Bipolar 2 From Inside and Out

Posts tagged ‘trigger warning’

What God Gives You

There are two expressions, common in “inspirational” memes, posters, and the like, that rub me the wrong way.

One is “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” I addressed that one in a post (https://bipolarme.blog/2014/11/10/suffering-and-train-wrecks/) roughly seven years ago, and now I’m ready to tackle the other.

“God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.”

Let’s take a look at the premise. It implies that God gives us all our trials and troubles. Already, I have problems with that. Perhaps God is love and the devil gives us trials and troubles. Perhaps neither God nor the devil is involved, and life gives us trials and troubles. Perhaps even we give ourselves trials and troubles. It strikes me that these are equally valid propositions, though many people favor one or another.

At the heart of it, though, is the fact that there are trials and troubles in our lives, whoever or whatever gives them to us, and we must handle them. Wherever they come from, they will not be more than we can handle, the saying states.

The evidence of our eyes, and perhaps our own lives, says that this simply isn’t true. Plenty of people encounter (or have given to them) more than they can handle. Think of the homeless mentally ill. Are they able to handle what they’ve been given? The woman with her third miscarriage? The veteran with catastrophic injuries? Sure, some of them face their conditions bravely, but others don’t, and they’ll never make the news as “inspiration porn,” the uplifting stories of people who can and have overcome their afflictions, which is predominantly what we hear about in the media.

The fact remains that some people do receive more troubles than they can handle. There are serious mental illnesses that have no treatment. There are injuries and horrors that leave a person scarred inside and out. There are troubles that are so bad they contribute to death by suicide. In these and other cases, someone or something (or simply life itself) has given certain people more than they can handle.

The premise behind the saying, however, is that God never gives YOU more than YOU can handle. What I’ve said doesn’t mean there is no hope – only that it might come from a source you don’t expect. That might be the same God who ostensibly gave you those trials. It might mean another person, or a group of people, or a society can help you with what you need to make it through.

It’s not necessary to leave it all up to God to solve these problems. And it may be that we cannot rescue ourselves. But perhaps we can be that person, or one of those people, who can help someone whose troubles are more than they can handle by themselves.

I won’t argue whether it is because of the grace of God that other people help. But the original saying, in all its simplicity, is too simplistic. I believe that troubles and trials come to us from somewhere in the world, not from God, and people in the world are ultimately the ones who can help us handle them.

I’m not trying to deny the actions of God in the world. I’m saying that we must do our part to solve these problems too. Donate to a good cause. Volunteer to help. Listen to someone who’s hurting. Even just buy a box of cookies from a Girl Scout. Let’s make that “you” an “us.” God (or life) never gives us more than we can handle – together. (Note: Don’t even get me started on “God helps those who help themselves.” That’s not even in the Bible. Go ahead and look. I’ll wait.)

And why is this post in a blog on mental illness? Because that’s one of the things that some people can handle and others can’t, whether it was God or genetics or brain chemicals or trauma that gave it to them.

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My Triggers

By shane / adobe stock.com

Bipolar disorder is a funny thing. It can come on with no warning. One moment you’re fine, and the next you’re in the infinite doldrums or jagging on a spike of enthusiasm. Most of the time, it’s like that. The moods come on unexpectedly and stay as long as they want.

Sometimes, however, there are things in your life that seem to trigger a bout of depression or mania.  This isn’t quite the same as what’s commonly called a trigger. In the usual sense, a trigger is something in your past, like a traumatic memory, that comes bursting through when you read, see, or otherwise encounter a reminder of that memory. Suddenly, you are thrown back into the situation that triggered you, reliving the trauma, feeling as if you were still there, re-experiencing it. Triggers are most commonly associated with PTSD (or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). Many people associate PTSD and its flashbacks with veterans and war, but other traumas, such as rape, assault, and natural disasters can also cause PTSD.

Trigger warnings are controversial. Some people need a warning that the content – especially books, blog posts, or films – may trigger a suppressed or otherwise traumatic memory and leave the person caught up in the sensations during a public moment, such as in a classroom. Obviously, people with traumatic memories would prefer to avoid this, so a trigger warning is placed at the beginning of a story, novel, or even a song that deals with rape, domestic abuse, or other traumas, especially ones depicted in a particularly graphic manner.

