Revising My Links
Posted on May 12, 2010 in Site News
I’m in the process of revamping my links. If you are a regular reader who feels neglected or who would like me to include your blog on my links on the left hand side of my blog home page, all you need to do is leave a comment with the URL either here or on my Facebook fan page. I admit that I am a bit behind on matters such as this and promise to make amends.
The Torture of a Game & the Shock of Having Been Shocked
Posted on May 10, 2010 in PTSD Violence
The exuberance of another player has put me into an uncomfortable position. The unremitting chaos of memory afflicts me. I can barely keep my mind on the contest when I am playing it because I am remembering the way my brother used to force me into playing games when I was a child. His stratagem was to read the rules through and then pummel me with accusations of laziness and introversion. Then we sit down to the card table he kept in his bedroom and study the board. Just when I thought I had the upper hand, he would invoke some hidden clause and undo me. When I complained that he was cheating, he would tell me that I should have read the rules that he never gave me a chance to read.
There were six years between us. He knew that his size and his willingness to throw his weight against me could cow me. When my mother intervened, she would do so on his behalf. I should have read the rules, she agreed with him.
One time we were playing a game set on the beaches of Normandy. The rules for the scenario clearly stated “Use Optional Rule Number 1 for this scenario.”
My brother saw the word optional and insisted that I was cheating. He called Mom in and she ruled on his behalf, again. I overturned the game board and tore up the rules. Ever after, that game which I had bought with my own money lay hidden in my desk. My brother had proven himself a cheat, twisting words to suit him. My father said the secret was to beat him because he turned into a baby and never wanted to play again.
I fear games, yet I am attracted to them. There’s a bit of bully in me from the experience of my childhood. It’s hard for me to see them as “only a game” because of the high stakes of honor for which I played as a boy. No blood splashes on the floor. No blue-brown bruises spread beneath my skin. No bones are broken. Yet in my heart and somewhere in the convolutions of my brain fear spreads and paralyzes me. This is the way with post-traumatic stress disorder. When it hits me, I don’t worry about pain. The images flashing across my brain do not hurt not even as much as the prick of a needle. No hands come down hard on me, no shod feet find my thighs and calves. It is only the memory of being overwhelmed that entangles me, the shock of having been shocked.
I seek to dream long and hard because that world is safer than the waking hours.
Dream
Posted on May 5, 2010 in Dreams
Everything starts in a dorm. I’m at the top of a dark landing, proceeding down. The next thing I know I’m in a car driving over a bridge near a swamp. (Is Lynn with me?) The road takes me up a hill and as I navigate its crest, I despair that I am ever going to be able to join up with the road that I see below me. But I follow the roughly paved road which takes me higher and higher. At the top, I find another car occupied by two women who are afraid and lost. They want me to show them the way out. “It’s right here,” I say, pointing to a place where the road dives to the canyon bottom. I go down this grade and then follow the road down the canyon bottom to my mother’s house. Here I find myself playing with a baby in bed — a baby colored like the last minutes of twilight, bluish fading to black. My brother comes home and throws a tantrum about this. My mother intervenes, but I tell her that he’s right. It’s not my baby but his. I gather my things and put them in the car. I explain to my mother that it is better that I am not around. I go home, thinking of the classes that I need to study for — philosophy is one. I’ve been skipping it.
Rides by Plane
Posted on May 4, 2010 in Travel - Conferences
How American Airlines assigns you your seating group number baffles me. It is an important enumeration when it comes to the moment when you take your seat, but I cannot see how it is derived. All I know is that after all the first class passengers, the priority passengers, the other kind of priority passengers, and the guy who winked at the gatekeeper just right, I was allowed to board in Group 3 going one way and Group 2 on the way back. None of this efficient “board by your seat number” that other airlines use: you looked at your ticket and got on board with your designated peers. These might be seated in the very back of the plane or the front; by the windows or along the aisles. Unless you happened to be traveling with a lover or a friend or a business associate, you found your place alone.
During the boarding, I arrived after the man occupying the middle seat had taken his place. Then, in Group 4, came the woman who sat in the window seat. One would have expected in a cunning design that she would have been on first, but American Airlines saw it fit that the two of us who had superior rankings get up and allow her to alight on her cushion for the four hour ride. Traffic in the aisle stopped so we could make room for her and then resumed when we were finished. When all the groups had been assigned, the doors shut and the pilot took us to Chicago.
