Eyes Turned Skywards: When Hope Against Hope is Not Enough

Posted on March 4, 2015 by gulliverunravelled

‘For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.’

Leonardo Da Vinci

Ever since I was a teenager, I have been enamored by these words because I have been lucky enough to have been propelled to such great heights, but I have equally been saddened by the realization that being sky-bound is a dangerous, if admittedly alluring, illusion. Sometimes I catapult skyward only to plummet downwards as if I had flown directly into the sun. The sun burns and I hurtle downwards in a tailspin, limbs on fire.

Being amongst the sun’s rays has been my only goal and I hoped with desperation, against all logic and better judgment, that I would take flight once more and open my eyes to the sun’s bright energy. It was a hope against hope that somehow I could be pulled from the tendrils of depression and returned to a space of great enthusiasm, motivation, fearlessness and clarity. It was a profound delusion. But wouldn’t you give up anything to be a ray of sunlight, even if this goal was built on a foundation of quicksand?

Now I cannot grasp hold of the sunlight. It blinks its way into my life almost as if it’s taunting me. Quick, snatch it before it disappears. Sometimes it lingers a moment longer and I wrap my arms around, forcing it to energise me. Which it does: more often now, however, it is closer to an electrocution than a grand and beautiful possession.

People tell me that I need to have strategies; that I need to build in structure to give me a safe space to be when the feelings get too much. I don’t mean to be ungrateful when people, with all their best intentions, offer advice and counsel, but I simply cannot even begin implement these ‘solutions’. I’m preoccupied by inertia. And if this shows in my face, I particularly dislike it if people reveal in their expressions a look of pity or horror. I am perfectly aware of how I look. I am entirely cognisant of my, often ghastly, appearance.

So what to do? What can I do but rely on professionals who offer both a neutral ear and medical advice? Both of which I am grateful for; I am extremely appreciative of their help and support, even if psychiatrists in particular often seem more like drug-pushers than doctors. In the past few months I have tried and failed to respond to changes in my medicinal regime. This is mostly because my body now seems unwilling to accept new chemicals and compounds. It either rejects them altogether, or reacts very badly to them preventing me from continuing. The side effects I experience have meant that there are very few options left for me to experiment with. And it is hard not to feel increasingly despondent. My preference now is to cease all medicinal therapy completely, detox and start from scratch – if this is essentially implementing a potential DNR then so be it. This might seem dramatic, but at some point you need to come out from under the miasma of drugs to see where you are and where you could go. I need the support from family, friends and professionals – and most certainly I will not ‘go it alone’. My ‘Twitter family’ in particular have been an indispensable part of my support structure and I am certain that their just being ‘out there’ will be incredibly important. It is incredibly important. Being part of an understanding and accepting community has been invaluable.

I arrived at the Twitter party and the end of 2009, so I wasn’t there at the beginning. I wondered what possible way 140 characters could be of any interest: I didn’t want to be one of those people who basically posted Instagram pictures of their evening meals and moaned about the weather. But within the spider’s web of silliness (don’t get me wrong, I love silliness. And cats. Silliness and cats.) I found individuals out there who spoke candidly about things that in my real life I had kept very much private. I discovered people who stood bravely in the glare of the ‘twitterverse’ and declared that they had a mental illness and that, yes, it was hard and undoubtedly it was often excruciating, but somehow they were still there even when often their very fibre secretly yearned not to be. And more importantly, they were willing to communicate with me: I wasn’t alone. I was welcomed to the bipolar party, often name-checked at the depression ‘bring your own bottle’ meet and greet and I was able to be there for people who were there for me – no judgment, no pity. When people say, “I don’t get Twitter” they simply don’t understand its potency. They do not realise that great and profound friendships can be made and when you feel you will never reach the sunlight, they will be there. When I say ‘hope against hope is not enough’, I don’t have to qualify it. That is not to say it is the panacea for everything, I mean that 140 characters can be incredibly powerful. So thank you ‘twitterfam’.

I have my networks: family, friends, medical professionals, a tremendous therapist and my exceptional ‘twitterfam’. I want to be able to count on them because I can no longer count on myself. I want their ‘eyes turned skywards’. I want them to hope for me. I need them to ‘walk the earth’ so that I can see that it is possible to step out into the light once more.