To other people, reacting to a trigger is an admission of fragility, at best, or at worst, an excuse for avoiding content that most people can easily handle. This is part of the mindset that leads to calling the severely traumatized “snowflakes” for their perceived inability to deal with stimuli that “normal” people take for granted. They do not understand the power of traumatic memories or the power they have over people who have been through trauma. They consider such people weak. They consider themselves strong, even if – or especially if – they have been through traumas themselves.

In general, my life has been less traumatic than some, more traumatic than others. There are memories that invade my dreams, situations that cause me panic, and stimuli that rev me up. I am not in control of these stimuli, or what they do to me.

Most of the stimuli trigger depression in me, as my bipolar disorder is heavily weighted towards depression. (In fact, I was diagnosed with unipolar depression before a psychiatrist finally recognized my condition as bipolar 2 with anxiety.) When I encounter one of these “personal” triggers, I am panicked, unable to communicate, and immobilized, or nearly so, and must rely on the help of others, especially my husband, to get me through. There’s no telling how long that depression will last.

Primary among my triggers is what I call “the rotten ex-boyfriend who almost ruined my life.” It was a toxic, gaslighting relationship that left my soul sucked dry and my emotions shattered. Fortunately, I do not often encounter anything that reminds me of those days. A friend I met during that time, in fact, has helped me heal both then and for many years thereafter.

Still, I have dreams – ones where I am traveling to the man’s house, ones where I am in the house but he is not present, and ones in which he is. I wake feeling vaguely seasick and nervous. The feeling persists like a hangover through most of the next day. It interferes with my ability to do work and to interact with people. My reactions used to be much worse, with specific words even able to throw me into panic and depression.

Another thing that triggers me is disastrous financial matters, or at least ones that I perceive that way. IRS dealings are by far the worst. A letter with that return address throws me into a panic. Once I even collapsed on the street after an IRS engagement and was unable to get up without assistance. Overdue bills and dealing with personal finances are triggers, exacerbated by the fact that I pay most of the bills, despite the fact that I make less than half the money. This is one of my contributions to the household since there are many things I am unable to do. Such situations leave me with my head in my hands, shaking and catastrophizing, unable to do what must be done until I calm down. (My husband is by now adept at helping me do this.)

And I have one of the more “traditional” trauma triggers – a natural disaster. A year and a half ago, our house was destroyed by a tornado. At the time it hit, I was upstairs in the bedroom. I remember the roof coming off. I remember putting a pillow over my head and hoping for the best. For many months I suppressed the trauma. But now it has come out. When the wind blows very hard or the rain blows sideways, I panic. Despite the fact that upstairs is the very place I shouldn’t go, that’s where I end up – in bed with a pillow over my head. (I also avoid movies like Twister. I’m not even sure I should try The Wizard of Oz.)

As for hypomanic triggers, I have few. Most of my hypomanic flights are unexpected, lifting me up with no warning. Although they can be exhilarating, they are also dangerous. One of the hazards is unwise spending, which of course can lead to the aforementioned financial depression triggers.

One trigger that takes me as near as I ever get to hypomanic sexuality, though, is a sensory, rather than a situational, trigger. For some reason, the smell of Irish Spring soap brings up the heat in me. I distinctly remember the first occasion on which I noticed this. A coworker walked past me and I smelled the distinctive scent. It started my juices flowing. Later, we became lovers. My reaction to Irish Spring is less extreme these days, but it still triggers a memory of the feeling. I seldom encounter the scent anymore, as my husband prefers Zest.

At any rate, it is my experience that triggers can arise from sensory memories, from dreams, from upsetting situations. I have few triggers related to textual representations, though I am not immune to those in films (I left the movie “What Dreams May Come” before it was over and waited in the lobby until it was over).

What I can say is that people’s triggers do not make them “snowflakes.” Triggers elicit visceral reactions that are no less real for not being visible to outsiders. While I don’t advise purging any possible triggering material from, say, academic curricula, I do think a trigger warning on syllabi or blog posts is only polite, and possibly psychologically necessary.