The plane shook as we came down over the wooded plains to the west of the city. A fellow in a seat ahead and to the right of mine did not take the buffeting so well and I confess that I, too, was touched by nausea. The plane performed its perfunctory bounce of arrival and I thought “Well, that trial is over”.
But it wasn’t. Traffic controllers had had us touch down on the runway farthest from the terminals and at O’Hare, that was a long way. “We’re taking the tour,” one woman said to a friend on the telephone. Past the perimeter fence and a road just outside it we drove for ten minutes. The fellow who wanted to barf kept rubbing the back of his neck and taking deep breaths. “Pleeeeease God,” I murmured in a hedge of prayer, “please stop this ride before he blows.” When we finally arrived, the sick man bent forward, but he didn’t blow chow, yawn in technicolor, or talk to the air sickness bag. Everyone rushed out and we were all in Chicago, under a long greenhouse stretching to curbside.
On the way back, the plane raced across the continent. Upon leaving O’Hare, we were told that we had already shaven ten minutes off our flight time. When we set down, we were a full thirty five minutes early. I called Lynn to tell her that I was on the ground. It caught her by surprise: she was unpacking groceries. “Come as soon as you can,” I said, then hung up. “Oh,” I said when she answered the phone the second time I called “Don’t look for me in the baggage claim. I will come to the curb.”
Quite a crowd clustered along the street. Arrivals dropped their bags on the sidewalks and bent their necks to stare at the gutter as they watched the time they had gained in the air go to waste on the ground.
Epiphanies from the 2010 DBSA Conference
Posted on May 3, 2010 in DBSA Support Groups and Conferences Depression Mania Pointers PTSD
Except for that space of time late Saturday when the constant crush of people wore me down, I found a few answers at the DBSA National Conference. The conversations that went on between people put me in a curious place: was I really like these people who called themselves bipolar? I didn’t remember losing it so profoundly as they had. There was no episode where I thought myself God, though I could point to excessive spending and launchings into anger. For the most part, I restrained myself. And in the moments that transpired as I sat in cushioned, straight-back chairs, I wondered if I suffered from bipolar disorder at all, so well had my meds been working lately. The wash of mania seemed a dream fixed to an offshore rock.
Here and there, I found answers. A conversation with [[Marya Hornbacher]] tied my retreating to the cold vaults of my personal torture chamber to my post-traumatic stress disorder. She had a friend who did the same, she told me. I didn’t fire off into spectacular manias for the most part because I was terrified of the shakings-up that the fictions in my head wreaked. I am trying to understand these. PTSD stemming from abuse as a child — in my case by my parents and my brother who is older than me by six years (a massive difference when you are a child) — cracks joy just as it is beginning to rise. So no happy manias for me, only anger and desperate over-spendings followed by self-imprisonment where my symptoms were only seen by my wife and the people who dueled with me on the Internet.
Paula Kamen’s Sunday morning eulogy of journalist [[Iris Chang]] affirmed this. Chang’s illness had gone unnoticed — so much so that her 2004 suicide took everyone but her husband by surprise. Asians, Kamen reasoned, do not express the symptoms of bipolar disorder as radically as Europeans and African Americans. For Chang, her loquaciousness and brazen ((I use this word not to undercut Chang’s moral validity but to speak to the strident character of her advocacy)) championing of human rights were the symptoms: she flouted the decorum that Asian families expected of their daughters. The whites who knew her had overlooked this because she did not conform to the danger signals to which they were accustomed and so Chang was allowed to go mad, energized in increasing delusion by their applause.
I, too, was pressured to hold back. My family — especially my brother who I now realize was threatened by me — told me to watch my “ego”. So I crushed it so that I would not do harm by upsetting them. Though some were annoyed by me, I do not believe that people saw me as crazy until that time when I ended up in the South Coast Medical Center behavioral science unit. My depressions they knew of: only Lynn suspected my manias.
Don’t do this at home if you live with bipolar disorder.
I met a few people who chose to be off meds for various reasons, but these were all depressives. A few said they found success in a simple course of diet and exercise coupled with vitamin therapy. Others had not found any medication which helped them, so they did not see the point of being on drugs that did not work for them. I didn’t worry about any of these people because they didn’t represent a danger to self or others. They knew what they were doing and they continued to regard better and appropriate medications as a possible answer to their future problems. Right now, they could do without. I think that is a valid, well-informed individual choice.
