But why? Why?

Posted on January 25, 2006 in Compassion Psychotropics Stigma

Tonight, I wondered if our stories and the reasons we give for our behavior are our own. I know of one very honest sufferer of mood disorders who gave his reason for not taking his meds as fear of the associated stigma. He was just sick and tired of the pills serving as the emblem of his disease. While his motives did not move me to follow his example, I could understand.

I related this anecdote tonight to a depressive who asked in a group what made us bipolars get off our meds. She said “OK, that’s a crazy reason. So what is the real reason?” So the others passed out the standard textbook reason: We decide that we’ve been cured, so we decide we just don’t need them anymore. I think that is true for many people. But I can think of many other reasons why people stop taking their meds. Depressives might just go off only on the “feeling better” argument; bipolars, on the other hand, invent rationale upon rationale.

Over the weekend, I talked about the anniversary of my suicide attempt. Several of us bipolars shared our reasons for taking out the knife, the rope, or the bottle of pills. No two were alike, though you could roughly divide them into two emotional fields: despair and anger. The despairing couldn’t face living another day in pain. The angry were just pissed off and thought they could prove something.

The depressive might have listened and said “But those reasons are all crazy. Tell me a real reason.” I call such thinking “compassion-challenged”. I didn’t particularly like the “pills stigmatize me” reason for going off one’s meds. Rejecting it as “crazy”, however, reinforces the patient’s fears. “Gotta hide! Gotta hide!” I can hear the reptilian core of his brain crying out. He might suppress it as we all must suppress that voice if he does not receive “proof” that it is true. In the moment that this fellow confessed that, I stopped, listened, and realized that he’d told us the truth. Not out of a textbook. Not what he had been told bipolars say. It was a real reason for him and before you could persuade him of the truth, you had to go where he was.

That is what makes it difficult to have this disease of ours. The unafflicted — many of whom believe that there are WMDs in Iraq and that someday they are going to be God-salvated millionaires if they just send a check for $700 to Pat Robertson — write off our deeply felt justifications for noncompliance and death as simply “stupid”. If we have any problem, it is that we think metaphorically, make our conceptions of our relationships into solid rods of basalt. We turn grandiose, hyper-religious, and dead certain of our imaginings. We’re hardly stupid — does anyone out there know a slow-witted bipolar (not counting the over-medicated)? We speak what we feel. The camera of our minds ingests intangible experience and spits out strange wonders. It is the reason why our kind has contributed much to civilization.

The hostility we receive does not help us move on. If I told you that you could end stigma by not taking your medications, would you do it? (I hope not.) Emancipation from everything the disease entails tempts us more than anything else. We don’t want to be thralls to the pills, to the controlling relatives, to the psychiatrists, to the police, to the courts, to the opinions of our friends, families, and neighbors.

I cannot give you one answer for why people commit suicide or why they go off their meds. You have to respect whatever one we have to give and love us from there.

When Winston quoted the creed written by H.L. Mencken, he highlighted these words:

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.

If you want to know the truth about my reasons, ask me. Don’t expect a good answer if you don’t care for the response.