Tag: Bipolar Disorder

Interruption To Regular Programming

red white and yellow medication pills
Photo by Anna Shvets on Pexels.com

I am in hospital, compromised by my standard symptoms that precede a manic or depressive episode. Looking more manic at this point though. The three symptoms are: lack of concentration, loss of short term memory, and pathological irritability.

If you have never been ravaged by them, then listing these symptoms can make it sound as though I am just a bit ditzy and cranky.

So wrong.

It’s going to take it out of me but let me see if I can paint a more accurate portrait of this beast. I am not yet so sick that it has silenced me.

The memory loss and lack of concentration leave my brain moth eaten. Holding onto thoughts long enough to articulate them takes a lot of effort. It is like using tweezers to try and catch tiny fish darting around in a big aquarium.

And the irritability? Surely as a rational, compassionate human being I should not feel so permanently unreasonable. I always insert the word ‘pathological’ in front of this symptom to try and describe just how out of control the stream of swear words is that run through my head when I am surrounded by people within ten metres of my personal space.

I say ‘pathological’ to describe the feeling of having hundreds of mosquito bites, my hands tied, and someone running a feather over the bites while they make fun of me. Sometimes it feels more like I’ve been sandpapered and then doused in lemon juice.

It is excruciating.

I will eventually get better. I always do. I know in time I will have the reserves to write properly again, and I will eventually go home and continue to rehabilitate. But for now, any spare energy is going towards doing what I need to do to get well, and if anything is left over it is going towards giving some moral support to my husband and children. So there may be some time between posts.

I always hope it won’t be too long but have been here often enough to know that it will take the time it takes and focusing on it won’t speed my recovery.

Stay tuned.

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Misunderstood Mania

My First Time

 

 

Not So Body Positive

Big cat on the street in the city

I came across an Instagram image of an obese cat recently (not the image in this post). The accompanying caption referred to the cat as a ‘body positive icon’. And it made me stop and think about whether a cat can, or even should be, an icon of body positivity.

I have never felt qualified to comment on the body positivity movement. As someone who lives with thin, white, straight, (mostly) able bodied privilege, I have been reluctant to wade into the hornet’s nest of opinions the words ‘body positivity’ evoke on social media. Until I saw this.

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The Comparison Trap

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Photo by Skitterphoto on Pexels.com

I liken comparing myself to others to a landscape of skin. In some areas that skin is as thick as a crocodile’s. Very little penetrates it. Take social media. I came to it old enough to have a solid sense of myself. My self-esteem and body image didn’t grow up in the glare of Instagram. FOMO generated by someone else’s curated holiday/body/green smoothie/adorable family snaps is foreign to me.

Other tracts of skin are a little thinner but still not easily breached, a bit like a callused heel. My career path and choices have held few twinges of comparison. Maybe in the early years of my veterinary career I did some comparing. But that was part of the trek of working out what sort of vet I wanted to be.

Writing and advocacy work have only evolved in the last few years, and I view other people’s work in these areas as something to either aspire to or steer away from. Yes, it’s comparison, but a cool, dispassionate kind.

Then there are the areas of soft skin, vulnerable, but hidden away too deeply to be strip searched by comparisons. My relationship with my husband fits here, I couldn’t compare us to anyone else, because what we have is as unique as a fingerprint.

Then there’s skin ripped open at unnatural angles.

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What Defines You?

For me, the taste of my rubber snorkel mouthpiece, the smell of seawater and the sight of pink coral with black fish darting around it, was the beginning. I was about four, snorkelling in the shallows on the Saudi Arabian side of the Red Sea. That defined me. Indelibly.

But mostly, what defines me only does so temporarily. Eventually those moments, decisions and experiences split open and peel away like dead eucalyptus bark to reveal fresh influences and redefinitions.

I remember the first time I felt desired. A look like lightning in the middle of a lake. And a sentence.

‘You are not like other girls. You are better.’