I was disappointed by the apparent lack of understanding when I mentioned the ground-breaking agreement by British politicians to avoid using psychiatric diagnoses to attack their opposition. Many anti-stigma fighters can see the problem with labels when they appear in television programs or when law enforcement shoots one of our number, but they don’t seem to get the importance of the language used in debate as well as the British advocates who engineered what I felt what probably the most important coup against prejudice so far this year. The words we use to desecrate the good names of our enemies have this way of turning back to harm us. It’s considered keen by youth, for example, to label those they don’t like as “bipolar”. Don’t forget how common it is to call Sarah Palin “psychotic” — a term which the public taints with blood dripping off a chainsaw and other emblems of violence rather than hallucinations and paranoia which are the true hallmarks of the symptom. It is this kind of language that I believe needs to be shouted down whenever we hear it.
I suffer from psychosis. I take meds for it. And I have no desires to harm others.
Though my thoughts were private to me and though I did apologize to him in person anyway, I want to express my appreciation for the talk given by George Nostrand. I have to say that I judged George by his ebullient shovel of a beard and the fact that he used the words “alternative” in his opening remarks. Having heard these used so many times by Scientologists and New Agers as a way of leading those who truly need to be on meds off the course, I very nearly walked out without hearing him.
His use of the term was quite different. For one thing, Nostrand does take meds and views them as critical to his continued health. What concerned him was the cycle that the mental health system thrust its clients, whereby they were only managed in the event of crisis and until they were just self-sufficient. Once stabilized on the needle’s point of what bureaucrats fobbed off as recovery, the state abandoned these people when they were still fragile. When the client faltered, agencies blamed lack of resolve on the part of the health consumers and/or the care providers for the failures. Nostrand contended that agencies should not merely aim to have their clients mere self-sufficient but thriving in the face of the challenge of the illness. I feel that his and Hornbacher’s contributions were the best to the overall conference.
Two Journal Entries
Posted on May 2, 2010 in Depression Journals & Notebooks Loneliness
Once in your life someone came to you when you had this ache like a brass cauliflower that weighs you down now. When she spoke to you, the heavy flowerets parted and — in its place — bliss was injected.
Fool that you are, you wait around whenever the mace strikes you and crave that feeling of release that company brings one more time.
Loneliness Catechism
Why didn’t you come over to me?
You looked like you wanted to be alone.
It’s when I have that look that I most want company.
Please Shoot Down This Blimp
Posted on May 1, 2010 in DBSA Support Groups and Conferences Depression Encounters
I’m reaching that point where my earlier fears about where I was being taken have manifested themselves for real: a blimp of a depression rides in the middle of my head and I can’t pop it. Mitchell from New York said that he took me for an extrovert: like so many, he doesn’t understand that the issue is not dislike of people, but being quickly tired by them. And I have come to a place — of exhaustion, fear, and disappointment — where I both crave and vomit the company of others. Some extrovert I am who has run to a quiet corner of the DBSA National Conference to let his feelings bleed into an LCD screen.
I think myself an odd duck — stuck in a place that perplexes even those who are allegedly most like me. I’ve wondered if I am truly bipolar, then am told that it is “not meet” as Shakespeare might have put it to label myself with the illness: I am required to see that I am a person living with bipolar disorder. In this place, I doubt I am even a person, certainly not like the ones who are all around me. I feel freakish, bizarre, a disturbing if interesting specimen of humanity who bores and perplexes. Then there is that other question: why, if I can remember the details about the things that I did while in episode, why can’t I remember the feelings that impelled me to be one way or another? I walk around feeling an imposter who takes Tegretal, feeling doubt that I belong among the so-called sane, and that amidst all these others I am a tile in the floor stepped on and ignored.
Last night I ate dinner alone and tonight I shall undoubtably do the same when there is no forcing together of the peoples by schedules and included-in-the-price servings at tables in the outdoor pavilion. A man comes to open his laptop on the other side of this table and I want to squeal Please go away. If I didn’t want to hear Glenn Close’s sister at 4 pm, I would end my day in my room. Someone please shoot down this blimp. It weighs me down.
Mental Illness and the Follies of Our Enemies
Posted on April 23, 2010 in Hatred Liberals & Progressives Stigma Terminology
Not two minutes ago, a liberal tweeter said three words to me: “Michelle Bachmann #psycho”. This is pretty typical fare from certain members of the Twitter Left (and the Twitter Right for their part). When poorly educated, shallow Republican tools speak up, their words are denounced as coming from the mentally ill.
