RealMental

See Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part One and Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part Two and Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part Three for the full story.

And so, I found myself at twenty years old in a small office with Dr. Ragu, the psychiatrist to whom my medical doctor had referred me. I had no belief whatsoever that he would be able to help me, but nothing else had saved me from my hallucinations, paranoia, anxiety, and depression – not alcohol, not marijuana, not LSD, not food – and I was finally willing to pursue the officially accepted avenue afforded to those who do not know where else to turn. He handed me a styrofoam cup filled with water.

Why are you here? he asked.

I have to be. I’m depressed, paranoid, I said.

You don’t have to be. You wanted to come. Why are you here?

I’ve been depressed my whole life, but I can’t deal with it anymore. My voice sounded unconvincing and hollow, but that may have been the cheap office walls.

Is there more than just the depression? he asked.

Yes, but I don’t want to talk about it, I said. I had never spoken openly about it before, and I was not sure that I wanted to start now. I felt like an idiot sitting across from him in that chair. I suddenly did not know why I was there.

But that’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? The sooner you open up the better.

I guess, I said to my knees, which I noticed my thumbs were massaging compulsively.

Well? Why are you paranoid?

I decided to give in and tell him about the hallucinations. I needed to come clean, and his lilting East Indian accent was comforting.

I hallucinate. The words blew in tumbled breath past my lips.

Dr. Ragu’s eyes lit up as though this were an exciting turn of events, and I could not help but smile at him. His face made the idea of hallucinating seem like fun. It wasn’t, but I liked his enthusiasm. I told him about the six-inch aphids I saw crawling through his spider plants, the snow that fell softly most days despite the fact that it was July, and the bodies in vehicles at night. I still did not believe that psychiatry held any promise for me, but I liked letting my stories out into the air.

For the first time, I was not hidden and locked in a struggle to maintain a veneer of normalcy.

(This is also posted at Schmutzie’s Milkmoney Or Not, Here I Come)

See Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part One and Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part Two for the full story.

**************

As I get older, my relationship to the events of my past changes. The chronology seems far less significant than it once did, and I find myself skipping from a story from when I was thirty to a game I played when I was three, connecting them by intuitive rather than direct association. When I tell these stories now about my history with mental illness, I move through the events that describe it in a seemingly haphazard manner, picking up pieces of it from very different times and places and hanging them together in constantly shifting triptychs.

My intent when I began this series was to follow a natural, chronological progression through my initial experiences with psychiatry, but that turned out to be less natural than I thought. It seems more rational to begin with the place at which I arrived, the point of the story, the point at which I began to seek help, and then work my way back to how that point came about.

So, I will tell you about when I was two, which I remember quite well. I can remember being one-and-a-half and wearing itchy plastic diaper pants that scratched my skin, so two is pretty clear. One of my first memories is of my sudden attachment to a pair of white oxford-like shoes with navy stripes on the sides. My mother decided to put them in a neighbour’s garage sale, because I outgrew them, and I was gripped by a terrible anxiety about not being able to have them anymore. They were mine! Mine! And I loved them! I really LOVED them!

My mother explained about how I could not wear them anymore, but I did not care. Those shoes were beautiful. I did not want to be bigger than those shoes. Those shoes should be mine and stay in my closet. I did not care that they no longer fit on my feet. I wanted to be able to touch them whenever I wanted. I still remember how they smelled.

At each stage of life until I was an adult in my twenties, I panicked over leaving an era of myself behind. On my fifth birthday, I cried all day, because I knew that I was leaving being a really little kid behind and that I was going to get old and die. The day I could no longer wear my red nightie, not even as a shirt, made me feel like I had moved into some parallel netherworld I no longer recognized. When I got my first period, my body’s betrayal of my childhood devastated me, and I avoided human touch for months. I felt no joy in the changes that some children embrace.

Of course, those shoes disappeared. I knew that some other kid was going to wear those on their feet, because my mother told me that would happen, and it made me very sad. How could something be mine and then not be mine? The space on the floor of my closet where they used to sit was empty, but I checked it often, hoping I might see them. I sat on my bed and wept. I was grieving.

