She constantly medicated herself with heroin. Carangi made several attempts at fighting her heroin addiction, attending rehabilitation centers multiple times. In 1983, she was profiled on ABC’s 20/20 magazine, in a piece focusing on the dark side of modeling. In June of 1986, she was diagnosed with HIV, becoming one of the first famous persons to be diagnosed with the disease, and also the first famous female diagnosed.

The makers of Gia completely overlook the possibility that Carangi’s eccentric behavior was driven by an organic brain dysfunction. None of the semi-fictional “interviewees” alludes to bipolar disorder though likely symptoms are depicted.

Why is this angle on Gia’s life ignored? In the post-Nancy Reagan “Just Say No” era, a certain anti-romanticism has developed around the drug culture. Many find it far easier to blame irresolution as a friend leads one down the wrong path than to admit a deeper dysfunction. It is more glamorous to be a drug addict than a sufferer of a mental illness. Many of Gia’s fans could buy into the myth that people with mental illness cannot contribute meaningfully to society as Gia did.

A few months ago I read another one of those articles which disputed Kay Jamison’s contention that Vincent Van Gogh was bipolar. The author argued that based on recent evidence that showed that Van Gogh had not committed suicide, Jamison’s diagnosis was wrong. The writer ignored all the letters and accounts of his bizarre behavior including his cutting his ear off as a message to a lover, reducing his end of life depression to grief over the death of his brother Theo. I finished the piece with the impression that she just didn’t want to acknowledge that bipolar was anything but a completely debilitating illness whose sufferers could not give the rest of the world anything of value. That the article appeared in a magazine that prided itself on its skepticism — truth-seeking — saddened me. Because this was the latest instance of its subtly disparaging those with mental illness, I have since ended my subscription.

We think better of drug addicts than we do of the mentally ill. This may be the main reason why Gia’s heroin abuse is seen as the root of all her problems when, in fact, it may have been a symptom and an attempt to curb the wild manias and low depressions that afflicted her. We cannot know for sure because Gia died before seeking treatment. Rehab programs don’t have good records of identifying those who live with conditions like bipolar and schizophrenia, rooting everything in the relationship the addict has with her or his drug and those around them. Gia’s biographers have mostly retold her story as a fable about her undefined weak character. If we are honest, however, we will not allow Gia’s memory to serve such a shallow purpose as merely warning people away from drugs. A far more potent message can be sent about the importance of recognizing mental illness in ourselves and in our loved ones. What if Gia had been put on a combination such as lithium and lamotrigine? If our intent in retelling her story is to save lives, let’s make sure that we put our focus on the right cause.