RealMental

It’s been almost eleven years since I went to rehab. I spent six of the longest months of my life there trying to build myself back into a human being. It was the hardest and best thing I’ve ever done, the most painful, and by far the most frightening. It was something I did out of necessity not virtue, a decision that thankfully changed the course of my life.

I started drinking and using drugs for one reason. Drugs and alcohol allowed me a brief reprieve from what had been a lifetime of pain and confusion. What I felt when I got high was relief, a literal opiate wave numbing my psyche, a sense of peace, the ability to relax and breathe. For all the anguish I’d experienced since I was a child, I’d finally found a cure. A cure.

But those moments were fleeting and the more I used the more I needed until I was using just to exist, just so that I could get up and walk around from time to time, so that I could pretend to exist among the god damned normal people. My cure had turned into a means of staying one step ahead of the pain, which lurked around ever corner, always waiting, and I knew that if it ever caught up with me it would end me, tear me limb from limb. I used and drank and ran until the drugs and the alcohol just stopped working.

After several months of weeping and screaming and shaking treatment became a safe harbor, a place where I could sift through the wreckage of what had been my life. Once I was able to comprehend feelings and words and regained some semblance of a thought process I realized that I had suffered all my life from depression. I was crazy, maybe, but my illness had a name.

A kind doctor diagnosed me and spent countless hours listening as I talked about things I’d never talked about before, and eventually convinced me that I was not a terrible person. It took some doing. Very slowly, I started getting better. Once I began treating my depression, my need to otherwise medicate became much less of an issue.

Here’s the thing: Even though the abuse of drugs and alcohol almost ruined my life, I know that it also saved my life. That’s a hard thing for people to understand. Drug abuse and alcoholism is often seen as a weakness or an indulgence but I’m living proof that they are sometimes neither. Sometimes self-medicating is all a person has left and that is a terrible and horrifying thing- salvation via destruction. The selling of one’s soul for just a few moments peace.

Whenever I encounter an obvious drug user and they ask me for money I always give it to them. I know how bad, God have mercy, it hurts to run out of your medication.

by Stormybluez

I try to go out every afternoon- for a walk… to the beach… to buy smokes… lay in bed at a friend’s – drive drive drive…save me from me < breath fresh night air. I'm taking TRAZODONE 50 mg for a little over a week now. at first it put me right out and i was so glad- BUT last night and now I took it over 2 hours ago and I'm wide a wake-- ughgh! Instead of feeling doomed in gloom<< I'm Empty .. very hollow ... like I hit a point so hard ---I'm stuck in a slow motion ricochet. Everything still seems so worthless I feel worthless...but I'm far to numb to feel anything --- everyone is SOoo concerned...They all think I'm a freak... AND i AM- but so what-- I stretched a canvass and started sketching early in the week it so therapeutic... I was feeling so much better bit by broken bit ... Then out of the blue I get a medical call --- they found something & want preform a biopsy on my cervix -- a Coltoscopy. both my great grandmothers died of cervical cancer MAN i don't NEED THIS !! I'm trying not to let to disarm me fully I scared tho--im soo scared... oh me I'm gonna try to close my eyes and fall now.

You’re welcome.  And, I’m sorry.  But I think I’m doing just that.

After a visit to the psychiatrist in which I described my symptoms (regular physical symptoms of  panic/anxiety with no underlying emotional connection or distress) and he responded by refilling my Xanax prescription, and dismissed the idea of checking my hormone levels, I went back to the OB/GYN/Reproductive Endocrinologist who performed my hysterectomy last year.  I described the same symptoms to him, and he nodded throughout, and said that, while he wasn’t prepared to say that I do not need psychiatric care, all of my symptoms fit the profile of someone suffering surgical menopause without enough estrogen replacement.  And my bloodwork confirmed that my estrogen level was low-ish, so we increased the dosage of my estrogen patch.

Ten days later, I feel on my way to being a new woman.  It is supposed to take three weeks for the effects of the dosage increase to be fully realized, but already, the 5 hours a day I was spending in a cold sweat, feeling panicky and unable to leave the house is down to a matter of minutes.   And what is bugging me right now is the idea that I have, perhaps, had hormone-imbalance problems for most of my adult life, and no one to recognize them as such, and treat them accordingly.