This sense of grieving became a near constant throughout my childhood. It took me another eight years to put a word to what I was feeling, and at ten years old, I realized that I was depressed. Upon that realization, I began to hatch plans, because even at that young age, I was weary of my condition. I did not know how to express my agony, and I did not know how to ask for help or that help was even available. I only knew that the way I was was not “normal” by any means, and I began to plot my escape. Any number of escapes were possible: physical pain, suicide, running away – under the weight of my grief, any type of relief or way out seemed reasonable.

Escape felt necessary to my very survival, and I began a long road filled with many ineffective attempts at distancing my pain. If anything good can be said about that part of my life, it is that I was certainly goal-oriented and persistent.

… to be continued …

(This entry is also posted at Schmutzie’s Milkmoney Or Not, Here I Come)

(…continued from “Why I Saw My First Psychiatrist, Part One“)

I left off in Part One of this story with my arrival at my boyfriend’s house after hallucinations of dead bodies slumped over the steering wheels of cars on my way home from a friend’s house. At the time, I lied to him about why I was out of breath, and I feel that I should backtrack in order to explain why I did so.

Although such full-blown hallucinations as the bodies in the cars were new to me, the sudden excessive paranoia and scattered thoughts were not. When I sat down on my boyfriend’s couch after fleeing my nightmare of a walk home, the only thing I could think about was when I was in grades ten and eleven in high school. During those two years, I went through greater and lesser phases of paranoia that involved, at times, keeping my back to walls at all times when alone so as not to be sneaked up on, checking the houseplants for video cameras and microphones, worrying that I was being drugged through my food, hearing distant music coming through the hot-air vents at home, believing that I was waiting for a sign to take my position as the new prophet, assuming that all men were rapists in waiting, and on and on. There were periods during which I was less fearful, but for the most part, I believed that I was under surveillance at all times, and I learned to keep my anxiety to myself accordingly. I would not allow a suspicious look or word out into the public eye lest They find out what I knew: I knew that They were watching, and They knew that I was direct threat to their hegemony.

I hated being fifteen. It was far more complicated than I had bargained for.

Aside from my parents asking me if I wanted to “see someone” once and an English teacher sending me to the guidance counselor over a dark piece of poetry, I managed to keep my behaviour well enough in check to remain unnoticed, and then, with no real effort on my part and for no apparent reason, the cloud of erratic thinking began to ease up. I was no longer a future prophet, They receded into a muddy memory of fanciful thinking, and the houseplants were no longer blinds for spy technology. And yet, the reversion to my old self terrified me.

What was I now without what I had believed I was becoming? Prior to my delusions, I had always lived with depression, and that is where I found myself again. I wanted neither state. Knowing how to behave as a functioning person had saved me from what I saw as unnecessary intervention at the time, and my plan was to continue that way, even though I was deeply unhappy. I wanted no one to know where I had been, because if it came back, and I had been correct, my secret still needed to be kept. As difficult as it had been to suffer so much paranoia and anxiety, I still harboured a desire for it. The possibility of the assurance of my own universal importance was intoxicating.

And then, the next four or five years passed without much incident. I graduated from high school and I moved out on my own. I was unable to hold down a job due to depression and anxiety, but I passed that off as simply being ill-suited to customer service. I was well relative to how things had been, and I wanted to believe that I could remain that way. I saw myself as having dominion over my own mind. I would overcome, and that was that. And then, slowly and quietly, I began to slip away from myself again.

This time, though, I no longer believed that I was a burgeoning prophet or that I was being continually surveilled. The world I grew in my mind to inhabit this time was a wasteland. There were dead bodies in cars. It snowed softly all through long June evenings and nights, as though the weather did not know its own mind, either. My tastebuds went numb, but my ability to perceive colour skyrocketed. I liked to sit well back from riverside paths as a lonely, forgotten thing in the trees and watch the passersby. I had one foot in reality and the other in a place that was never quite there, and I was frightened by my secrets.

