Mitigating the Madness

Am I Bi-polar?

After being diagnosed with bi-polar disorder, I started to do research. I wanted to find other people like myself and see what I could do if anything to find my way back to something akin to normal. There still wasn’t a lot of information on the internet about mental health at this time or how to treat it, so I was left with a lot more questions that I was answers.

After finding a mental health clinic that used a sliding scale method for payment, I was able to attempt therapy for the first time. The medications that I was given never really seemed to help, but instead only exacerbate my problems. One medication seemed to ease my lows of major depression, but sent me spiraling into a manic fit of hyperactivity otherwise. This hyperactivity was totally new and extremely scary for me. I felt like I had all of this energy building up inside my body and if I didn’t do something to get it out I was going to literally explode. So I was moved to another medication, this one caused a huge rash to break out on my chest.

At this point, I was beginning to question was seeking help actually helping me? The professionals that I saw always seemed apathetic, and I felt like they didn’t really care what happened to me. The one time I had admitted to my mother that I was feeling suicidal and needed help I was told, “You know we don’t believe in that, you’ll be fine.” That was all I needed to know that I couldn’t confide in my family.

When I confided in my psychiatrist that I was feeling suicidal, I was told that I could commit myself and get better help in a psychiatric hospital. Feeling like I had no other options, as nothing had work to this point, that is what I did.

The trip to the psychiatric hospital was about as useful as a busted condom. After admitting myself I was stripped of anything that I could use to hurt myself or others. Understandable, but what was understandable was the staff waiting two days to take my tongue piercing citing I could hurt someone with it, but leaving me with my glasses. I guess they didn’t realize that I could in fact hurt myself or others with my glasses had I so desired, while my piercings were of little danger. I guess it’s just my vivid imagination that gives me the ability to see the danger in things that people otherwise view as safe, but once more, I digress.

While there, I was told it could be several weeks before I was able to see a doctor, and being locked in a ward with people that were clearly worse off than me didn’t give me any hopes for actually getting treatment. By the end of the third day, the screaming from other patients and the condescending tone of the staff was more than I cared to deal with. If this was what I had to submit myself to in order to get help, I didn’t want the so called help they provided. I requested to leave and was released the next day.

*Side note: My experience in this psych hospital was not the norm. Looking back, I feel like the facility was under staffed and over populated, which may have been why they didn’t seem to care when I said I wanted to go home.*

After the hospital hell I tried going back to the mental health clinic, but the breaking point with this clinic was when I tried to discuss issues with gender dysphoria, and the psychiatrist looked at me and asked, “What’s that?” then proceeded to pull out their DSM to search for gender dysphoria in front of me.

(The DSM is The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, basically it’s a reference book for mental health professionals that contains conditions and disorders that relate to mental health or the brain. The current DSM is DSM-5 which was released in 2013. Since this was prior to 2013, the DSM referenced was the DSM-4 which was released in 1994. Education, yay!)

This broke what little trust I had in this clinic, and I never went back again. If I knew more about my mental health problems than they did, they really weren’t a good match for me. This was the last time that I tried to get help for my depression for a long time. I dealt with the lows and the really low lows on my own, trying to mitigate the madness on my own however I could.

Life was anything but glorious.

Muddling through Life.

I constantly felt like I was walking around with a huge dark cloud hovering over me, staining anything that was joyful in my life with it’s bleakness. I started to accept that this was the way life was supposed to be, or rather this was how my life was supposed to be. After struggling to claw my way through life, I was finally ready to give up. I conceded that my demons won, I was tired and I just wanted it all to be over. I didn’t feel like I could force myself through one more day.

I tried to make peace with what was left of my life, and engaged in the one thing that had brought me pleasure, writing RP. (Role-playing was rather big during this time, and a lot of people wrote whole stories together with others.) During what I had planned to be my last night on this planet I met someone who I found to be rather intriguing. For the first time in a while, I actually enjoyed my evening, and the world didn’t seem so dark and I didn’t feel so alone. That was the night that I met the person that would become my spouse. This was the second time, someone saved me from ending my own life.

Rather than carry through with my plans I decided to give life one more day. That one more day turned into another just one more day, and as my relationship grew with this mysterious person half a country away, I didn’t feel so isolated from the world. I wasn’t alone, there was someone that would listen to me even if I didn’t know the words to say to express how I was feeling.

Having someone to talk to helped ease my depression, and made dealing with it at least slightly easier.

I want to take a moment to state that there is a correlation between social isolation or loneliness and not only depression, but also other mental as well as physical health problems. An article published by the American Medical Association states:

“It is important to recognize that social isolation does impact physical and mental health,” Dr. Hollmann said. “In the surgeon general’s report on the epidemic of loneliness and isolation brought home the point that the adverse effects of isolation are greater than those of smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.’

“Social isolation and loneliness each independently have more than a 25% increased risk for significant health issues and not just mental health issues like anxiety, depression or suicidal ideation, but other diseases, particularly heart disease, stroke, diabetes and dementia,” Dr. DeLong said. “It’s a major public health issue that’s been very much underappreciated.”

If you want to read the article in full, you can find it here.

Even slightly easing the isolation and loneliness that I was feeling help me want to get better. It gave me hope that life could in fact be better, rather than worse or non-existent.

{to be continued…}