Fun with Mental Illness!

Yeah, tongue is firmly planted in cheek.

So that visit to my parents' for Easter? Ha ha ha! Serve my dad a glass of wine and take cover because you don't know what bomb he's going to drop on you!

We were relaxing in their living room after dinner. My dad started telling family stories-- about his parents, who only died a few years ago, and his aunts and uncles. Most of his aunts and uncles lived until I was in my late teens or early twenties and all lived within 20 miles of us. So I knew them well. They shaped me in many ways. They were all kind of interesting, rustic characters. We come from farm stock. My family is Americana.

So, my dad is kicked back in his La-Z-Boy, sipping his cabernet, telling us about the time, when I was a baby (very early 70s), that he stopped in to see his mom and dad. He could tell that his mom had been crying. He asked her what was wrong and she acted strangely and simply said she was going to the doctor. He pushed her for details, but she acted sketchy and evasive. My dad said that for some reason he couldn't let it drop. (Very unlike my dad.) So he kept asking, "What's wrong? Are you sick?" My grandfather was in the room and my dad saw him give my grandma a look saying, "Don't say anything". My dad kept pressing and finally my grandmother told him that she was going to see a psychiatrist. She was hospitalized shortly thereafter. Diagnosis? Bi-polar disorder.

I had to pick my jaw up off the ground.

Where to even begin?

How amazing is it that a farmer's wife in the 1970s was going to a psychiatrist? We are talking hardcore rural farming community here. I feel really proud to know that my grandparents took the bull by the horns, got my grandmother the help she needed and didn't give a fuck about what society thought. I was shocked to hear this story about my grandmother too because in thirty years of memories of her, I only saw her as strong and stable and always, always, always in control. It seems that she found a way to manage her illness.

This completely turns my belief about my family's beliefs on mental illness on its head. I thought that mental illness was a big taboo. I had heard some things whispered about. And, I guess it was the whispering that made me think it was a shameful subject. I thought there was a total distrust of psychiatry and therapy. I was wrong.

The most puzzling thing of all, however, is why my dad chose to reveal that bit of info to me when he did. I'm trying hard not to be pissed about it. He knows that I've seen psychologists for depression for going on thirteen years now. He knows that I've been on meds for six years. Why, why, why did he wait until now to tell me this story? What? That info wouldn't have been a bit helpful to me? I cannot understand.

But, there's more. He continues on to tell me that my grandma's sister was also diagnosed as bi-polar in the 1960s and was treated with electroshock therapy. And then, he reveals that my grandfather's sister was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. She attempted suicide by throwing herself out of a second story window in a hospital that she was checked into when she was a teenager. When I knew her, she was a mean alcoholic. Obviously, she self-medicated.

I didn't have the nerve to really ask many questions. My dad then just switched the topic to mundane things.

When B and I went to bed a couple of hours later, all we could do was look at each other like, "What the fuck?"

My reaction to all of this is to refrain from freaking out. Psychiatry was very rudimentary in the 60s and 70s compared to today. I spoke at length with my psychopharmacologist about this and she told me that "bi-polar" and "schizophrenia" were basically umbrella diagnoses back then. They actually covered a wide range of both major and minor mental illness. I knew that there was some mental illness on my mom's side of the family. So, I knew that there was a predisposition to it in my genes. But, this greatly increases that predisposition.

My bouts with depression/anxiety began when I was somewhere between eight and twelve. There were definitely situational causes, but it was more. They were occasional when I was a kid. And hid them completely from my parents. The ups and downs became more cyclical in my twenties. I never become suicidal in my depressive state. It feels like an air has been let out of a ballon. It sometimes gets to the point where I feel completely numb. Life seems bleak and hopeless and completely pointless. I withdraw at these times. This usually brings out crazy amounts of existential anxiety as well.

Before I had the baby, I had only had one episode in which I ceased functioning. The good news about my wiring is that I could be as depressed as a human gets and I can still get up and go to work and do a good job. That's a blessing in many ways. So that first major episode was about six years ago. I had just moved in w/ B at the time and he was wise enough to advise me to get in to see a "real" therapist and to try some meds. I did and just had to deal with occasional minor depression after that.

Until last November. In November I had an episode that really scared me. I'd never experienced anything like it before. It was depression coupled with anxiety and so bad I could barely lift my head off my pillow. But my head would race and my heart would race and it would feel like it was never going to get any better. It got bad enough where I talked to B about hospitalization. Again, it wasn't that I was suicidal in any way, I just needed someone to give me something to relieve what I was feeling that very minute. Long story short, within a day or two I got in to see a new MD and we got creative with meds and I was back up and running within two or three weeks. That's an unusually fast recovery from something like that. Boy, did I feel blessed.

So I moved on with life with this expectation that that was the end of that. I was on new meds. I had energy and was functioning and felt just all around great. Not that I was happy all the time. That's the phallacy...that meds somehow rob you of your ability to feel. That is bullshit. It's all about feeling a normal range of emotion. I could feel sad and the world wouldn't feel like a hopeless and cruel place. I could feel stressed when things were tough. I didn't have to sit with my head between my knees taking deep breaths when I had the slightest thing go wrong. I was functioning as one should.

No lie, it's been rough for me since my aunt died. But I am mourning, plain and simple. I have been feeling sadness, deep sadness that at times feels overwhelming. But that's ok. That is not anything that I would look to medicate myself out of or around or past. That's simply being a normal functioning human.

But a week ago, the bottom dropped out and I had another breakdown. How I know that this is mental illness, as opposed to mourning, is the abruptness with which it comes on. And how it is so physical. And how nothing that you do or that anyone says to you seems to help. I was again thinking about the hospital because I couldn't get through to my MD and I just needed something to make this stop. And it was more complicated this time. There were definite periods of "revving". I went from lying lethargic on the couch to running outside and raking our entire backyard. And I didn't feel any better afterward.

And all I could thing about was the fucking bipolar diagnosis running from my grandmother's and great aunt's DNA to mine.

Fuck.

So, here I am today and I'm obviously feeling better or I couldn't even be writing you this. Turns out my psychiatrist's mom had a stroke and that's why she was MIA. She got back to me yesterday and was able to give me something to quell the anxiety without making me comatose. So, I feel fragile, but like things are going to be ok.

I am scared though. And I'm sitting here kind of wondering why I am writing all of this. The self-critic immediately says, "You're trying to get attention," and "You're self-indulgent." But there is more to it than that. I guess I am trying to map out this history, trying to figure it out. I think it's an interesting story, and as I am writing in anonymity, this is not airing my dirty laundry. This is nothing that my friends don't already know about me.

So I will sit with it, thank G-d I'm on the road to recovery and continue to suss out the interesting bits of the story.

Comments

[Margarita Mama]

fascinating that you have so much family history. Your parents never cease to amaze me. At least they are coming around now and opening up!