Let me get something clear. I am a progressive. I was a progressive before I went on meds and I am a progressive now. Part of my political ideology impels me to live a life as free of prejudice as possible. Supposedly the woman who vomited this hairball believes in the same principle. I doubt she would attack Michael Steele’s blackness or call Senator Graham a fag. But she doesn’t live it when it comes to the mentally ill. Where we are concerned, the rules change. You can abuse the mentally ill all you want through the indirect means of equating psychiatric diagnoses with the follies of your enemies.
Beatrice Bray speaks to the abuse of psychiatric terms in today’s Guardian:
Newspaper cartoons can be great. They can say the unsayable. They have licence to push the boundaries of taste. Their images can resonate for years. But Martin Rowson’s cartoon “Dressing-up box” (Comment & Debate, 29 March) overstepped the mark.
Rowson had fun depicting different Conservative politicians in fancy dress. They are shown like kids in the playroom. But as one Tory lifts Mrs Thatcher’s moth-eaten blue dress, he shouts: “Hey everybody! This is the ‘psychotic yet tough union basher’ cozzie!”
The use of the word “psychotic” was offensive. You may think this political correctness gone mad, but if you are ill, or have been, you need words to describe your experience to yourself and to others. If for you these words are negative, you will hate yourself. Language can make or break your happiness….
“Bipolar” is a new term which was introduced to replace the stigmatised “manic depression”. This creates a chance to reinvent the illness, but already the new label is becoming tarnished. You cannot separate words from their popular meanings. You have to change attitudes and behaviours as well as words.
Rowson’s cartoon is testament to this, even though he does not sound like the kind of man who would want to disfranchise those of us with severe mental health problems.
We were not Rowson’s target: Margaret Thatcher was. But just to complicate matters we are now championing the honour of Thatcher even though some of us are leftwingers. We do not think that Thatcher, a dementia sufferer, should face misused words of abuse.
Bray ends her article by observing that the three parties in Great Britain have signed a compact agreeing to avoid stigmatizing language in their political debates, campaigns, and other public utterances. When I hear even liberals whine when they are called to task for the abuse of psychiatric terminology, I think it essential that we begin to civilize our language so that people are not made to hate themselves for accidents of genetics.
Stop saying that Michelle Bachmann is insane. She’s not anything like me.
Walking with My Butt to the Wind
Posted on April 22, 2010 in Body Language Coronary Neurology
All the unfamiliar if friendly faces made me glad to see my cardiologist — even though he was about to shove a camera down my throat and fish it back up. I’d gone in when I noticed my left arm had gone dead while chatting with some friends online. A tweet made me think of the possibility of a [[stroke]]: following the link, I had my wife check all my vital signs. I passed, then sat down. Idly, I began to count my fingers off the thumb of my right hand ((This is a habit that many people with OCD and bipolar disorder do to calm themselves. It is usually benign, but can become obsessive when you enumerate over and over again for hours at a time, for no other reason than to perform the count.)) . One two three four. One two three four. Then I switched to my left hand.
My fingers and my thumb couldn’t find each other. They missed. Or when they found their contact, immediately began to slip off place. My hand had turned into a school of minnows flopping out of water.
I told Lynn that this was serious. I grabbed my coat, the book I was reading and the latest issue of Skeptical Inquirer. Lynn drove me to Mission Hospital. I breathed a sigh of relief when the emergency room lobby was empty. A triage nurse took down my history and showed me to a room in the farthest corner of the E.R. More nurses and a couple of doctors appeared and the questions began: What happened? Can you show us? Did you lean or sit on the arm? Did you fall on it? What is your name and date of birth? Do you have a headache? Lift your arms in front of you. Lift against my hand. Now do it with your feet. Follow my finger. How many fingers am I holding up? Let me look into your eyes. Close your eyes and touch your nose with your right forefinger. Now do it with the left. Do you have a headache? Who is the president? What is your name?
At one point, I was shunted away for a [[CT Scan]]. The nurse took a series of my head in the raw, then injected me with a contrast solution that warmed my testicles and toes. I lay inside the magic donut for what must have been half an hour to forty five minutes while the computer composited its circle of x-rays into an image of my brain without and with the iodine mixture.