 

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Mental Health

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Psychological Tactics of Abusers, Gaslighters, and Cults

Image by Vadim Gushva via adobestock.com

Once upon a time, I lived with a man who, I later realized, was a gaslighter. (This was in the time before gaslighting became trendy and well-known.) For a while after I left, I had no notion that I had any harsh feelings towards him. It was only later, after I had been away for a while, that I realized what my buried feelings were and what damage he had done. The experience was responsible for parts of who I am today, including my strength and resilience.

For a time, though, right after my deeper feelings began surfacing, I realized that I had been psychologically controlled. I began to read up on the phenomenon. Some of the subjects I devoured were accounts of and theory of domestic physical and psychological abuse, mind control, and cults. They fascinated me – how the human mind and spirit could be so affected by another person or persons that they acted in irrational ways, defended their abusers, changed their personalities, and gave up their lives, either figuratively or literally. I don’t mean to compare my experience to the suffering that the people I read about have gone through, or to the suffering that still exists. All that I knew was that I had been manipulated, and was desperate to find out how, if not why.

I started with the easiest subject to find information about – domestic abuse. I will say that my gaslighter never harmed me physically and only once said something that could be taken as a violent thought towards me. But I learned, particularly, about intermittent reinforcement. This happens when the abuser switches between telling the victim that he loves her and she is wonderful, and that she is stupid or ugly or otherwise worthy of abuse. These mixed signals keep the victim coming back, on the theory that sometimes the person is so nice and loving. “It must be that I make him mad without meaning to,” she thinks.  Thus, she is hooked and less likely to leave.

My gaslighter also used intermittent reinforcement and mixed signals to keep me hooked. I stayed much longer than was good for my mental health.

Learning about mind control – “brainwashing,” kidnapping, and so forth, gave me little insight into my own situation, except that some of the principles were to isolate the person being controlled, to control the environment such as when the person slept or ate, and to be that person’s only source of information or reality. I had been relatively isolated physically, had little control over schedules, and, while TV news was available, it was always filtered through the gaslighter’s sensibilities and opinions. Again, I am not comparing my suffering to that of other people. I don’t believe, really, that suffering can or should be compared.

Learning about cults took me even farther from my own experience, but I was fascinated by it nonetheless. I soaked up information about Jim Jones and Jonestown, Heaven’s Gate, Scientology, and others. Especially interesting to me were stories of people who had escaped from cults. (One of my Facebook friends escaped from a religious cult, which took advantage of her PTSD and bipolar disorder to ensnare her. She supports others who have been victimized by cults and spreads information on cults and the tactics they use.) All I can say is that leaders of cults are usually charismatic, often reject societal sexual norms, and mentally coerce their followers to isolate from family and to finance the cult leader’s lifestyle.

Gaslighting, which I have written about many times (https://wp.me/p4e9Hv-pm, https://wp.me/p4e9Hv-C2, https://wp.me/p4e9Hv-Ir, https://wp.me/p4e9Hv-Cu) most resembles domestic abuse, though usually without the physical violence. It uses the tactics of intermittent reinforcement, isolation, verbal abuse, cults, and mixed signals to convince the victim that her perceptions of reality are invalid – in extreme cases, that she is going insane.

All of these forms of abuse do harm to their victims, in varying degrees. I was lucky to be able to leave my gaslighter when and how I did, and I will forever be grateful to the people who have helped me heal from the experience.

If you are in any of these situations – domestic violence, emotional abuse such as gaslighting, or being victimized by a cult, the best advice is: Get out now. Leave while you still can, before something worse happens. And get help, both from your friends and family, if possible, and from a professional counselor who has experience with these issues. It could save your happiness, your sanity, or even your life.

 

Resources

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/72664.Nonfiction_resources_on_abuse_and_domestic_violence

National Domestic Abuse Hotline https://www.thehotline.org/

https://nymag.com/strategist/article/best-books-on-cults-reviewed-by-experts.html

https://www.women.com/sophiematthews/lists/books-on-gaslighting-101718

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Persistence of Memory

It is spring, sunny and pleasant, but the wind is blowing at 20 miles per hour. The boughs of the fir trees sway dramatically. The bird feeder glints in the sun as the light catches its swinging arc.

I am anxious.

