Last night I watched Crazy for Love a very bad movie wherein a man, Max, is put into a mental hospital for attempting suicide for the tenth time. When he’s there, he glimpses a very ill, schizophrenic, Grace, whereupon he instantaneously falls in love with her. She too is determined to kill herself. His life’s mission then is to “make her better”. To “make her happy”. Having found his new mission in life, he no longer wants to kill himself.
Well, pin a rose on his nose.
I am crazy. I tell this to people in my personal life. It’s not a secret. I figure there’s no point in trying to cover it up; it’ll come out eventually. I’m crazy. The approximately 20 scars on my forearms rather give away that something is amiss.
But people really don’t like the word “crazy”. In fact, most often, what people say to me is, “no, you’re not!”. Well, actually, I am. I have a mental illness, I’m bipolar and I’m crazy.
Here is today’s interview with me, Natasha Tracy, complete with call-in questions. I think it went well. We discussed some of the negative impact bipolar has had on my life. I talked about bipolar disorder, depression, suicide, coping and how my writings at HealthyPlace have been controversial.
Stabbing is bad. It just is. If you have to pick self-harm options between cutting, hitting, and stabbing, don’t pick stabbing.
Unless you’re trying to kill someone, in which case I think stabbing would be pretty good. And satisfying. I’m surprised more murderers don’t pick stabbing.
I’m having anxiety issues. And impulse control issues. And stabbing issues. Well, that last one is really a function of the other two, but it’s an issue nonetheless.
I’ve always been attracted to stabbing. I think that’s because when you start wielding a blade with force, you can’t change your mind. And it’s so easy to did deep. And draw a lot of blood.
This silence feels familiar. I despise the deafening, familiar sounds of silence. They terrify me. I suppose the silence strangles me. Strangled, alone, screaming.
People who know me, know this about me. They know how much I hate being ignored. They know that when they don’t return my calls or my emails my mind riles in negative and catastrophic scenarios. People who actually like me don’t want to do that to me.
It would be nice to know ahead of time, if a treatment would work. Unfortunately, no one cal tell the future: not for cancer treatment and not for mental illness treatment like electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) either.
But very smart people try to figure out what might predict the outcome of treatments. Especially treatments like ECT, a hotly debated, and much maligned treatment. That’s the good news. And the bad news.
In a retrospective chart review of depressive and bipolar patients in a Netherlands hospital, of those who received ECT, 65.8% met the standards for remission. The only predictor of response found was duration of index series.
There are frequent reports that of the people who survive suicide attempts, they realized sometime after the pills, or the gun, or the jump, they didn’t want to die. This is obvious. No one wants to die. People who attempt suicide don’t want to die. They want to be out of pain.
People Who Attempt Suicide Don’t Want to Die, They Want to Be Free of PainIt is obvious that every human wants to live. No matter what their personal circumstance each human claws against death until they either don’t see it coming, or they feel there is no alternative for them.
Many people actually have no problem with that – we call it doctor-assisted suicide. The reason it’s “OK” to kill yourself near the end of your life is because it is medically certain you will be in agony for the short remainder of your existence. In this instance doctors just turn their head while a little extra morphine is administered. Happens all the time.
No one, however, recognizes mental illness as a terminal illness. It can never be determined to a medical certainty that the rest of your life will be lived in agony. Even though it might be. Tomorrow might be different. Magic might happen. A unicorn might walk through my front door. But probably not. Tomorrow is probably going to be exactly like today. Only it’ll be Saturday. Yay.
The problem with a disorder like depression is that pleasure is simply absent. Pleasure in all ways is gone. Desire is gone. Depressed people don’t like anything. Depressed people don’t want to do anything. And even if something extraordinary were to happen, like a unicorn in your living room, it wouldn’t matter. Because the ability to feel pleasure is gone.
And if anhedonia weren’t enough to make life absolutely pointless, there’s the adding of pain on top of it. Pain on top of pain on top of the unbearable, unarguable knowledge of more pain. And still, the fact is, I don’t want to die. I just really don’t want to live. Like this.