When the results came back clean, I leaped to the hope that I would get to go home. The nurses and the questions disappeared. When the results came back, I learned of the doctor’s distrust of the instrument. In carefully chosen words, I was left to infer that I would be held for more tests because the hospital did not want to be sued. This is what my five-a.m.-in-the-morning mind said to me. They wanted to keep me a prisoner. They were out to collect the largest possible insurance checks. All the talk about the need to check my heart for leaks and my brain and neck for clots fell on deaf ears. I wouldn’t be sleeping in my own bed for 24 to 48 hours, maybe more.
The doctors feared that I had experienced a [[mini-stroke]] which required other tools to detect. Following the visit of the very tired-looking neurologist and the admitting doctor, a retinue of technicians appeared. I was handed paperwork which asked me the type and position of any implants or piercings in my body and if I was prone to anxiety or claustrophobia. An agent of the hospital appeared with a bag into which I dropped my wedding ring and MedicAlert bracelet. An other technician came to warn me about the most invasive of the procedures, the stuffing of a device down my throatthat would allow doctors to create a [[sonogram]] of my heart.
Before they shipped me off for the tests, technicians removed every patch they’d slapped on me for listening to my heart. I was wheeled off to a waiting room, where they stripped me of the hospital gown they’d given me in E.R. and dressed me in another one of a different shade and pattern of blue. The time had come to shove me into the [[MRI]].
This consisted of laying me down on a lightly padded slab, then placing a mask that allowed me to see the operators through a combination of mirrors and a chest plate over me. I feared that I would suddenly discover that I was claustrophobic as they slid me inside. My eyes followed an inch and a half wide gray line that led to nowhere. They’d given me earplugs and classical music, but neither of these shielded me from the onslaught of sound that the MRI belched forth. “Oh great!” I thought as the first beeps and screams pummeled me. “It’s the eighties again! [[Pong]]! [[Space invaders]]!” The machine had an extensive repetoire of video game sounds. As each new combination sounded in the missile-silo-like tunnel, I closed my eyes and imagined waves of UFOs descending on me to be shot at by my defenses. They treated me to forty five minutes of these effects, pronouncing me a perfect patient in the end.
The next stop was the days most gruesome torture. They had me gargle and eat a gelatin mixed with local anesthetic before injecting me with a sedative. I was made to lay on my side with my chin pressed to my chest, and swallow a cable. My cardiologist — who had been summoned especially on my behalf — moved it around inside my esophagus and took pictures of my heart. He was swift and merciful in his exploration. My heart, he declared, was in excellent condition. I was sent up to my room where they put new heart-monitoring patches on me and offered me yet another hospital gown.
I had not eaten for ten hours prior to this last [[Grand Guignol]]. I had to give my throat an hour before I could eat due to its numbing for the bizarre ingesting of the sonogram camera. The chicken was delicious even though the green beans were boiled to as point beyond which even the most fragrant sea weed would have no flavor ((I never understood why my mother — who was a registered nurse — insisted on boiling vegetables to death. I now believe it was because she is one of the few people living who actually likes hospital food)) . The entrance to my throat felt as if I was coming down with a cold. I wasn’t tired, which made me worry that the events of the day had ramped me into a mania. As I closed my eyes, attempting to shut out afternoon’s silver light, another technician — an Asian woman — came in to administer one more test: the classic [[EEG]], a test for epilepsy.
Singing a folk song whose words I couldn’t understand or identify the language of, she attached electrodes to my scalp and ears one at a time. I napped as she worked — my first slumber in over twenty four hours. When she was finished, she sat down behind her console and started tapping at keys. Fields of white stars drawing circles inside of blue rectangles appeared in my eyes-shut-night. “Mister Sax, open your eyes,” she commanded. “Mister Sax, close your eyes.” A few more taps and her work was done.
After she pulled the mass of wires from my scalp, she said “Good news. No seizure.” “Thanks for the light show,” I replied. I couldn’t sleep after all the excitement, so I remained awake, watching the original version of [[The_Thomas_Crown_Affair_(1968_film)|The Thomas Crown Affair]] on TCM. Lynn came in the evening and fell promptly to sleep.