There is a thunderstorm. Those same trees are tormented by strong winds. The hard rain doesn’t fall but blows sideways. Golfball-sized hail pelts the ground. I swear I can see lightning flash close to our house.

I am panicking.

About ten months ago, my life was changed when I lived through a tornado. Everyone says it was a miracle I survived. I was on the second floor of my house, with no time to get to the basement, when the roof came off. Assaulted by a maelstrom of flying dirt, insulation, and debris, I put a pillow over my head and hoped for the best. And I came through it without a scratch, although the house was damaged so badly that it had to be torn down. It’s being rebuilt right now and we hope to move in in a couple of months.

After the tornado passed, I was calm. I even slept with that filthy pillow as I waited for my husband and the rescue squad to come and extricate me from the bedroom. As the days passed, I had to deal with a lot of things that reminded me of the tornado – staying in a Red Cross shelter, dealing with the insurance company, going back to the house to rescue our pets and salvage a few belongings that had been in the least-damaged part of the house.

As time went by, I told my story again and again to friends and acquaintances who asked about it. Without exception, they were amazed not just at my survival, but at how incredibly calmly I talked about it and how I didn’t seem to be suffering from any post-traumatic effects.

Then why is it that, ten months later, I seem to be experiencing the anxiety and panic that should have struck me then? Heavy rain makes me nervous. Strong winds disturb me. Lightning makes me jump.

My husband thinks that it is because we are getting closer to the anniversary of when it all happened. And it is again tornado season in Ohio. I think it was not completely irrational of me to be afraid of the storm last week. I just wonder why it happened after all this time. Have I been in denial for ten months? Does it sometimes take that long for post-traumatic stress to manifest?

A friend of mine had a similar experience when her car was nearly hit by lightning. At first, she said, she was still able to drive to work. But as time went on, she became more and more frightened of driving through rain. As she put it, “Over time, my anxiety ramped up rather than down.” She had to have de-sensitization treatment.

Her explanation for the delayed reaction was that “the long-term memory encoded it.” Perhaps it’s possible that the lightning for her and the tornado for me lingered in short term memory and did not become troublesome until they were fully stored in our long-term memory banks. That sounds counterintuitive, but it may be right.

Will I be comfortable on the second floor of the house when we finally occupy it? Will I be able to sleep in the bedroom? Will every thunderstorm send me racing to the basement?

I just don’t know.

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I Can Hardly See the Scars

Scars from self-harm are reminders of dark periods in our lives, times when we felt too little or too much. Times when we thought that feeling physical pain could distract us from emotional pain. Times when we felt so numb that we self-harmed to reassure ourselves that we were still alive.

Tattoos can be a lot of things. They can indicate membership in a tribe, be a reminder of a happy occasion, commemorate the passing of a loved one, be a work of art, be a relict of a drunken night, espouse a cause, or have a personal meaning that no one else is party to.

Self-harm is something a lot of us have tried, in one form or another. And the scars produced by it have many meanings. They can be reminders that we lived through a really bad time or reminders that we chose a really bad coping mechanism. Some people look at their own scars and feel lucky to have survived. Some look and feel shame.

Now, a Philadephia tattoo studio, Crown and Feather Tattoo Co., is offering to cover up people’s self-harm scars with free tattoos. The service is so popular that the studio has had to hire more tattoo artists to keep up with the demand.

They call this effort “Project Tsukurou,” a word derived from Kintsugi, a Japanese art form that involves repairing broken pottery with resin and gold dust. I wrote about Kintsugi recently (Beautiful at the Broken Places, https://wp.me/p4e9Hv-Yj). Rebuilding oneself after a breakdown and thinking about making it a work of art was very empowering to me. Apparently, the tattoo artists and their patrons felt the same way.

I have scars from self-harm and I have tattoos. The tattoos don’t cover the scars but are located in close proximity. The scars have faded, nearly invisible now since the dozens of years since they were created. I am over that, healthier than that now. (Once someone asked me how I quit self-harm. I replied, “I didn’t need to anymore.”)

At first, I was ashamed of those scars. I tried to hide them with wide bracelets and watchbands. Later, I made my peace with them. They were now a part of me, a reminder of a time of despair and despondency. They were a reminder never to let things get that bad again. That there are things I can now do to alleviate the pain or the numbness, should it ever get that bad again anyway.

