RealMental

By Dianna

I’m 35 years old and I live with my Mom and Dad. I’m OK with that…most of the time. They are my crutch as there are things I probably would do that I shouldn’t and things that I wouldn’t do that I should. My Dad is “old school.” He doesn’t believe in mental illness but believes everything is an act of will. Don’t want to feel crazy? Then stop.

There are many days when getting up seems way too hard and the very thought of walking out that front door in bright daylight fills me with terror. My stomach clenches, my hands shake, but I know I have to because the look on his face, the disguised remarks, or the silent treatment will be so much worse. So I do it, and in the end I am better off for it as the reality is never quite as bad as what I create in my head.

There are nights I’d like nothing more than to sit in my room with a bottle of wine and drink myself silly. This only leads to hyperactivity and a walk out the front door to a bar, because the truth is, I don’t like to drink alone. I have the built in excuse not to do it, too, because my Daddy will get mad at me. In the end I am thankful, when I wake up fresh and ready to face a new day. Each day this happens is a day that fills me with pride that I made the right choice and conquered the demon in that moment. You see that’s the thing. The moments always pass if you just refocus the energy, the battle is learning how to do that, the rest of my battle is to learn to do it for me and not for someone else.

Then there is the knowledge that eventually I have to let go of the crutch and I have to find a way to make it on my own. I have to get out there and build a life of my own and more often, I finally want to. Most days I am no longer scared.

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By Dianna

Where do I go from here? Once again I feel my life spiraling out of control and have nothing with which to stop it. I am a logical person. I know what I should do to make myself feel better, however I seem to have no way of stopping myself from doing what I shouldn’t do.

When I get nervous and feel disliked in a situation, I drink. When I am manic and feeling like the world is mine and everyone should bow to my amazingness, I drink. When I drink, I inevitable fail and the all consuming guilt spirals into depression.

This weekend I celebrated my friend’s birthday. Her friends don’t like me. Perhaps the best thing was not for me to point out how one particular friend of hers doesn’t even say hello to me and shoots daggers at me with her eyes. They make me feel uncomfortable and she herself, always seems to want me to act a different way, or be a different way, and I try to tell myself it’s all in my head and than I feel bad, but perhaps maybe it isn’t.

That night, I separated myself from the group. Instead of talking to them, I talked to strangers. People who didn’t make me feel disliked and uncomfortable. People who listened to me and didn’t tell me I was talking too loud or act as if I was embarrassing them. They left me at the restaurant and I had to find my own way to the bar. Then, they left me at the bar and I had to get myself home. No matter how poorly I was behaving, how can that be the way to treat a friend?

Here I go again. One more friend down. When you only have 3 left it’s a sad and lonely place to be.

Being bi-polar is not conducive to friendships, and those you do find generally are engaged in the same self destructive behavior you should avoid like the plague. It gets you nowhere real fast. Yet, no matter how many times I am told “it’s not my fault”, no one else seems to believe it or wants to take the effort to understand that. And sometimes I just don’t believe it.

Whose fault is it if not mine? I’m the one who chose to have sex with strangers, to put things up my nose that shouldn’t go there and to put that glass to my lips over and over again.

Today I made it out of bed, albeit late, and I will drag myself to the gym and remember each hour that passes is another chance to begin again.

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Part One Here
Part Two Here

Part Three

By Muriel Lipke

After returning to San Francisco in 2007, I was great, for about a year… Then I had another episode which landed me in a doctor’s office.

The difference was that I had done my reading since that first breakthrough episode in 2007 about serotonin and what it does to one’s brain. I knew enough to advocate for myself at this point and so when the general practitioner I had been seeing told me that my list of symptoms I’d compiled following the more recent episode were “all in my head” I fired him and went in search of a doctor who would listen to me.

Which was when I found in Dr. Amatti. The first time I saw her I ran down a lengthy list of about 200 symptoms I had regularly experienced and asked her if she could figure out what was wrong with me. She listened carefully and said that she wanted to run blood work and other tests on me to see what could possibly be in common with my diverse symptoms.

