Month: April 2015
An Apology to Those Living with OCD
Posted on April 30, 2015 in OCD Stigma
It is hard to have a southern overseer;it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. — Henry David Thoreau
I need to stop talking about my “OCD”. When do I label myself thus? When I do make sure my desk is orderly every night or make checklists or avoid stepping on cracks or squeeze every last drop of toothpaste from the tube or proofread my blogs before I publish them or correct them after I have published them. It’s a cheap use of the term and it belittles those who actually suffer from the illness.
Many people do it. They have no clue about how it screws up the life of its sufferers. OCD isn’t just a few quirks but it takes over entire lives. I know people who have to touch every door knob in their house before they go to bed or repeat certain phrases over and over again or have their food arranged in a certain way on the plate — they can’t eat it otherwise. Some clean until the floors in the house are badly scratched and carpets are frayed from excessive vacuuming Others hoard. My dentist hygienist tells me that she is always telling her clients with OCD not to brush too much; their excessive efforts wear out the enamel on their teeth and tear up their gums. Its sufferers don’t perform their rituals for pleasure but to avoid punishment by the disorder such as extreme anxiety and sometimes panic. One sufferer described it to me as having a lattice of borders in his mind that he dare not trespass upon.
So I apologize for trivializing the term. It is bad enough to have the disease. No one should have to bear with a stigma that makes light of a serious problem in their lives.
Carb Cravings
Posted on April 28, 2015 in Body Language Eating Psychotropics
My pants are getting tight again and my shirts come unbuttoned at the navel. Oh to be rid of these infernal hungers!
Helicopter Caretaking
Posted on April 27, 2015 in Anxiety Caretakers Suicide
We patients are told not to think of ourselves as the disease, but helicopter caretakers get no such warning.
Stigmatizing Synonyms for Mental Illness
Posted on April 25, 2015 in Mental Illness Stigma Vocabulary
If you want a list of stigma terms, this should be a good start.
We Should Stop Using Mass Murderers as Our Poster Children for Change
Posted on April 23, 2015 in Privacy Stigma Violence
Instead of joining the throng when a spectacular crime is reported, we need to speak up about stigma and the ineffectiveness of the services we are offered each day of our lives.
Accountability and the Grim Facts of Depression
Posted on April 22, 2015 in Anxiety Attitudes Compassion Depression Guilt
The black spiral literally knocked me off my feet. I decided on my own to stop taking Geodon — a horrible drug that left me dizzy for all but the last three to four hours of my waking day — and I crashed and crashed hard. My bedroom was my habitation; my cats my constant companions. I felt the after effects for months — a dimness of the world, a heaviness on the brain, and difficulty forming thoughts. Shortly after I emerged from more than a week of never moving from the bed, I wrote:
I count nine days of nothing but turning on my bed, sleeping on the best of them, just clutching blankets on the worst. I run back and forth writing, thinking, and hiding under the covers for this one. That’s my activity and I need to make more. I’d be at the gym working out except I took two Ativan and do not wish to risk the drive. And it is too hot and unshaded for the walk around the condos that I have made my regimen.
Coming “back” implies seemingly ridiculous victories. Today you brush your teeth. You take one less Ativan. You go for that walk twice at dawn like you should. You write in your journal. You blog. All in between visits to the bed, your teacher and your protector.
Just yesterday, I heeded studies which suggest that spirituality helps those suffering from depression and mixed and remixed the books next to my bed until I found a pocket Buddhist companion. This (translated into the objects of depression) made sense to me:
I am not my depression. My depression is not me. The world is not my depression.
This doesn’t say that I lie under the covers for not discernible cause and it doesn’t say to stop taking the meds as appropriate. It simply separates my disease in the same manner as one might separate the eye or the ear. My eye is not me. I am not my eye. My eye is not the world.
We get into an ownership thing in Western thinking — if not throughout the whole world. We own our body parts and our diseases rather than seeing them as causes. They are neither separate of us nor part of us. They are facts.
This gives me personal relief from this nine day good-riddance if rid of it that I am. And I’d rather not talk more about this. It makes sense to me.
Facets
Posted on April 17, 2015 in Depression Mania Memory Reflections Stigma
What could they have said to a raging bullshit artist?
Why I Avoid Quaker Meeting: A Bipolar Man Explains
Posted on April 16, 2015 in Exuberance Mania Religion
Let this be written for those who come after and those who live now so that they may understand.
Dream
Posted on April 12, 2015 in Dreams
My brother is trying to impose a conservatorship on me. I am not married — my wife Lynn is not part of my life — so I am totally at his mercy. But he makes a mistake: he enlists the help of his wife. She is not the woman who he actually married, but a shorter woman with long blonde hair. She warns me about what he is going to do and helps me escape down a long, dark red tunnel.
File under Nightmares.
Can You Talk Someone Out of a Depression?
Posted on April 11, 2015 in Depression Therapy
You are dealing with an irrational disease not a philosophical system.
Confiscation
Posted on April 10, 2015 in Bipolar Disorder Calm Fear Photography Silicon Valley War
Had these two impulsive acts of mine been due to the hypomania in which I slipped in and out? Perhaps. If they were, they mark times when my mania actually worked for me.
The Stigma Against Treatment
Posted on April 9, 2015 in InterNet Debates Mean People Psychotropics Stigma
When the bricks fall, they tend to fall on my side of the wall.