Posted in Bipolar Disorder, depression, Disability, friendship, Mental Health, psychiatry, psychotherapy, social networking, Society, Twitter | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Time Traveller’s Knife

Posted on January 20, 2015 by gulliverunravelled

I have a secret: I have a superpower. I can travel in time. I need no police box, no DeLorean. I slip backwards and forwards with ease. Now we are mid-January and the demarcation between this year and the last is more defined. But this is an illusion. Time has no meaning for me; the passing of the hours and minutes is tangled and I find myself in another January and in another place. I have been there and back again before, although the taste and smell of it all doesn’t feel quite right and it changes its form and mutates each time I fall between the cracks in time. It is a selective exchange of moments. I cannot grasp hold of the precious memories that undoubtedly lie somewhere in my brain. I feel the pain of every fiery recollection. I’m hot behind the eyes and prickly in my chest.

And I get stuck. I am in flux.

‘Medication resistant bipolar depression’ – this where I’m at and this special gift is the key to time travel – written as clear as day on my latest assessment report. Resistance sounds as if I’m somehow deliberately denying medication its shot at working. Am I resistant to change? Because being a time traveller is a stubborn state of affairs. It preys on the past and masks the future. The only way to grasp the future is to commune with the past. It is a seductive voice and I believe its suffocating caress.

Every new year presents a chance for change, a change for the better. But when you are depressed, change seems impossible. You assess the year gone by and begin to categorise the mistakes, the missed opportunities, and reflect on how differently and consistently you have behaved in the face of adversity. The sharp blade of despair digs ever deeper into your skin as if attempting to tattoo your failings permanently into the flesh. I feel like Guy Pearce in Memento, tattooing his skin so as to find a way to unlock his past and guide him through his present. When you have the ability to time travel, you need markers to help you on your way. But these markers are like headstones in a graveyard, monuments detailing my failings and inadequacies. When I am well, I try to chart a course between them, acknowledging them, but not allowing them any purchase on my life. But when you’re depressed, you don’t have a map to help you navigate around these vast obstacles.

Time travel has its own economy with a dubious exchange rate. You make sound investments when you are well and save money for troubled times ahead. But you can never save enough. You spend one currency only to find yourself needing to exchange it for something else. And you find yourself unable to buy the things that enrich your life: the present insists that you spend on the future, but the past demands that you cash in your savings and exchange it for non-existing tender. There is no guide as to how to spend it. You cannot go to your bank for advice. You cannot keep track of your outgoings because each time you transition from one time to another, you pay a varying amount of emotional tax. The further back you go, the more tax you pay. Soon you find yourself broke with a huge overdraft that you cannot hope to pay back.

Time travel has its own passport. It is full of stamps that remind you where you have been. When you are well, you can tell yourself never to visit certain places again. When you are in crisis, you find yourself being compelled to return to old ground. You get repeated stamps for the same destinations. These are not destinations that any sane person would want to revisit. You return to the scene of many crimes again and again. If you try to force yourself to travel to pastures new, a guard stops you at the border. You feel like a criminal barred from the delights people tell you are out there. Sometimes you can get as far as the arrivals lounge, only to find that, when you try to exit, there is nothing but an empty space waiting for you. And don’t even think about trying to locate your luggage: your baggage has been scattered.

I have a secret: I have a superpower. I am a time traveller. I can see your future, but I cannot see my own. I can see the end of time, but not the beginning.

Posted in Bipolar Disorder, depression, Disability, Mental Health, psychiatry, psychotherapy, time | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hidden Realities: The Consequentialist Problem of Mental Illness

Posted on November 19, 2014 by gulliverunravelled

This week I attended a referral appointment with a bipolar specialist, at the behest of my usual psychiatrist who had somewhat hit a brick wall in finding effective ways to treat my increasingly intense and unmanageable symptoms. I had already been told that I had a particularly tricky and problematic bipolar presentation, but I think we both hoped that the specialist, a well-respected academic and practitioner and expert in bipolar disorder, would be able to see the wood for the trees and demystify things a little. Perhaps he would categorise my current episode as something more conventional and offer a clear and uncomplicated treatment plan. Clear and uncomplicated – two words that I would come to understand were far from descriptive of my particular presentation or ‘strain’ of bipolar disorder.