All my life I’ve been particularly sickly. Well – not all my life – I first started noticing that I got sick a lot when I was in my teens. I had been treated for allergies, phantom physical pain, insomnia, night sweats, repeated strep throat and bronchitis, stomach cramps, irritable bowel syndrome, shaking hands, ringing ears, “female troubles,” asthma, random fevers, etc… PLUS depression and anxiety. I was regularly told that I was a flippin’ hypochondriac. So much so that I believed it a little. I didn’t think all those symptoms could be connected — but, after working with Dr. Amatti I learned that they are.

See the thing is my brain doesn’t make enough serotonin for healthy bodily functions. Serotonin doesn’t only control moods – it facilitates the central nervous system! My levels of serotonin were so dangerously low my doctor told me that had I not seen someone when I did that I possibly could have died – either by my own hand – (because I’ll freely admit that I’d contemplated suicide because I felt like such crap,) or because of organ failure.

I was really really sick.

Though, I immediately began to feel a little better as soon as I knew what was wrong with me. My body didn’t make enough serotonin and because I’d gone so long living without healthy levels of it in my body, I’d sustained some minor brain damage. The best the doctors could figure out, I’d become immune to the SSRIs my doctor had put me on the year before, because I was taking a high daily dose over an extended period of time. It happens. I guess.

What they have not figured out is how I got this. Dr. Amatti thinks it’s genetic. Mental illness runs in my family. I think it’s a combination of genetics and trauma from abuse. My therapist agrees with me. All I know is that in the fall of 2008 I was diagnosed conclusively with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Major Depression, Anxiety and a dysfunction that they haven’t come up with a name for yet (I keep suggesting mine) where the brain has been permanently damaged due to lack of neurotransmitters over an extended period of time.

I was placed on an aggressive drug therapy. It’s taken me a year to really get back to feeling better at all – but, I’m glad to say that I now do. At the encouragement of my friends and family I got back into therapy. It’s been nice to have someone non-partial to talk things through with, and I think it’s really helped me a lot, at least in feeling like I’m not alone.

I remember asking my therapist shortly after beginning to work with her why it was that I could go for years and years and years without experiencing any symptoms of my mental illness, only to think I was “cured,” and then break down again?

She told me that she thinks that much like I’m going to have to be on drugs for my whole life to deal with the chemical part of my illness, the traumatic events that lead up to my breakthrough episodes are going to be with me my whole life, too. Just that perhaps I will only have to deal with them every so often, in a cycle, usually when there is a trigger to bring it all back up to the surface. I think that’s true because I have noted that every five years or so something seems to happen which has caused me to need to revisit my abuse and deal with issues from it. I work really hard to get through those periods (I’m going through one now) and deal with shit so I can be as normal as possible.

I’m really thankful that I have good doctors now and a family and close friends who understand my illness and support me. Recently I started talking about getting back together with my boyfriend (the love of my life, the one from the start of the story) which has made me feel even more protected than normal. He knows all the dirty details of my trauma and I have been at my absolute worst around him — he loves me regardless. And, really, dealing with mental illness is so much easier when you have people to help you.

There are a lot of people out there – fake friends and such – who enable my bad behavior when I’m going through it or cut me down or make me feel awful about my disease (like I’m making it up or something) that I have had to learn to tune them out in the past couple of years. That’s a hard lesson. I want to be friends with everyone and it took me 35 years to understand that some people are just toxic.

I suppose that’s a lesson for everyone, not just someone struggling with what I’m struggling with.

However, now that I have done that AND gotten on the right medication AND found a therapist who I am comfortable talking to AND developed my support network around myself so that if I fall again there are people there to catch me… I finally feel like me. The me I knew I always was. And, it’s so liberating… to be able to just enjoy my life… it’s freedom from those events which shaped and informed who I became as an adult that I never anticipated having.

Having it makes me grateful.