Mostly, I don’t look at the scars anymore. But my tattoos are right there next to them. One is a semicolon, a symbol and reminder of suicide prevention. (See projectsemicolon.com for more information.) The other is the :): symbol for bipolar disorder. When I look at these tattoos, I think of the reality of both my disorder and my new, better, life-saving coping mechanisms.

Of course, tattoos are not a choice that everyone is prepared to make. Some people feel that they shouldn’t modify their body in that way. But for someone who has already modified their body with scars of self-harm, tattoos can possibly give them back a measure of dignity and pride that their self-harming days are over. They can look at their bodies and see, not mutilations, but life-affirming works of art.

So far, the only tattoo studio that I know of performing this service for free is the one in Philly. But most tattoo studios are used to covering over regretted tattoos with new ones. They should be able to cover the scars of self-harm as well. And if they don’t do it for free, well, one could think of the money as an investment in healing or moving forward or creating a work of art where once there was only a reminder of pain.

 

Reference:

https://scoop.upworthy.com/tattoo-studio-covers-up-self-harm-scars-for-free-it-totally-changes-your-outlook?fbclid=IwAR0sjb_G3sS_P3FsXmImsBtRaIrFkak_8OHjcNJJjocnnSrrL1X-bBqgSlc

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Wounded People, Invisible Scars

Let me tell you about the time I got stoned in third grade. I was a weird kid – smart, scrawny, emotionally out-of-step, lonely. I dressed funny. I was no good at sports. In short, I was bully-bait. One day I was waiting at the bus stop with some other kids. They decided it would be a fun game to throw rocks – broken pieces of macadam – at my feet. I jumped over them easily, laughing along.

Then one of them threw a rock and hit me in the head. As I was sobbing and bleeding, a passing teacher rescued me and called my mother. The kids ran off, yelling, “We didn’t mean to hurt her!”

I was wounded, nonetheless. Three stitches later, I was, if not as good as new, at least able to carry on. The scar on the outside has since faded to invisibility. The scar on the inside is invisible, too, but very much still with me.

A lot of us have invisible wounds and not all of them come with physical scars. There’s a whole category of conditions called “invisible illnesses.” They’re the ones that don’t come with wheelchairs or crutches or seeing-eye dogs. People who look “normal” on the outside but are fighting like hell on the inside. Some of these conditions are autoimmune disorders. Others are caused by developmental difficulties, uncommon viruses, and even hormonal disruptions.

Then there are the ones that live in the brain. In memories. In scars no one can see. In mental illnesses. What was wrong with me was mental and emotional, inside my brain. Maybe the other kids could sense that and that was what made me a target.

There are a lot of the walking wounded among us, along with non-ambulatory people who are also wounded in other ways. People with brain injuries or PTSD. These disorders can strike anyone and you can’t tell who those people are simply by looking at them.

In cases of serious mental illness, in particular, the wounds and scars, while internal, can be deadly. At least once, my own brain has tried to kill me. Bipolar depression, combined with irrational thinking and problems in the world outside my brain, left me with seemingly only one choice. Fortunately, I didn’t act on the pain. I lived through it.

Too many of us have invisible, internal wounds. Too many of us spend enormous amounts of time and energy pretending that we don’t. For some reason, internal wounds seem more shameful, less understandable, than external ones. A broken leg elicits sympathy. A broken brain, not so much.

I know that the rock that hit my head wasn’t what broke my brain. Bipolar disorder is much more subtle than that. Whatever its causes – and the jury seems to be still debating that – a minor physical impact is not considered to be one. The seeds of my bipolar disorder were likely already there, lurking in my differentness, my emotional oddities, my uncooperative but active brain.

But the incident sure didn’t help. It made me more vulnerable to the shocks and disappointments of life as a weird kid. It took a pothole-sized chunk out of what should have been my developing self-esteem. It opened up crevices in my brain where the doubts, fears, insecurities, and excesses of bipolar disorder could lodge.

Wounded people surround us every day. Sometimes the pain leaks out around their eyes. Other sufferers are more adept at hiding it. The important thing to know is that anybody – anybody – you see on the street or meet at work or at church or at the gym could have one of those invisible scars.