Knowing that many mental illnesses are triggered and/or exacerbated by hormonal events such as puberty, childbirth, and menopause, why is this not factored into diagnoses more often?   It’s not just women–men are affected as well.  My own husband seems to have experienced the first symptoms of bipolar disorder just after hitting puberty.  But with women, I have the feeling that it just gets…overlooked more often.  I mean, the very word “hysterectomy” pretty much indicates the medical community’s attitude toward things female, doesn’t it?  That woman is unbalanced, moody, highly emotional, downright erratic…hysterical.  By removing her reproductive organs, the part of her that’s female, we can make her sane.  Whatever.  I’m not crafting a very good explanation of what I’m getting at here, but I think you understand.   Hello, AMA?  It’s almost 2008.  Can we have a NEW WORD to replace “hysterectomy,” please?  Ugh.  And by going on a rant about this, HEY, I’ve just proven them right, haven’t I?

At least they can’t say I’m “PMSing” any more.

How about the rest of you, ladies?  What is your experience with the relationship between hormonal fluctuations and your mental/emotional state, particularly as regards diagnosed, medicated mental illness?  Are hormone levels checked regularly as part of your treatment regimen?  Is your “femaleness” even considered…or worse, is your mental state “written off,” even in part, due to gender and the perceived instability/emotional weakness of women?

Do you ever get the feeling that a doctor is listening to your symptoms, and wondering if it’s just “that time of the month?”

By Beca

It happened even earlier today. The awareness of the heaviness in my chest; the weight on my shoulders; the desperate, nagging wish to crawl back into bed and stay there all day. But I couldn’t. I was driving to work. Yesterday I didn’t notice it until lunchtime, managing to push my way through nearly half the workday before recognizing, admitting, allowing the yawning sadness to worm its way into my consciousness. Today is going to be even longer.

On the surface I appear to be functioning, thriving even. My son is dressed, fed and off to school on time. I am showered, dressed, fed (a donut and a gingerbread latte, but it counts). I am slowly working my way through the pile of work on my desk. I even have makeup on and my dogs are in my truck waiting to be walked at lunch because the guilt of leaving them locked in their kennels another full day was too much for me this morning. But if you look beneath the surface you’ll notice the sink of dishes waiting to be loaded into the dishwasher, the massive dust bunnies overtaking the corners of the living room, the lineup of children’s movies by the DVD player waiting to entertain my child, and the significant number of fast food bags stuffed guiltily in the trash can. Underneath I am sad, so heavily sad.

I push through, knowing this has come and gone before, taking my happy pills, bathing in the light of my happy lamp, going through the motions and hoping that repetitive action, motion will remind my brain what it needs to
do.

The fourth time i tried to kill myself hasn’t happened yet.

I am making some of the hardest decisions i have ever had to make to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. Today my husband asked me to come home, he pleaded. He asked me to come back and make an effort to work things out. To be a family again.

So many parts of me would love to do that. The support. The friend to talk to. But i know in my heart that the environment i lived in for the past seven years is directly related to the debilitating depression that i suffered for the past two years. I can’t put faith, or take the chance, in the idea that things will change.

I need the change i have now. I need to stay alive. For myself, for my children, for my husband. I want to stay alive. I feel better in the past three months than i have in the past nine years. It’s been hard. Incredibly hard to walk away from my marriage. But, for me, that’s the key. It’s been hard. It’s made me sad. But, i am not depressed.

I can truly say that. For the first time in so long. I am not depressed.

Being on my own has made that happen.

I’m sorry for that.

By coolbeans

I spent several hours today thinking about what to write. I looked for memes. I checked out writing prompts. I considered ripping off Plain Jane by pulling together my own “Go Read It Today” post.

Instead, I checked my archives to send you back to a post from 2006. But this time last year, I wasn’t writing. At least, I wasn’t writing online.

My empty blog archive sent me to my secret hiding spot for the real dirt my brain coughs up. I dug out the paper journal I’d used last year in the middle of an emotional avalanche. I tipped the notebook back and forth between my palms, feeling its weight, wondering if this wasn’t a really stupid idea. Maybe today’s the day to write bad haiku.

Deep breath
crease the spine
dive inside

There wasn’t an entry for today. In fact, there was a gap between the end of October and the end of November. The closest I came was “I haven’t journaled for almost a month.”

Open to Fall
no words for today
just a dead end

I thought that I might share some of that journal someday. I anticipated scanning pages, blurring text, biting my lip and the bullet as I hit “Publish”. But at finding nothing in the heart of the fall last year, I flipped to the beginning and read through to the end. I wonder what I had thought was worth sharing. When I read it now I’m detached, calm, and judgmental. I think it sounds a little too dramatic. A written prayer feels forced, my plea for a different history reads like melodrama, the need to get everything out of my head looks like exaggeration. I decide, “This is too much. It’s so over-the-top. Who would want to read this? It’s grim and dismal and a little ridiculous.”