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Part One Here
By Muriel Lipke

Part Two

My life evened out pretty quickly following that episode and the start of therapy. I was diagnosed with “situational depression” and “anxiety.” I worked for about a year to process the death of one of my abusers and compartmentalize it so that I could go on living my life in as normal a fashion as possible. In the spring of 2005 I finished therapy and wasn’t on drugs anymore and was generally feeling pretty good…

Flash forward to the spring of 2007. I was under a great deal of stress, working at a new job, in a exceptionally demanding field. My boyfriend (the love of my life) had broken up with me in 2005 (before I finished therapy, even) and we were still friends. Since that time I had begun dating someone new — who ALSO broke up with me — right after I started the high stress job. Like seriously, the day I started the damn thing…

I floated along, doing okay for a while – though I was clearly withdrawing from my friends and family – and, starting to spin out of control. I was drinking a lot – I mean, I’ve always liked to party – but, it was becoming a pretty regular habit. And, I didn’t like that. So I balanced the party out with excessive exercise, running three miles in the morning, every morning and another couple of miles on my elliptical trainer after work every night. I was working about 70-90 hours a week.

Sometime in April I noticed that I would occasionally hear this weird humming or ringing in my ears. Shortly after that I began having toothaches. I went to the dentist and he told me that it looked like I was grinding my teeth. My hands – which had always shook a bit – were so unsteady that I couldn’t hold a pencil or pen and perform anything that required fine motor function outside of typing. I began to get headaches – lots of headaches. In general, I was feeling pretty poopy.

At the end of May, over Memorial Day Weekend, I ran a half-marathon. I then went out that evening and partied to celebrate with my friends. I actually called it quits pretty early and hadn’t consumed that much booze, because I remember thinking I was pretty damn sober when I walked up the stairs into my apartment. I went to bed and slept fairly well until about 5 am when I woke up because my heart was pounding in my chest.

I was – for some reason – exceptionally frightened. I was having irrational thoughts and my hands were clenched at my side. I laid there for about an hour, trying to calm myself into going back to sleep, when finally I realized that wasn’t going to happen I decided to get up and go for my run. I flipped on MSNBC (as I did most mornings) and started the coffee pot which I had set up the night before. When the coffee was done I pulled the pot out of the cradle to pour myself a cup and couldn’t hold it. My hand couldn’t make a grip and the pot slipped out of my hands and crashed on the floor at my feet, splashing hot coffee all over me.

At the same time, a shooting pain went up my left side, through my torso and shoulder. I suddenly couldn’t breath and I began to have tunnel vision.

I don’t know how I did it, but I managed to get into my bedroom and called my Mom. I told her what was happening and that I was really scared that I was having a heart attack (because that’s what I thought it felt like) and that I wanted her to tell me what to do.

“Go to the hospital,” she said, “Right now.”

I called a cab and took myself to San Francisco General Hospital where I was seen by a doctor who told me that I was not having a heart attack, but a massive anxiety attack. I talked the doctor out of calling down a psych consult and took a cab home. I called my Mom and told her what they had told me at the hospital. And, I told her that I thought that there was something else wrong with me and that I felt like I couldn’t deal with it in San Francisco on my own and that I wanted to come home.

She agreed with me and two weeks later my friends had helped me pack my apartment into storage and I was on a plane headed home for the summer.

The first month or so that I was home was so fucking frustrating. After that breakthrough anxiety attack it was like I was a huge raw nerve just hanging out into the world. Everything and everyone set me off. I didn’t want to eat or sleep or see my friends or family… I just kind of sat in my bedroom at my parent’s house waiting for the medication that I’d been given at the hospital to do something.

One day while I was at my parent’s vacation house with my Mom, I decided I wanted to give myself a pedicure. It was a disaster: First I spilled an entire bottle of polish remover on the carpet while trying to take my old polish off my toes. Then I couldn’t form a steady grip in order to paint my toenails. I tried and my hand shook so badly that I smeared polish all over my foot. This happened three times before I lost my shit and threw the open bottle against a wall. My Mom came upstairs when she heard me sobbing. She found me slumped down in the hallway, crying hysterically, over something as stupid as painting my toenails.