I arrived at the hospital terrified. I didn’t know what to expect and I contemplated cancelling the appointment altogether. My mother came with me and we sat in the car park as I looked at printouts of my blog posts that we both considered using as a guide to explain how I have been feeling these past weeks. I decided, in the event, not to use them as reading them to myself just distressed me more. I read the ‘voice’ aloud in my head and it frightened me. As we were buzzed into a building with high fences around it, a building I feared might capture me like a spider’s web, we were ushered forth towards Dr H’s office. He asked whether I wanted my mother to accompany and, out of politeness, I asked “Do you want to come in?” – we agreed that she would come in with me. In the past I have been very anti taking anyone into my appointments as I viewed them as private and a zone where I could say things that I would never say to anyone outside the confines of a psychiatric clinic. And perhaps this has been a mistake because the two spheres of my life cannot then compliment each other and the support I need cannot be adequately given, continuity cannot be assured. But throughout the hour and ten minutes was in Dr. H’s office, I was reminded of a quote from Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind:

“Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them, is, by far, the highest card I was dealt.”

I realized that my mother is also the highest card I was dealt too – she helped shape and flesh out my medical history particularly in areas that I was simply incapable of exploring. The appointment turned from being subjective to be partially objective, or at the very least, less stuck. A full psychiatric history has never been this thorough; it could never have focused on my mother’s pregnancy and my behavior in early infancy because it is possible to recall such things.

And so it went: we fleshed out my entire psychiatric history together and for the most part my early life seemed to fit almost entirely the pattern of early onset bipolar disorder: extreme anxiety, phobias, bouts of temper. But then somewhere around the age of 13, something went array. It was here that the disconnect between my reality and everyone else’s became apparent. I don’t remember anything but suffering from waves of depression washing over me every few months and feeling more at odds with my environment. I felt completely alien and for a brief moment of time I believed I might well have come from another planet – that would explain why I felt such a freak of nature. I would sit on the floor alone with loud, malevolent voices in my head telling me that I was abnormal, unworthy, sick.

But this isn’t what everyone else saw. Everyone else thought I was on the upper end of a badly behaved problem teenager. It was very difficult to hear my mother describe how violent and aggressive I had been, that I could be scary. I see these episodes as black outs because it’s like entering into a dark terrifying tunnel where the mood is all I remember, not my actions. To be described as violent was very distressing. Is very distressing.

Perhaps these bouts of rage and the waves and waves and waves of depression took its toll on my neurochemistry. Even as a young child some of my behavior was clearly abnormal at times. What came to be revealed was that I simply never developed a neurological roadmap, no networks for self-monitoring and recognizing when I was about to enter an episode and definitely no tools to deal with my moods when they turned on me. Had my symptoms been recognized as what they were it is possible that some of the poor wiring could have been undone, but this never happened. I slipped further and further into my hidden reality and became entangled in a neurochemical maze. This left me with no way of dealing with things when my bipolar disorder really came to the fore in my 20’s.

I described the agony and the ecstasy of my full-blown bipolar disorder: the highs and successes and accolades and promotions; the troughs and horrors of my escalating hypomanias that shot through into psychotic manias. All as the textbooks describe. Which is all well and good, but it is the shame of all of this that is often the germ of bad things to come. I gave a full account of as much as I could bring myself to describe, but one thing had become evident. Dr. H looked directly at me and asked:

“When was the last time you remember being stable?”

And I was stumped. I opened my mouth, but couldn’t answer. I deferred to my mother: “What about when I live with you?” But, no, she didn’t view that as stable or a period of remission. Had I been unstable all this time? And by ‘all this time’, essentially forever. All this time being treated for something that had been so extreme it had been difficult to medicate or manage. Or impossible. Definitely, I admitted, my symptoms over the past five years had become so awful that I had been in treatment for much of the time and with very little success. This is why I was there; this is the state of affairs that had left my usual psychiatrist foundering.