So I did not tell my boyfriend when the paranoia returned with such suddenness. I did not want to be told that I was wrong. I did not want to be locked up in an institution for seeing and thinking differently. As scary as it was to have my world shifting out of range, I wanted it to be real. If it was not real, I was lost, and if I was lost, I had nowhere to go. The other me was interminably sad. In the end, I was too scared to be able to keep up the ruse of normalcy as I had before. I knew how far my fear could go.

That June or July, I made an appointment with my doctor so that I could get a referral to a psychiatrist. Part of me worried that They might be real, that I was basically turning myself in to Them. Another part of me knew that the snow I saw falling and settling on spring’s new leaves was seen only by me. I simply wanted to stop, get off somewhere soft, and sleep.

Some time later, I found myself seated in an office building watching impossibly large, six-inch aphids grazing along Dr. Ragu’s hanging plants while I tried to decipher english through his thick, East Indian accent. He asked if they were green, and I said Of course they are. Finally, I felt I had an ally.

I visited my first psychiatrist when I was twenty years old. Over the course of several months before that, my sense of detachment from life had become more and more pronounced. I have never felt particularly real, firmly set in the here and now, so this gradual shift went unnoticed for quite a while. I wish I could point to a certain date or an incident as the starting point, but the initial changes were far too subtle for me to take note of at the time.

Along with my sense of detachment came a growing paranoia. It was inconstant, and its focus was erratic. That, too, came along so quietly that I did not notice it until one night when I was walking home from a friend’s house. I turned a corner onto my street, took a few tentative steps, and found myself glued to the sidewalk with fear. I shot looks up and down the street. I was absolutely certain that someone was watching me with ill intent. There was not a whiff of wind, not another person or animal visible, and the night was bright with streetlights and a full moon. I stood near the corner and smoked a cigarette, looking right, looking left, and trying not to blink in a bid to be aware of as much of my surroundings as possible. Eventually, I rubbed out my cigarette with the toe of my shoe, found my courage, and stepped out into the middle of the street. I figured that everything would be most visible to me from there, and it was comforting to walk where the streetlights shone brightest. No one was going to outwit me in the middle of the night.

And that’s when things took a very bad turn, a turn I would never have suspected.

Both sides of the street were lined with parked cars, and when I reached the second cars in from the curb, I stopped and did a double-take. The interior of the vehicle on my right was dark inside and also shaded from the streetlights by overhanging elms, so I could not be sure, but I thought I saw a body slumped over the steering wheel. I was too terrified to take a closer look, but from what I could tell, the person had been shot through the forehead. That can’t be a body in there. It’s not a body. It’s not a body, I thought. I looked again. It was like I was high. I could see the body, but at the same time I could not really make it out. I held my breath and stood stone still for what seemed like half an hour, not knowing how to move forward or go back to the place I had been. I decided to continue with my plan to walk down the middle of the road, because I simply could not accept that I was seeing what I was seeing. It’s not a body. It’s not a body. It’s not a body.

But then I saw another body in the third car on the right, and then in the fourth on the left, and then in the fifth on the left. I walked faster and faster until I was running at top speed, desperate to get inside out of the night and into a lit house. I knew that there could not possibly be bodies slumped over steering wheels in nearly every car for a full block. There just couldn’t be. But knowing that what I was seeing was not real did not counteract the terror I felt at seeing it.

I raced up the stairs into my boyfriend’s house, chest heaving. I had never been so relieved to be home. Are you okay? he asked. Yeah, fine, I said, panting, I just thought I’d run home.

It was shortly after that that I decided it was time to find my first psychiatrist.

(read Part Two)

I have been meaning to write about what these last two weeks have been like for me since I upped my dosage of Celexa from 20 mg to 30 mg, but when I sit down to explain everything, all I can come up with is a hodgepodge of emotive descriptors, such as anxious and defeated and scared.