“What’s the problem?” She asked.

“My hand won’t stop shaking enough to paint my toes,” I cried to her, “And, I spilled polish remover and then I got mad and threw my nail polish at the wall.”

My Mom was really shocked, though she knew that there was something seriously wrong with me, this was the first time since I was a teen that she’d seen me break down like this… She got me calmed down and took me downstairs where she painted my toes for me. It was comforting and humiliating at the same time.

My boyfriend (the love of my life) called me several times that first month and I talked to him about what had happened. He helped me come up with a list of questions to ask the doctor when I was able to see one. I ended up going to see my family practitioner who ran some tests on me and told me that he thought that the problem was that my brain wasn’t making enough serotonin to be healthy.

Eventually the medication combination that he gave me kicked in and I started to feel a lot like my self again. At the end of the summer I was ready to go back to San Francisco and resume my normal life.

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The past few months have been difficult for me: Mike’s stroke, financial problems, DJ’s death, sickness (Hello SWINE FLU). My anxiety, always a problem, became crippling. I couldn’t face social situations. The smallest tasks became overwhelming and I withdrew from Mike and the kids. More than anything, I wanted to crawl into myself and hide. It was physical too. I started eating more and moving less. Always tired, my entire body ached. My arthritis was also hurting more and I finally broke down and went to the doctor at the beginning of November. While I was there, he suggested I change the meds I take for depression. For the past few years I’ve been doing fairly well taking Zoloft. I still struggle with my emotions from time to time, but it helps. He told me that Cymbalta would do the same thing but that it would also help with my pain and fatigue. I hate taking pills, so it sounded good. At the same time, he gave me two prescriptions for pain relievers/muscle relaxers.

Sure enough, after a week of Cymbalta I felt a lot better physically but mentally I was much worse. I wasn’t sad or even ‘depressed’. It is hard to explain, but something was very wrong. Have you ever gotten a song stuck in your head? You try and try not to think about it but every time you turn around you’re humming the tune or singing the words. The next few weeks went something like that, but instead of songs I would think about hurting myself. They weren’t suicidal thoughts; I didn’t want to kill myself. Washing dishes, I would imagine breaking a glass and cutting myself. Every time I shut the van door I would have to force myself to move my hand out of the way so that I wouldn’t accidently smash it on purpose. If I walked under a tree I would think about a branch breaking and falling on me. It was terrifying. For the most part, I was able to ignore the urges, but not always. Once I was cutting my toenails and kept feeling compelled to take off more and more of the nail until I had torn my entire nail off. I was looking at my bloody toe and I knew that it should hurt but I didn’t feel anything but relief.

I should have asked for help, but I didn’t want to seem crazy. Normal people don’t do things like that. I did talk to a couple of people about the drug but they didn’t mention any side effects like I was experiencing so I thought that it must be in my head.

Last Friday, Mike and I got in a huge fight. We have our little disagreements, but we very rarely argue. Something inside of me broke and I started crying hysterically. I insisted that Mike leave the house because I couldn’t even look at him. I knew I was in trouble. My first reaction was to take one of the other pills the doctor had prescribed. I’d had trouble with it before because it put me to sleep right away. I figured that it would calm me down and I could take a nap before the kids came home. Mike was supposed to be back soon and he could take care of things until I was back to myself.