Not all the broken look broken. Not all wounds are visible. Not all scars are external.

Be gentle with other people. You never know who’s hurt inside.

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When You Don’t Want to Live, but You Don’t Want to Die

“I hope I don’t wake up tomorrow morning.”

That is the classic thought of someone suffering from passive suicidal ideation. It’s not really a desire to die by suicide. It’s just a way of expressing how much it hurts to be you.

It’s not active suicidal ideation, the kind where you make an actual plan to kill yourself, even if you never put it into practice. It’s passive, meaning that you’d like to be dead but don’t intend on doing anything about it. It’s like asking the universe to take over and do it for you.

I’ve certainly had passive suicidal thoughts. Once I was very stressed and depressed while coming home from a business conference. I clearly remember thinking, “Maybe the plane will go down and keep me from having to deal with all this.” I certainly had no plan to rush the cockpit with a box cutter or anything like that. I just wanted my pain to be over. I wanted the choice taken out of my hands.

Another time I was at a business meeting in a swanky hotel that had rooms surrounding the lobby on numerous floors. I remember being on the 16th floor, looking down at the atrium beneath with what felt like idle curiosity. Would it annoy the hotel more, I wondered, if I landed on the carpeted area, necessitating a thorough cleaning or total replacement? Or would they be more upset if I landed on the marble floor portion of the lobby, making a bigger mess and potentially chipping the surface? (And was it just a coincidence that business meetings made me contemplate my mortality or did they just come packed with a lot of stressful triggers?)

At neither time was I actively suicidal. I’ve been there once too, and this was completely different. When I was suicidal, I had actual plans and plenty of means to carry out any one of them. I’m not going to discuss what those plans were. (The difficulty of choosing among them may have been what kept me from actually doing it. By then my depression had lifted just enough for me to get help.)

It was easy enough later to make jokes about the passively suicidal occasions and most people took them as exactly that – jokes. It was even plausible that they were jokes. I used to talk about jumping out a window, adding that it wouldn’t work because I lived in a basement. It was only much later that I thought about it and realized that I needed help even on those occasions. After all, isn’t pain the source of much humor and the downfall of many comedians?

Passive suicidal ideation is asking yourself “what if?” What if my troubles were over? What if my pain was gone? What if all I had to do to accomplish this was to let that bus hit me instead of stepping out of the way?

The important thing to remember is that someone passively suicidal is in great psychological pain and wants not to feel that way anymore. In that respect, it’s similar to cutting or other self-harm. And like those acts, it doesn’t end the pain at all. It may be a temporary escape valve, but it’s not a solution.

Passive suicidal ideation is certainly a bad thing and an excellent reason to see your psychiatrist or therapist as soon as possible. If you hear a friend or loved one talking this way, encourage them as strongly as possible to seek help. Let a professional decide if the person has passive suicidal ideation or active suicidal ideation. It is entirely possible that passive suicidal ideation will lead to the more active kind and even to death if it is not dealt with.

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The Fire and the Window

fire orange emergency burning

Photo by Little Visuals on Pexels.com

When Anthony Bourdain died by suicide and I told someone the news, he asked me, “Why?”

I was taken aback. “What do you mean, ‘why’?” I replied.

“You know,” he said. “Did he have money trouble? Break up with his girlfriend? Have some disease?”

That’s a common reaction to suicide and it’s uninformed. Real-life stressors can contribute to suicide, but they are almost never the whole story. People die by suicide when the pain of living seems greater than the pain of dying.

Gregory House, the misanthropic, genius title character of House, M.D., once said, “Living in misery sucks marginally less than dying in it.” People who kill themselves don’t believe that. They believe the opposite.

The best metaphor I ever heard for suicide was the plight of people in the World Trade Center’s upper floors on 9/11. There were the flames. There was the window. And that was the choice. Suicide happens when a person sees only two alternatives and both are equally horrible, or nearly so.

The bullied child does not take her own life because she was bullied. She was in pain, for a variety of reasons that included bullying. It was a factor, but it wasn’t the reason. She was hurt. She was isolated. She was depressed. She couldn’t believe that things would improve. She wanted the pain to stop. She believed she faced the choice between the fire and the window.