I have never been stable. I have never been in remission. And now I was stuck in an endless loop of rapid cycling (and what feels like gathering psychotic fractures). The elastic band had been tightened up too many times and had snapped loose. Here I am stuck with wiring that is now irreparably damaged. In his words, “you have a very difficult illness that has become very entrenched; you never learned how to experience and moderate your moods and now you’re stuck in this pattern of intense rapid cycles.” I’m stuck. I’ve been on close fifteen different medications and still I’m ill. To him there was cause for some hope, there was one main mood stabilizer I haven’t been on, sodium valproate, and he thinks we should experiment with this, but I can’t help feeling that this is a last resort. I can’t help feeling that, after a thorough exploration of my entire medical history, and being given a definitive diagnosis, he’s handed me a death sentence. I’ve had 35 years of struggle and I don’t want to live with another forty or fifty years more of anguish. The consequences of my bad wiring have ripped through my life mixing my hidden reality with my daily existence – the consequences have been catastrophic. Even the results of the labours of medical professionals and caring family members have not soften the edges and mitigated the symptoms of my escalating crises.

So what can we do? We take our meds. We say the things we’re supposed to. We try to be as candid as much as possible. We live this life of pain; this life that runs roughshod over everything. Because it does feel finally that with a categorical diagnosis from a renowned expert this label is my life. That I AM bipolar. It is me. We have intermingled. Is it possible to live with the consequences of a hidden reality that wants desperately to come out of the shadows and tear through the skin of my life? Because, yes, it feels like I’m now on death row. This is the problem of mental illness.

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[TW] Clock-watching: the countdown to the specialist

Posted on November 12, 2014 by gulliverunravelled

It seems that I’m a bit of an enigma to my current psychiatrist. I say current because his coming Monday I am seeing yet another doctor at the request of my current doctor. The pattern and intensity of my bipolar episodes have become so erratic that my medication regime is failing to control or at the very alleviate my symptoms. My last appointment review letter indicated I was in a ‘mixed state’, which comes as no surprise to me, but something of a frustration to my current psychiatrist who has pretty much thrown the kitchen sink (or least the ceramic, minus the taps) at me to see whether something will stick. In the meantime, I have been up and down and up and down and increasingly distressed. And he is struggling to know how to treat me. My cycles are ultra rapid now, but maintain some consistent features: perhaps two days of laser-guided hypomania and then the rest of the time in a whirlwind of desperation, agitation and, as is my state over the past week and a half, intensifying depression.

I like my most recent psychiatrist. He is unfailingly sympathetic and tireless in his approach to excavating some kind of pattern of mood and corresponding treatment regime. But even he is at a loss as to why I am still oscillating so dramatically. Neither of has discussed admission, mostly because he knows that being professional with regard for my university job is paramount. We have until the 3rd of December to come up with a new plan, in conjunction with the consultation with the specialist, after which I am off until term starts again in late January and perhaps a window where more intense treatment might be necessary.

But Monday seems farther and farther away. The ‘complex nature of [my] illness’ is starting to have a significant impact on my work and ability to cope with all facets of my life. Practically everything upsets me at the moment: charging my laptop overnight, choosing clothes to wear, or ordering a coffee. Trivial things. I have a tremor that mostly affects my left hand and interferes with typing (the key skill of a note-taker) and my stutter is often incredibly disruptive – it is likely that both these things are the result of my intolerance to the lithium I am taking and this is probably going to be phased out as of next week. The stuttering is made worse by the continual anxiety and stress that I feel all day. In the night, the agitation and crippling depression has space to take hold more intensely. My sleep is disrupted even when I try to calm things down with zopiclone and diazepam. Poor sleep leads to confusion and panic. And then I have to contend with the other side-effects of the medications I diligently take: quetiapine upsets my ‘stomach’, the lamotrigine gives me twitches and the aripiprazole gives me blurred vision. The lithium has been a total failure and will be the first thing to go, alongside the aripiprazole most probably. If I can’t type and I can’t see properly then I most certainly cannot do my job.