I want to have more to say than feeling words. I want to be able to tell you what I have done, realizations I have come to, behaviours I am hoping to change, but I have got bupkis. This is not at all surprising, really, because I am still making it through that first month after a dosage change, but don’t we always want to have more to show for all our hard times than orange stains on our fingers from cheez puffs and a dwindling supply of facial tissues? I know I do.

Yesterday, I was setting out cartons of asian takeout and chopsticks and whatnot for the Palinode and me, and you would have thought that I was waiting for someone to beat me by the way I was behaving. My anxiety was so high that I was fumbling with everything, and each time I dropped or bumped something, I would jump or squeak or issue an apology. I ended up reaching such a fever pitch that the Palinode took to patting my arm and saying You’re doing really well, really good, don’t worry, you’re doing fine.

Who needs this kind of support to get through setting out utensils and takeout? Apparently, I do, and it is frustrating. I always have high hopes when I change dosages or medications, so when the road to wellness is bumpy, I take that as a personal failure. I become certain that I am weak, that I am less intelligent than I thought I was, that I am inherently unlovable, that this is all there will ever be for me. I know this line of thinking is not entirely realistic, but even so, these ideas take me by the nose.

If this scenario works out the way I hope, this is just the storm before the calm. My body has to take its (sweet) time to adjust to its new chemical configuration; I have to adjust to not being the kind of anxious depressive I was when my experience of the medication (hopefully) evens out. Transitions are rarely easy, even when they do not involve psychological illnesses, so I just have to keep in mind that I am in transition and try to stay patient.

Is there a drug for patience?

(also posted on Schmutzie’s Milkmoney Or Not, Here I Come)

I have a psychological disorder with symptoms of anxiety, depression, and a touch of paranoia. Do I know distinctly what I have? No, I do not. Three psychiatrists gave me three different diagnoses – paranoid schizophrenia, manic depression, and schizoid affective disorder – and so I lost faith in the solidity of labels.

So, I have a disordered brain for which I take a particular pill, which I will call Fabulon. I love Fabulon. It has done wonders for me. Last January it dug me out of a particularly nasty spell of anxiety that had me hiding under blankets on the couch for a week and spiking fevers every time I even thought about leaving the apartment, and since then, it has managed to keep me pretty even keel without any nasty side effects. Every other drug I have tried has dried out my mouth, turned my pee green, made me too nervous, made me too tired, given me migraines, caused sexual dysfunction, and generally has not alleviated my poor self of the burden of The Crazy. Fabulon does, though, and I love it.

Of course, my love of Fabulon comes from its effects once I have already adjusted to a new dosage and am on the sanity straightaway. Starting a new dosage is a strange, dreamy journey in which nothing seems to stick to me. Time fritters away from me, seeming both long and short, while I float in a permanent present. I lose track of the quantity of things, so it is easy to drink too much, completely overestimate how much money I have, and talk so loudly to the Palinode that his head hurts.

I am now in the midst of my third such trip. I experienced this at my first 10 mg dose, and then again at 20 mg, and now again at 30 mg, so it is familiar territory for me at this point, but it has not stopped me from behaving a little dottier than usual.

On Saturday afternoon, the Palinode explained to me something that he was going to do. What? I said. He went over it again. I have no idea what you are talking about, I said. He looked at me like I must be kidding him, and I could tell that whatever he had been talking about was not difficult to comprehend. That thing you are talking about? I said. You just go ahead with whatever it is, because I can’t understand a thing you’re saying. I still do not know what he was talking about. My brain recalls him sounding like the adults in animated Peanuts cartoons: wah wah wah wah wah, like a muffled trumpet.

On Sunday morning, I looked high and low for my purse and became convinced that I had lost it at the pub the night before. It wasn’t in the car we rode home in, it had not been turned in to the pub staff, and it was nowhere to be found in our apartment. I looked in the closet, behind the furniture, and even under the bathroom sink. Just when I was sure that my favourite bag of all time was lost forever, I pulled open the bottom drawer of my night table, and there it was jammed tightly in between balls of yarn, some bandaids, and an old cat toy. It was obvious that I had used some force to wedge it in there, but I have no recollection of doing so.