The bottle said to take one pill three times a day. My brain was running around in circles. I should just take three pills once, right? The worst that could happen was that I would sleep all day and wake up feeling groggy. I took three and waited and cried and waited and cried. Nothing happened. My brain was still racing. What if I took three more? I’d get sick probably, but at least I would go to sleep. I took three more and waited and cried and waited and cried. Nothing happened. I took a shower, with my clothes on, and fell asleep. The water in my face woke me up and I remember thinking that the water had washed away the medicine. I should take some more…

I don’t remember anything after that, but my sister said that the bottle was empty. I woke up in the ICU and stayed there for two days. After that I spent four days in a locked psych ward at the hospital. No tv. No radio. No clock. Just lots and lots of time. They changed my meds and listened to me cry. Then they listened to me cry some more. Then they listened to me talk. And then they let me go home. I feel a million times better now, but ???? Now I feel like I am officially branded: MENTALLY ILL. It seems worse somehow than just getting some meds from the family doctor. Now it’s Major Depression with a side of Invasive Thoughts.

By KristyK

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By Muriel Lipke

Part One

Shortly after I moved to San Francisco in 2004 I received a phone call from an uncle on my biological father’s side of the family telling me that my paternal grandfather had died. I remember sitting at my desk and asking my uncle if he had called to tell me anything else. When he said “no” I hung up the phone without even saying goodbye. I didn’t feel sad, I didn’t cry – why would I? My grandfather, along with my father sexually abused me from the age of four until the age of thirteen. I hadn’t even seen the man since I was 18, when I confronted them both as part of my therapy, demanding that they admit what they had done to me as a child.

For that matter, I hadn’t seen father-dearest since I was 23 when he told me that I was an “ungrateful child” whom he regretted was ever born. That was around about the time that I was in the middle of my first and only divorce – having married a man a few years previous who was just as abusive as my father was. I think that my father liked my ex-husband better than me because he saw himself in him. I know I saw father-dearest in my ex and that horrified and frightened me so much that I could barely move. Getting out of that marriage was the first step in many that I took for myself in order to get well.

Or, at least be better than I was.

Deciding to not have contact with the people who abused me and/or facilitated that abuse was the second.

So father-dearest got banned.

My boyfriend of several years was laying on our bed reading a book when I got the news of the old man’s passing. As I put the phone down in its cradle he asked me, “What was that about?”

“My grandfather died,” I said with no emotion in my voice what-so-ever, “You know – the one – who did those things… he died.”

“Good riddance,” he said, “Are you okay?”

My boyfriend was (is) a social worker and he’d been maintaining since he had met me that he thought I was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder due to my abuse as a child. I probably was, in addition to suffering from the clinical depression and anxiety that I knew about already, but I was stubbornly resisting going back into therapy. I thought that my work there was done after several years of weekly therapy (five years previous) and a drug regimen. I considered my “issues” compartmentalized and put away where they appropriately belonged and wanted to get on with the business of living my life without having the stigma of mental illness – situational or genetic – tacked onto me.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” I said.

That night I had to take a sleeping pill for the first time in a year so I could fall asleep. I am and was a restless sleeper. That night my inability to fall asleep was particularly bad. But, after an Xanex I eventually drifted off.

I dreamed that I was back in the house my Mother and I had lived in before she divorced father-dearest. I was five when we moved out of that house, so it’s rather remarkable to me that I remembered it in such detail in my dream. It seemed to be my birthday. I was my actual chronological age in the dream – 30 – but, I was dressed in a frilly party dress that I remember from a photo of my fourth birthday party. There was a party going on behind me, my friends and family were all there, celebrating. However when I turned around, towards the front of the house, I got tunnel vision and saw that my grandfather and father-dearest were sitting together on a plaid sofa in front of a bay window. I could see through the window that it was snowing outside. I turned to go back into the party and saw that the area behind me where all these protectors – my Mom, my brothers, my uncles, my maternal grandparents, my boyfriend (who shouldn’t have been in a dream where I was four, as I’d only known him for a few years) – had disappeared. The room had turned cold and grey and it seemed as if the walls were crumbling down.

I tried to wake myself up, saying over and over again that it was just a dream, to no avail. Then like by black magic, something grabbed me around my waist and pulled me towards that plaid couch, until I was standing right in front of father-dearest and my paternal grandfather. Father-dearest stood up and looked down at me with his eyes filled with anger and hate – it was a scary look – sadly, not one I was unaccustomed to. He pushed me onto my knees in front of my grandfather, keeping his hand on my shoulder so I couldn’t get up. My paternal grandfather looked at me, then leaned forward to hiss at me in his whiskey and liverwurst scented breath, “You’ll never escape me!”