I hated the waiting. I hated the bed that automatically realigned itself every time I shifted my body. I hated the flat hospital food. The fact that I had to drag an [[Intravenous_therapy|IV]] tree along every time I went to the bathroom irritated me. The medicine they gave me to clear the contrast solution out of my kidneys tasted vile. My balls stank. And in the end I found it was easier to get discharged from a psychiatric ward than a neurology one. But my heart was strong, my blood numbers were good, only an artifact created by the machine clouded my MRI results, and all I had to face was the mystery of a numb fingertip indicating [[peripheral neuropathy]]. I would not be walking with my butt to the wind for another day.
Down a Cliff Under Fragments of Cloud
Posted on April 20, 2010 in Dogs Hiking Weather
I noted the first spots on the rocks in the road as we neared the dead tree and picnic table about one and a half miles in. As I sat down to feed Drake his dinner, I noticed streaks of rain on the tabletop. He wolfed his kibble quickly. I took a couple of sucks from my [[Camelbak]], dressed him in his yellow winter jacket, and motioned him towards home.
The first fist of the storm hit a few minutes later. Then it sucked in its breath, let us proceed under the illusion that we would see nothing heavy, and then slugged us hard with a downpour. Drake wanted to go faster, but I kept calling him back and treating him with biscuits.
Just past a spot where the downhill split — the right fork heading toward Harding Canyon and the left toward Modjeska Canyon where the truck was parked — Drake fell behind. We had only ten minutes before we’d be back in the shelter of the truck. I looked back and didn’t see him right away. Then I noticed the back of his yellow jacket sticking out of the perpendicular grass and moving precipitously down a near-cliff. The blue hood had fallen over his head so that he couldn’t raise his ears or enjoy any peripheral vision. The only sense that was unimpaired was his sense of smell. I called to him. His head thrashed about, his senses trying to locate me.
I moved toward the spot where he had gone over the side, calling him as I approached. He dashed back and forth, trying to find a place to climb up. I attempted to direct him to an easy path, but he either couldn’t make sense of my directions or didn’t want to obey. Finally, he just halted and stared as fragments of cloud pelted his plantive face. He wasn’t going back the way he came.
Grumbling, I dug my heels into the rain-softened earth and joined him. He moved to one side. Once I was down there, it was clear that I wasn’t going back up, either. “This way,” I directed, and stomped down the steep slope. Earlier rains had slackened the thirst of many a seed. Grasses, flowers, and brambles festooned the hillside. I didn’t worry about tumbling head over heels because of the softness of the earth. At the bottom of the first incline, we came to a three foot deep ravine that was the only way past a place where three slopes met. A broken yucca crossed it. First I had to cross and then I had to cross again. There was nowhere to go, so I followed the bottom of the gully which was paved with the variety of slick conglomerate that underlay much of the surrounding country.
With both hands, I steadied myself for the passage down the active rivulet. The intensity of the rain picked up. I nearly fell on my ass. My pants absorbed the water that was all around me. More water ran off my blue windbreaker. I cursed my dog, but made sure he was close behind me. When I could, I jumped out of the ravine and onto a flat patch where I fought grass and bramble to make a way to a lower segment of the fire road. At one point, where the rivulet crossed my path again, I grabbed Drake and threw him ahead of me.
It occurred to me, as I looked for a better place to descend, that the best routes were on my right. I forced myself in this direction, breaking vines with my bare hands when I had to. A nest of foxtails lay right next to a short stone face. I made a momentary nest here because the cliff kept the grass dry. It was then I noticed that I had lost Drake’s bag with his biscuits, food bowl, [[frisbee]], ball, and waste bags.
“Goddammit,” I groaned as I looked back on bushwhack I’d cut. The black bag could not be seen.
A few raisins restored my energy and we made it the rest of the way to the fire road. Drake was soaked. The rain had creased his hair so that he looked like he’d been roughly combed. When we got in the car, he shook off his winter jacket. I drove him home and, when we got there, denied him all the usual pleasures of blissfully sniffing the familiar grass and leaves of the shared garden.
What made him do it? Had he gone to the edge and just slipped? Was he testing me? Or had he decided to hell with the road, he was going to take a short cut? A journey which would have taken a few minutes if we had stuck to the established trail ended up eating up about forty five minutes. All the energy I had depended on the walk to give me had been wrested away.
UPDATE (4/23/2010): Went back to the place where Drake went over the edge. About eight feet down, I recovered the lost butt pack. It was easy to climb back up. Drake followed all the way.
