Tag: QLD Mental Health Week 2020

On Uncertainty

Written for QLD Mental Health Week 2020

How does uncertainty make you feel?

I ask because uncertainty is having a moment right now. It galloped in with the Covid-19 pandemic, and the further we get into it the more it seems to be digging itself into our awareness.

I used to be deeply uncomfortable with the pebble of uncertainty in the shoe of my life. I liked to know what was ahead. It gave me a (false) sense of control and the misguided belief that just because I couldn’t see uncertainty in my life, it didn’t exist. I deluded myself for decades that when there were no clouds on the horizon, the course of my life was somehow more certain than if I could see trouble ahead.

Then all the certainty in my life was put through a paper shredder within five days of my first baby’s birth.

I got my new baby experience with a side of florid postnatal psychosis severe enough to warrant admission to the locked Special Care Unit of a psychiatric hospital. My sense of certainty and control over my life went down the toilet.

After I’d recovered from this psychotic episode I felt entitled to some certainty. I wanted to know this nightmare was over. And I wanted a guarantee it would never happen again.

So when my psychiatrist mentioned ‘a possible underlying Bipolar Disorder’ and that it would ‘take three to five years to know for sure’, the inside of my head threw a combination of a tantrum and a pity party.

When I got sick again after three years, after seven years, and after nine years and my diagnosis of Bipolar 1 Disorder was confirmed, I still felt entitled. Entitled because: ‘hadn’t I suffered enough yet?’ Entitled to not have to tiptoe through my life with everything clenched, waiting for the next time this thing pounced.

I have only recently acquired some degree of acceptance of the uncertainty this illness introduced into my life. I didn’t enjoy the last two episodes in 2018 and early 2020, but I also didn’t waste energy resisting them. In the same way I no longer spend any of my resources anxiously wondering when it will happen next and how bad it will be, because without wanting to sound nauseatingly Zen, the truth is: It will be what it will be when it will be.

Uncertainty exists in everyone’s life every day. But instead of it floating along in the background, right now it is constantly being rammed down our throats. It’s like having a nasty little gremlin on your shoulder whispering over and over again:

‘You do realise bad things could happen to you at any minute’, when the true risk of something bad happening to you is probably not that different to pre-Covid times.

For our mental health to survive this pandemic we have to learn to live with uncertainty, because the end of it is nowhere in sight. And just like my psychiatrist couldn’t give me any certainty when I first got sick, the smartest scientists in the world aren’t able to accurately answer this question about Covid-19: Will it ever be over, and if so when?

Uncertainty is an uninvited, kicking, snoring bedfellow. So how do we get comfortable with it?

First we tease out what about this situation we can control and what we can’t. For example, we can’t control the flow of information that feeds our uncertainties rushing over us every day, but we can control how much of it we absorb.

And once we’ve done what is in our control to help ourselves, we have to try and unclench from the need to know what is going to happen next. We need to stop trying to know and plan for a future that is like a spiderweb in a storm. Here’s what I mean:

During one of my admissions to hospital I sat staring out of the window of my room feeling as though there was no point in doing the work to rebuild myself because my future was too uncertain, my illness could tear me apart again anytime.

Over a couple of days of intermittent staring I noticed a spider in its web just outside my window. Every night it stormed. Rain, wind, a couple of times hail tore chunks out of the web, at times almost destroying it.

That spider showed me the way out of my tangled thoughts, by not only rebuilding every time after its pristine web was wrecked, but doing so in the face of the risk of the same thing happening again, whether the next day or in a year.

The sword of an uncertain future has hung over every single one of us since the day we were born. Nothing has changed there. It is just up to us whether we choose to battle with uncertainty and lose, or whether we accept that being alive will always mean living with uncertainty, pandemic or no pandemic.