Last night, the Palinode put me in charge of ordering in some asian food for supper. I remember feeling quite confused in between consulting the menu in the yellow pages and talking to the lady on the telephone. I even had her read my order back to me, because something just seemed terribly off with what I was doing. I could not figure out what might be wrong, so I just went with it and hoped for the best. When the food arrived, I was stunned. I had ordered twice as much food as we ever order to the tune of $56. FIFTY-SIX DOLLARS OF ASIAN FOOD FOR TWO PEOPLE. It was ridiculous. By the end of the week, we will be so sick of noodles and bean sauces that baked potatoes are going to look pretty terrific.

The past two times that I have had to deal with a Fabulon dosage change, the more major effects lasted about a week, so I only have to contend with another three days of this brainless wonderment at the world’s turning. Until then, I plan on doing nothing more difficult than watching the world go by while I chug coffee to maintain wakefulness and work at remembering that one thing at a time that I can manage to hold in my head.

Of course, now that I have mentioned that I am supposed to remember one thing, I have lost it. Hopefully, it was not something important like having to pee or feed our cats. I guess I will find out soon enough if my chair suddenly becomes too warm or the cats are dragging their spindly bodies across the floor when I get home.

Wish me luck with the whole not wandering out into traffic thing.

(Originally posted at Milkmoney Or Not, Here I Come)

I feel like I cannot go to work or see people out in public. Over the last several days, every time I think of work or meetings that I have to go to, a burning sensation crawls up through my neck and behind my ears. Shortly after, the nausea starts. It is happening now just writing about it.

If I read for too long, the informations swarms behind my face, and I feel that I will drown in the too-muchness of it all. I turn to television, but it only seems to speak of heartbreak and violence with the occasional laugh track to tell us when the heartbreak or violence is funny. Food does not fill the holes it once did, and so I find myself craving hybrid foods that do not exist: fudge brownies that are like chocolate ice cream but do not hurt my teeth, donuts that are more like vegetarian spring rolls but still sweet, baklava that is more like mango chutney.

I like the things that I do outside of the house. There is no reason to be made so ill at the thought of them, but here I am, burning and nauseous. The same thing started happening to me late last January. I stayed at home for a week from work, battling my body’s stress signals just to make it to the bathroom. Since then, I take a medication at a low dose, and it worked well until I had a total laparoscopic hysterectomy in early July. It has proved less and less effective as time goes on, and now I feel that I am almost back where I started in January.

This week, I am going to make an appointment with my doctor to discuss an increase in my medication. Until early last week, when asked how I was, my reply was the usual Fine, and yourself?. Only a week later, it hurts to be asked that question. It makes me reflect on myself, which I sincerely do not want to do right now. I want to sleep or watch television. I do not want to know how I am feeling. It only complicates what would otherwise be a perfectly good flatline.

This is the reality of my illness that I have avoided confronting. Medications are not always perfect. I am not always perfect. If a treatment does seem perfect at first, that does not mean that it will always be perfect. This is the nature of life and change, but I do not want to fit this illness into human reality like that. I want it to be a tidy package, like a chair or a stop sign. I want it to be one unchangeable thing that I can rearrange when necessary.

I prefer to look at myself through a false lens, one that sees me as someone recovering, but it is becoming clearer and clearer to me that that is not the case. I am not recovering. This thing, this illness, is a part of my life, and going back to my doctor to alter the dose of my medication is a big step for me in admitting this to myself. I usually throw up my hands and run away when treatment does not succeed the way I had hoped. By staying the course, I am saying Yes to something to which I do not want to say yes.

I do not want to say yes, and yet I must do it.

There should be a place
where all the undesireds are winnowed out,
and we are pared down to our best essentials,
like naked babies before their first poop,
wholes before they fall to their first chaos.

I do not want to say yes.

(Originally published at Schmutzie’s Milkmoney Or Not, Here I Come)