It’s understandable that people who love those of us with a mental illness tend to feel powerless. But here are some ways you can help make the world better for the mentally ill.
Bipolar is one of the most commonly diagnosed psychiatric conditions among teens and twenty-somethings, but there has been little written about it from a younger person’s perspective and few people know how to approach the topic. In her new book, Welcome to the Jungle: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Bipolar but Were Too Freaked Out to Ask (Conari Press, May 2010), Hilary Smith fills in the gap with an upfront and empowering approach to the challenges of being diagnosed with bipolar. Here she shares with us six tips for making the world a better place for people with mental illnesses.
There is a recognition among many of us crazies, as well as the professionals that treat us, that most of us do not simple fall into one camp – we’re bipolar with a hint of ADD; we have a borderline personality disorder with depressive and psychotic features; we suffer from schizo-affective disorder with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and addiction mixed in. Humans are complex, and their brains even more so.
And what’s more, my depression isn’t like your depression. In fact, so much so, that using the same word is almost nonsensical. I sleep 15 hours a day, but you only sleep 3. I have a successful job, but no family or friends. You have neither but participate in online support groups 10 hours a day. I think about killing myself every day but you actually plan for it once a week. You never cry but I cry all the time. Are we the same? Am I more depressed than you, or less?
And things get more complicated when you compare personality disorders and bipolar and ADD and PTSD combined with comorbid conditions like addiction. And yet somehow we’re supposed to suss this all out, find a label, and a treatment that goes with it. That’s pretty tough.
As you might have noticed, I’ve been writing about bipolar and mental illness for a really long time. Seven years in internet time is a lifetime or so.
And in all that time, in addition to the writing, I’ve been reading, or more commonly, researching mental illness. I’ve been looking up information on mental disorders, psychiatric medications, mental illness treatments, supplements and everything else of which you can think. This is because I like to be educated about my bipolar disorder and my healthcare and treatments. I often share that researched information because I think others should be educated about mental illness too. I strive to make anything I write accurate and provide links to reputable sources.
But what information should you trust? Who should you trust for mental health information? Should you trust me, a random blogger? People on discussion groups? Information sites? Drug company sites? Doctor sites?
Pretty much, almost always, no.
Anxiolytic Isn’t Even in the DictionaryI grit my jaw. I bite the skin around my nails. I pull at my hair. I bunch my fists. My breaths are shallow. I twitch and clench erratically.
I tell myself not to grit, bite, pull, bunch, twitch and clench. I tell myself to intake more air. Those instructions are followed. For moments. And then they’re not. While I wasn’t looking I started gritting, biting, pulling, bunching, twitching, and clenching all over again.
This is a paper I wrote for a psychology course I am taking so the level of discourse is quite high, sorry about that. I promise though, it is comprehensible. What I’m basically talking about is calcium-channel blockers and other calcium antagonists (they turn calcium down). This refers to calcium in your brain and not calcium in your blood.
Because inadequate response, poor compliance, chronic recurring symptoms, and functional disability are constant challenges is the treatment of bipolar disorder, (Gitlin, 2006) efforts have been made to search out new mood stabilizing medication and determine new methods of action. There has been an effort to treat bipolar disorder with a class of medication termed “mood stabilizers”, most notably consisting of some anticonvulsants (also known as antiepileptics) in addition to the traditional lithium.[1] While anticonvulsants are widely used in the treatment of mood disorders, their method of action in mood stabilization is mostly unknown.[2] Recent research has indicated that disrupted calcium homeostasis is present in bipolar disorder, and that anticonvulsants and lithium effect calcium channels and concentration in the brain (Amann, 2005). The mood-stabilizing effects of calcium channel blockers like Nimodipine (Levy, 2000) further add to the evidence that calcium antagonism is useful in the treatment of bipolar disorder. I will show that these “mood stabilizers”, anticonvulsants, stabilize mood in bipolar disorder, at least partially, through their ability to act as calcium antagonists.
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