The politician who dies by suicide in the face of a major scandal does not kill himself because of the potential scandal. He dies because he sees his choices limited to shame, humiliation, despair, and ridicule. He believes that what happens to him will be as bad as dying. He is caught between what he sees as the fire and the window.

Mental illness can make it difficult to see that there are other choices. The distortions of thinking associated with serious mental illness can make us see only the fire and the window.

The one time that suicidal ideation got the better of me and I was close to making the choice, my thinking was just that twisted. I was faced with a choice that seemed to me would ruin someone I loved. I thought that I could not live with either choice. One was the fire and the other the window.

My thinking, of course, was severely distorted by my mental disorder. The thing that I thought might rain destruction on the other person was much smaller than I believed. There were ways out of the dilemma other than dropping a dime or killing myself. If we continue the metaphor, the fire was not that big, or that implacable, or that inevitable, but I couldn’t see that. In the end, I hung on long enough for my thinking to clear and for me to see other options.

I don’t actually know what was going on in the minds of the souls who were trapped in the Twin Towers. I don’t mean to lessen the horror of their deaths or wound their families by speaking of suicide this way. The reality of their choice is so far distant from the choices that other people who consider suicide face.

But that’s kind of the point. People who die by suicide don’t see any other way out. If they seem to be responding to what most people see as survivable hurts or solvable problems, people say they can’t understand how someone that rich, that successful, that beloved, that full of potential could have not seen that help was only a reach away.

The person who dies by suicide doesn’t see the hand reaching out. Only the fire and the window.

 

If you are considering suicide, call the National Suicide Hotline: 1-800-273-8255.

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Does It Help When Celebrities Talk About Mental Illness?

It usually doesn’t hurt.

But how much does it help?

That depends on who is talking about mental illness and what they say.

Celebrity Activists

We need more mental health advocates like actors Carrie Fisher and Glenn Close. Both of them have spent years talking about their own and their loved ones’ experiences with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Neither one is a one-benefit-and-they’re-gone supporter. They repeat their vital messages again and again, in different ways, in different venues, in different words. Carrie Fisher, in particular, used her mega-star power and witty personality to keep the discussion alive and spread it to millions of people.

Active Celebrities

While not devoting as much time and attention to mental health activism as Fisher and Close, other well-known entertainers including Demi Lovato and Lady Gaga have made contributions to the public discussion on various mental illnesses. Because of their large number of fans, these messages reach millions of people. And their music reaches people at an emotional level that PSAs just can’t. If even a small percentage of their audiences pays attention to the messages, that’s a lot.

And we can’t forget Prince Harry. Positive messages about mental health coming from royalty are ones that people will listen to. (You know how we Americans love royals.)

Celebrities

Other celebrities mention their mental health diagnoses in public, but do little more to campaign for mental health causes. Catherine Zeta-Jones spoke of her bipolar II diagnosis when she was hospitalized for five days, saying that it was brought on by stress. And renowned glass artist Dale Chihuly admitted his bipolar disorder when he was more or less forced to by a lawsuit.

Staying quiet certainly is their right. Mental illness is a deeply personal and to many, a private thing. And celebrities as much as any of us must struggle with when and how and to whom to reveal their struggles. Perhaps in the future they may become more comfortable talking about their problems and contributing to mental health causes and organizations.

Suicides

Unfortunately, suicides speak loudly. Robin Williams’s death by suicide made a big impression. It got people talking – if only to ask “why?” Though a lot of the conversation revolved around “Even funny people can have suicidal depression,” that’s a start on the message that you can’t tell who’s suffering inside just by looking at them. It’s just too bad that the death of a beloved entertainer is needed to start that discussion.

Media

Are the media “celebrities”? A few individuals truly are, But as a group, the media have the largest platform of all. And what do they say about mental health? I think you know the answer. Mental health gets discussed in the news media in cases of terror and tragedy, and when no other explanation comes readily to mind.

The media bear a huge responsibility when it comes to stigmatizing mental illness. Theirs are the only messages that many people hear – and believe. The news media have (or at least used to have) a reputation for spreading the truth. Nowadays we can’t even count on that. The splintering of the news media into “sides” to promote opposing ideologies – combined with shrinking budgets that have nearly eliminated informed science reporting – make it difficult for the average news consumer to know who and what to believe.