When the Bootstraps Break, Have Something Ready
Posted on April 15, 2010 in Psychotropics Stigma
As a teenager and a young adult, I adopted the position that I would “pull myself up by my bootstraps” rather than take any medication for my depression or my anxiety. Pills meant that you were weak and truly crazy ((Like not taking them meant I wasn’t?)) My family of origin encouraged me in this. My wife suffered the effects ((Which fortunately did not include domestic violence. Like 97% of nonimbibing bipolars, I did not strike or threaten to strike her.)) . The years passed by and conditions inside my head worsened: the rages became more frequent and intense, the depressions more profound. It became increasingly impossible to implement the good advice therapists gave me because of the clash of storm wave to rocky shore in my head.
If I am to leave any advice to young people it is this: It can be an ennobling thing to attempt to take on your illness unmedicated and it is your right to choose such a path. But never, ever close the door to recovery by saying you will never take medication. It is not becoming addicted any more than a diabetic becomes addicted to insulin or a heart patient becomes addicted to the drugs that bring down her/his blood pressure and lessen the cholesterol in her/his system. If you need help, accept it. I made a huge mistake closing this door: my brain paid for it in the form of worsening moods, hallucinations, and anxiety. A little in the beginning might well have lessened the amount I am taking now. Be of open mind and make the right decisions for your health. You are still a human being worthy of dignity and respect if you choose to take meds. Shun those who tell you otherwise.
Why the mentally ill say “Screw You”
Posted on April 12, 2010 in Psychotropics Stigma Terrorism
I don’t support forced psychiatric compliance without cause ((You must be a danger to yourself or others.)) any more than I support forced root canals. I am on psychopharmaceuticals and I have had several root canals. I tried alternative methods for mental health. I lacked decent health insurance for many years. In both cases, treatment occurred because I got decent health insurance, walked myself into a doctor’s office and sought relief. So I am sympathetic with those who refuse treatment after having it ramrodded into them. In the long run, if they choose to go for it, I suspect they will be more faithful to their once-or-twice-a-days than if they had not volunteered.
It’s surprising to me — after the terrorist plots against Nancy Pelosi and others uncovered last week — that there was not an immediate call to round up all those who weren’t taking their medications as happened after Virginia Tech and similar events. At least one of the accused — Gregory Lee Giusti — is alleged to have what news commentators characterized as a “troubled past”. Apparently Giusti has threatened others such as [[BART]] cops who insisted that he pay rapid transit fares. His mother feels that his paranoia about the health care bill grew fat on the junk fare served by Fox News ((Which is probably true.)) . But liberals have used Giusti to characterize the [[tea party movement]] and conservatives have said nothing at all.
Here’s the disturbing thing I see going on here: once more the system failed us, probably because there’s not enough money to look after those who do pose a risk to self and others. Liberals seize on people like Giusti to make points about the mental stability of the opposition. Conservatives — seeing that their own propaganda fed into this — say nothing this time. I don’t doubt that if the threats had been made against a conservative politician we’d be hearing their tired old song and dance about how the mentally ill need to be locked up to a wo/man. (Don’t expect them to provide any money for it, however.) What they want in the way of meds are chemical strait-jackets. This time, however, they see the implications of their irresponsible hate-mongering and so are keeping their mouths shut on this one except to whimper that Giusti was clearly insane.
And the result is the usual nothing-gets-done-for-the-mentally-ill. Budget cutbacks will almost certainly mean that we get screwed when it comes to keeping open clinics. Instead of getting treatment in mental health facilities, they will wait for some crime to be committed and then lock us up in prison; and when we’ve served our time, they will find a reason to put us back in for a longer time.
Yet one continues to pray that something else will be done. Many of the mentally ill would take their meds if they had stable shelter and stable access to clinics. The United States does very poorly by its impoverished. No one group has a harder time rising from poverty than those of us who are afflicted by genetic brain dysfunctions. We need the support of family, friends, and — yes — our communities to make it.
Once I went around with eighteen teeth that needed root canals in my mouth. I thought I could bear the pain like a cross because I didn’t have decent dental insurance. The same held true with the paranoia and racing thoughts that I endured because of my bipolar disorder. Somehow, family members, friends, and my fellow citizens thought it would be easy to snap out of it, to get the treatment that I needed to overcome my disability. I had to grit and bear it until the means befell me. Our country expects miracles and yet provides us with no Jesus. No wonder so many of our number say “Screw you”.