You may also like to check out:

Lessons For A Control Freak

The Other Curve Being Flattened

When Covid-19 And Bipolar Recovery Collide With Unexpected Results

Tokenism In Mental Health Awareness

Tokenism In Mental Health Awareness

Written for QLD Mental Health Week 2020

Saturday 10th October is World Mental Health Day and I feel a little conflicted about highlighting it. There are a lot of positives to having dedicated days or weeks to draw our attention to mental health. But I also believe we need to approach these awareness days with a little caution. It’s too easy to post or repost something related to the topic, tick the box of doing good and move on with our days.

Ironically these tokenistic efforts are becoming more common as awareness around mental ill health grows, especially when we don’t have to move beyond the comfort of our keyboards to feel as though we are achieving change. Of course it is good that there is more awareness, tolerance and marginally less stigma surrounding mental ill health than there was fifty or even twenty years ago. But we have to make sure we don’t replace the old insensitivities with their more modern counterparts.

I have written about my dislike of RUOK day before RUOK Day: Full Disclosure and this year I heard another perspective that reenforced my reasons for disliking this day. When I am well, my psychiatrist appointments usually consist of me requesting scripts for any medications I am running low on, a brief check in with how I’m going and then we chat about the state of the world, my advocacy work, his psychiatry work. This year one of my appointments happened to fall around RUOK day and we talked about the pros and cons of this day. I expressed my opinion and my psychiatrist referenced one of his patients coming in on RUOK day in distress because they were bombarded by people they knew asking them if they were ok. People they didn’t hear from for the rest of the year. People who were probably well intentioned, but using them as the token mentally ill person in their lives, to tick the box of having asked: RUOK?

Awareness around mental ill health should not be confined to one day or one week of the year. Episodes of mental illness flare unpredictably and feel as though they will never end. This feeling is fed by the fact that no one can tell you when it will end. There are good days and worse days. There are days when the risk of it turning into a terminal illness skyrockets. Someone may have a spectacularly good day on RUOK day, a calm and uneventful mental health week, but be suicidal sometime in April or on Christmas day, when it is all too easy to be under the impression that we showed our support for those among us living with mental illness back in mental health week, and Christmas day is busy and by April we are into Caesarean awareness month and IBS awareness month.

 So what can we do to be meaningfully aware of the impact mental ill health has on those of us who live with it, and what can we do to support them for more than a day or a week of the year?

Everyone who lives with mental illness is different and everyone’s experience is different even if they live with the same diagnosis. So, I don’t speak for everyone.

For me – I don’t need to be asked how I am. I have enough insight into my Bipolar 1 Disorder to know when I need to seek help. I am fortunate to have good support systems in place, so I don’t tend to feel lonely or isolated.

For me it is all about the language people use. Hearing or seeing stigmatising language either in the media, on social media, or spoken, punches me in the gut. When I am confronted with words like nuts, crazy, lunatic, psycho, mental institution, – the list is long – it belittles me. It strips away the facts of my life, my healthy functional relationships, my personality, my university degrees, my profession, my interests, my sense of humour and it reduces me to a hellish caricature of who the misinformed masses believe someone mentally ill is.

So, think about how you write and speak around me. If you hear or see someone else perpetuating stigmatising language around mental illness, call it out. Do so politely, but raise awareness of it. I do it as often as I can, but I also get tired of being told to shut up, get over it, or that I am overreacting.

Perhaps the most helpful thing you can do for someone in your life who lives with mental ill health is not to automatically ask them how they are, but to ask them what you can do to make them feel valued and supported all year round. They may answer: ‘Ask me how I am’ in which case you are doing it meaningfully and mindfully, not because it is a certain day of the year.

All that said, Happy World Mental Health Day everyone. In honour of it also being Queensland Mental Health Week from 10th-18th Oct I am aiming to drop a few additional posts in Thought Food this week.

Look after yourselves and each other!

You may also like to check out:

RUOK Day: Full Disclosure

Mind Your Language Katy Perry

Don’t Call Conspiracy Theorists Crazy

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