Who does that leave to spread the message? Us. Those of us who live with mental illness or have loved ones who do. And sometimes I worry that we are talking mostly to ourselves – to each other. Don’t get me wrong. Those conversations are vital in helping one another deal with our difficulties and sharing messages of support and understanding.

But maybe we can do more – even if it’s educating a family member about depression or wearing a semicolon tattoo to promote suicide prevention or posting/commenting on social media when a news outlet has gotten its coverage of mental illness all wrong.

Among my fondest hopes is that one or more of my blog posts will be passed along to someone who needs to hear the word. “Here – read this,” is a message I would be proud to spread, even though I’m no Carrie Fisher.

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Mental Health

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What I Learned About Ketamine and Depression

Trigger Warning – Meds

Note that I’m not a doctor or a pharmacist or any kind of medical personnel. Do not consider this post to be advice on what you should do. If the subject interests you, ask a licensed physician for more information.

What did I know about ketamine before I started doing some research?

Not much.

I knew that as a street and “club” drug it was known as “Special K.”

Then I heard that it was being used for treatment-resistant depression. Here’s what I found.

First, you can’t just go down to Brown Street and buy a few pills. That’s illegal. And what you get may include other substances that you didn’t intend to take.

So, you need a prescription for it. Once you get that prescription, usually after a consult with a psychiatrist, you need to find a treatment center that will administer the drug. Clinic operators may be anesthesiologists, as ketamine is primarily used as an anesthetic.

The treatment is delivered via IV or injections. No simple pills to take. It’s a course of treatments, each lasting 45 minutes to an hour, with a rest of an hour afterward. The treatment may be delivered for as many as six doses over the course of 12 days. (There may also be a nasal spray option, but the IV version seems more typical.)

You have to have someone who can drive you. The possible side effects include confusion and blurry vision. You can’t drive for 24 hours after the treatment, which basically means you can’t drive for two weeks, since the treatments are roughly every other day.

They don’t know how it works. I don’t find this surprising, since every time I’ve asked my psychiatrist how a medication works, I’ve been told, “They don’t really know, blah blah blah, neurotransmitters, blah blah blah, serotonin, blah blah blah.”

It’s expensive. The initial treatment may cost $500–$1,000, and a full course of treatments may cost as much as $3,800, which insurance won’t cover. These are estimated costs, based on treatment in various regions of the country. (The wholesale cost is approximately $.32 per dose, by the way.)

The results don’t last. They give relief for as little as a few hours to as much as nine months, after which a $600 booster shot is required.

You may still need regular antidepressants and psychotherapy. Ketamine may get you “over the hump” until your regular antidepressant kicks in, but is not a stand-alone treatment.

There are side effects. Confusion, hallucinations, and high blood pressure are among them, along with something called “lucid daydreaming.”

More research is needed. Duh.

The FDA has also approved trials of MDMA (Ecstasy) for treating PTSD. It is also being researched for effects on OCD, depression, and other conditions.

So, assuming that I could afford it, would I try ketamine? There’s not one easy answer to that.

Back in the days when my depression was drug-resistant, when I had spent years trying different combinations of psychotropics, when I was considering electroshock, I might well have seen ketamine as something to consider before I took that step. It should be noted that, at the time, my psychiatrist did not recommend or even mention it, so it might not have been appropriate for me whether I wanted to try it or not. And anyway, a combination of meds and therapy finally kicked in and made the subject moot.

Nowadays, I would not try ketamine (or MDMA, for that matter). My bipolar depression has moved from drug-resistant to drug-alleviated, at least for the most part. And that “most part” is enough for me. I have no need to be driven 45 minutes to the nearest clinic or to try to find a psychiatrist and anesthesiologist willing to go off-label. I am satisfied as I am.

As always, Your Mileage May Vary.

Sources

http://www.webmd.com/depression/news/20140923/ketamine-depression#1

http://www.ketaminetherapy.com/Depression.html

http://uchealth.com/intranasal-ketamine-infusion/

https://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2012/12/01/should-you-try-ketamine-for-depression/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketamine

http://www.webmd.com/depression/news/20161130/fda-ecstasy-ptsd-treatment#1

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