I tried to scream, I couldn’t – I tried to get away, I couldn’t – I begged him to let me be, he wouldn’t. Then father-dearest forced my head down onto the couch and sat down on top of me. I was suffocating and screaming and crying and begging for my Mom to wake me up…

The next thing I knew my boyfriend was shaking me awake, but it wasn’t as if I had left the dream, only that he was there with me. I was terrified and it took me several minutes to recognize that we were not in my old house, but my new apartment in San Francisco. I still wasn’t convinced that father-dearest and my grandfather weren’t waiting around the corner to hurt me – I made my boyfriend get up and search the apartment, armed with my tennis racket. I followed close behind him and once we’d cleared all the rooms I allowed him to put me back to bed and feed me another sedative. Though I made him promise that he’d stay awake until I fell asleep to protect me.

I was completely irrational. Because I was sick, I was always sick, I just didn’t want to admit it — because, let’s face it, who wants to be mentally ill? My own mental illness was mild in comparison to my brothers – he was a full blown voice hearing and hallucination seeing schizophrenic – and where I could recognize his illness and advocate for him with doctors and lawyers and the general public, I could not admit my own disease or advocate for myself.

The next morning my boyfriend told me that I had woken him up because I had punched the wall next to our bed and was screaming at the top of my lungs. I had no memory of that what-so-ever, although my right hand was bruised and swollen. It was then that he put his foot down and told me that if I wouldn’t go get help for myself that he couldn’t continue to be in a relationship with me.

Given that my boyfriend was (and is) the love of my life, that was a powerful motivator and about a week later I went to San Francisco Mental Health Access where I was hooked up with a therapist and a psychiatrist and put back onto the medications that I had worked so hard to wean myself off (under the care of a different doctor) years previously.

Part 2 & 3 coming soon!

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In response to Miriam’s post In the Interest of Full Disclosure.

Wren says –

“Am I self sabotaging, my therapist asks? I don’t know. I am afraid of finally losing the weight? Maybe, I don’t know. Is it a control issues? Fuck yes, I can control what I eat and I can’t control what I eat or don’t eat all a the same time. I am the mobius strip of food control. Yes, I feel expectations from family and friends. I do not feel understood because I do not understand myself.”

I just wanted you to know that your words in that particular passage really resonated with somebody…with me. In fact, if you changed “losing the weight” to “gaining the weight” I could pass it off as something I had written.

I wish I had words of advice or encouragement to give you other than the ones I do, but I just know sometimes I like to be reminded that I am so NOT alone.

You are so NOT alone.

You are also not any one thing by which your disorders may attempt to define you. You are a composite of a million bits and pieces and chunks of very valuable personhood; thoughts and ideas and dreams and fears and memories and impressions and talents and expressions.

You are you, housed by a physical body that does nothing more important than serve as a carrier for your energy; a physical body we have all learned to judge, part and parcel, for no particular rational reason.

We belittle ourselves every time we let our opinions (or others’) of our bodies represent the entirety of our beings, every time we let our exterior determine whether or not our interior is of any value. We belittle our potential; more importantly, we belittle our here and now.

That being said, taking care of that body – and treating it with love and respect- is the only way to fully allow our full beings to be celebrated and to thrive. Abusing the body, with food, with negligence, withholding medication, severs ourselves from, well, ourselves.

Until the disconnect from repeated abuse becomes so severe that we live in our brains and cease to feel in our skin. All that is left is the endless blur of judgment, a barrage of impulses, a capricious whirr of exercises in restraint/denial and complete and utter lack of control.

But you can do this. We all can. And when you can’t – reach out. Ask it, say it, shout it, cry it, write it… someone will hear you.

Because you are so not alone.

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