It shaped a part of me that felt proud to be different. We laughed at those ‘other girls’, whose sole ambition in life was wifedom and motherhood, women who threw themselves at him while we toyed with each other. My emotions stayed safely walled off from the chaos of love.

I was defined by my untouchable smugness.

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Misunderstood Mania

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What do you know about mania?

Everyone knows depression is bad. But does this mean mania is good because it supposedly sits at the opposite end of the bipolar spectrum?

Mania is often painted as the cartoonish counterpoint to depression. Perpetually bright, happy, and fun. But it is not fun. It is the character in a horror movie who starts out friendly but then morphs into someone with sinister, glowing eyes.

Mania assaults your senses.

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My Sliding Doors Encounter With Our Public Mental Health System

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Have you ever had a moment when your answer to a question determined whether your life imploded?

I have.

It came five days into parenthood. I was lying on the floor in my maternity hospital room crying because I was trying to outrun a jaguar chasing me towards a cliff. Things were starting to go very wrong in my brain.

In the following months, when my mind warped and writhed in the grip of psychosis and later catatonic depression, and when what started out as postnatal psychosis turned out to be a first episode of bipolar 1 disorder, I could not imagine things being worse.

But they could have been.

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Mental Illness Doesn’t Respect Deadlines

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September 2001 – Ascending the Col du Tourmalet

‘How long until I’m better?’ gnaws at my insides.

When I ask my psychiatrist that question, he always answers honestly:

‘I don’t know how long, but you will get you better.’

That ‘I don’t know’ even when it’s followed by a promise of eventual wellness, is brutal.

Many years ago, my husband and I took part in a cycling trip over the Pyrenees from the south of France into Spain. The route followed the same path as the Tour de France sometimes does. The first day took us up the Col du Tourmalet, one of the longest and steepest climbs. We rode around twenty kilometres to the base of the mountain and then climbed for close to another twenty, each one steeper than the last, the air getting thinner and thinner.

The last two kilometres were gruelling. Mist closed in. We could barely see the drop off the edge of the mountain. We rode on our lowest gears. Our bones turned into burning jelly and our lungs felt as though they were trying to extract oxygen from water. We were forced to stop to catch our breath every twenty or thirty metres.

But there were markers to show us we were getting closer to the top. Mental footholds in the misty, painful, breathless soup. We had answers to ‘How much longer?’. And with them came hope and the tenacity to keep going. Although it was unbelievably challenging, we had an end point to work towards.

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Visiting Someone In A Psychiatric Hospital?

BCPND visit 2010
2010 My daughter visiting her little brother and I in the mother/baby unit of the psychiatric hospital

‘My daughter never visits me in hospital. She doesn’t like this place.’

An elderly woman told me this in a private psychiatric hospital several years ago.  Sadness dripped from her words.

The thought of visiting someone in a psychiatric hospital (especially for the first time) can leave people feeling: Awkward. Uncomfortable. Fearful. Repulsed. Guilty. Ashamed. Misinformed. Unsure. To name a few.

What do you say and do if that’s you?

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Psychiatric Medication And Stigma

medication stigma foto unsplash
Photo by Wei Ding on Unsplash

Do you believe stigma around taking medication for mental illness exists?

Or put it this way:

If you had to choose, would you rather disclose that you were taking insulin or psychiatric medication (antidepressants, anxiolytics, antipsychotics, mood stabilisers etc) to your employer, your family, your friends, and a room full of strangers? And why?

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What a mental illness can teach you about your mental health

jony-ariadi-197568-unsplash Photo by Jony Ariadi on Unsplash
Photo by Jony Ariadi on Unsplash

Here’s a paradox: My mental health improved after I developed a mental illness. When I am not symptomatic (which is a lot of the time) my mental health is fantastic. It is possibly better than that of many people who don’t live with a mental illness. Here’s why:

Mental illness can teach you a lot about mental health, because it confronts you with the choice to change the way you approach your life.

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