But that’s what it sounds like when you want to die.

I moped around for a few minutes because I felt stupid for thinking the things I thought. I was angry for things I wrote. I was angrier for words I didn’t write and couldn’t have written because I never said them.

I didn’t stew for long, though. I don’t have to. I’m on the other side of it and I’m not still writing those things because I’m not still feeling those things. A part of me wonders if maybe it really was selfish and self-indulgent. But I remember to forgive myself. Truly, I struggle to envision how it could have been different. I worked hard to stay on top of things. I was doing everything right but I’d been running on empty and had even gotten out to push for a good long while. There’s only one other way I can imagine getting past everything that I blew the whistle on last year. And now, I can’t imagine not being here to write this today.

_______________

1-800-SUICIDE
(1-800-784-2433)

1-800-273-TALK
(1-800-273-8255)

Originally posted here.

(Sunday morning, East Coast Time)

As I traded phone calls back and forth with my brother (here), my aunt (there), and my mother (there), I reflected on the fact that this is just too damned hard right now. And, that maybe I precipitated her mania? by not just keeping my damned mouth shut during her visit. By the time I talked to her this past Thursday, she was excitedly complaining to me about the internal inconsistencies in The Golden Compass series, which I’d lent her to read on the plane flight home. Something about how Lyra already knew how to do her hair in the first book, so why was she learning all over again in the second? Hoo-whee.

When I talked to her on Friday night, she was excited to tell me about how she’d finally been able to get out some thoughts about a theology based on the Holy Spirit, and not on God the Father or Christ the Son. From a lecture she gave 30 years ago, back when she was teaching at divinity school. “And I was considered quite one of the more brilliant up-and-coming feminist theologians.” Nah, obsession with the past and inflated ego are not signs of mania.

“Why is it, that whenever I finally have a breakthrough in the creative process, you people think I am crazy?” Well, let’s see, the giggling every minute or so might have tipped me off. And . . . “whenever?” This is only her second manic episode. She was very irritable with me during the three phone calls we had, and was refusing to go to the hospital over the weekend. She was sure she wasn’t manic. “This is different.” Telling her that sure, creativity and happiness are nice, but these were precursors to delusion and confusion, like last time, and that you have to stop it before it starts, or it’s longer and worse, wasn’t getting me anywhere. So the third time I spoke with her, after she told me “I did NOT agree to go tomorrow, I will NOT go anywhere until MONDAY, when the doctor’s office is open again,” I just started sobbing, and begging her to please go to the hospital on Saturday, because I am three thousand miles away, and as angry as I am at her, I want her to be OK, and I just can’t handle her breaking down right now, in the middle of my own issues.

Well, when I put it that way, and appealed to her self-image as a caring mother, it was a different story. She went, the doctor and she and my aunt met, the doctor told her he thought that she was on the verge again, she grumpily accepted the ‘scrip, and then she and my aunt went out for Thai, according to my aunt, who called from the restaurant while Mom was in the bathroom. I’ve got to call her in a few hours to try and convince her to fill the prescription, and take it before she goes to see the shrink tomorrow, so that he can “prove to you that I am fine.”

(Later Sunday afternoon)
Well, that didn’t go well. She told me the doctor gave her the medications “just in case,” got increasingly more agitated, and then hung up on me after telling me that she didn’t understand why we all hate her. She then called my aunt, told her that she hated her for telling me “lies” about what had happened with the doctor, and hung up on her.

I then spoke with the covering psychiatrist, who seems a saint. I told him what’d happened and he agreed with my take, and told me he and the shrink at the hospital yesterday had rx’d Abilify, but we’re at that point where she’s not yet hospitalizable, so there’s not a lot I can do from Boston.

I don’t want to go to California. My brother’s going to try to call her in an hour and see how she’s doing.

(Early Sunday evening)
She’s been calling my aunt, yelling at her, and hanging up. My brother then called her, talked her down, and got her to agree she’s going to see the shrink tomorrow. (I’d told him the covering’d told me they were open tomorrow and she could come in whenever.)

She then called me to tell me she was sorry she’d yelled at me, but that she was still mad at my aunt, and that we were all still wrong. I said, “Good, I hope I am. Give Dr. X my cell number so he can call me and tell me so while you’re there.” “That’s a good idea!” she says.

I don’t want to go to California. I don’t want to look for documents to establish our relationship, so that I can start guardianship or commitment or representative payee proceedings. I want her absence to make my heart grow fonder.