Last night I got home and the darkest of suffocating waves washed over me. I tried to alleviate it by watching a film, a film I enjoyed very much when I went to see it at the cinema (X-Men: Days of Future Past), but I couldn’t keep still and I tried very hard not to cry. I managed to see the film through to the end. I went upstairs and took my nighttime medication (the great pile of pills in different denominations) and lay in bed with a whirring mind full of despair and self-hatred. I looked at the clock and it was 10.30, which isn’t late for me, but I started to calculate how much time I had to get effective sleep before getting up early for a 9am lecture (which in the event did not happen and I got up at 7am for no reason). Then I began to panic: I can’t sleep, my life is so painful, I can’t take these hours and minutes that drag me along, my bones hurt from the psychic darkness infecting them, I am a heavy, dragging sack. I took some zopiclone to help me sleep, but by half-past midnight I was still awake and still in a state. I took some diazepam and then promptly started to cry, the intense crying where your whole face feels agonizing and you screw up your face against the pain. I received some supportive tweets from people who I have come to consider close friends and felt slightly less alone. Thank goodness for my twitter companions.

I looked at the clock and discovered it was now 1.15a.m. and I had to get up at 7a.m., which seemed unbearably close. So, I began to consider whether trying to force myself to sleep, and risk waking with a diazepam/zopiclone hangover, was a good idea. I went and got my iPad – Netflix it is then! I watching a couple of episodes of House (M.D. if you’re American), but then I started to search for the episodes that I knew were particularly depressing. Well done, brilliant idea. Oops, now I was crying again. Perhaps a book then? Nope, I can’t read with these blurry eyes, and certainly not at that time of night.

I looked at the calendar on my iPhone to confirm that my referral appointment was indeed on Monday and not any closer. Of course, I knew it hadn’t moved all by itself just because I willed it to. I took some more diazepam. I then wondered whether my lodger was awake and if she’d want to just chat for a few minutes, at what was now nearing 3a.m. I left my room and stood on the landing before going downstairs to disturb my cats instead. They were asleep and grimaced at me when I put the light on. Bad human. So I went back to bed, this time feeling a little calmer thanks to the extra diazepam and, after about ten minutes, I had dropped off to sleep.

This morning I awoke with a gargantuan medication hangover, made worse by the taking of my a.m. medication. I dragged myself into the shower, dragged myself out of the shower, dragged on my clothes and dragged myself out of the house. And this is where I’m at, dragging myself around like a sack of rocks. Attending lectures for my students is difficult today and my brain simply is not working. And so I wait. Waiting for this appointment that seems as if it is next year. Waiting in the hope that something positive will come of it because I am putting all my eggs in this basket. And so I clock watch and clock watch – I wait for the specialist with the keys to my salvation.

Posted in Bipolar Disorder, depression, Disability, Mental Health, psychiatry | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

[TW] Music and Lyrics: Soundtrack to my life

Posted on November 10, 2014 by gulliverunravelled

If it weren’t for my iPod I struggle to see how I would exist at all.

My entire life, I have searched for the perfect playlist: the soundtrack to my life. I search constantly, ceaselessly excavating the bowels of iTunes for songs that pinpoint a moment in my life that I want to retain. I listen intently to the songs that ‘play out’ television programmes and I add and add and add them. It’s an addiction – I’m always after my next fix. But it isn’t a purposeless addiction. I need music and lyrics to protect and envelop me. I can identify a person or band, a song or a theme, from a fraction of the first bar. So deeply entrenched is the music it has been absorbing into my pores. This subcutaneous manifestation of my mood shifts and changes and so too do my preferences, but I still believe that the soundtrack to my life will save me.

These past weeks I have become more desperate to find the perfect list, the distinctive collection of tracks and pieces that can connect with my state of mind. I am terrified that if I cannot isolate this anthology of emotions then I am truly dead. But perhaps I’m doing this to myself so that I can fit together the disparate pieces of my mind into a jigsaw that doesn’t save me. I dread to think what the word cloud would be for the tracks I have chosen for my current playlist, imaginatively titled, ‘Autumn/Winter 2014’. It really is a list of songs to facilitate oblivion. At least it is for me, even if some of the songs appear on the surface as innocent enough: I challenge you to translate You Can Call Me Al into a song to slit your wrists to. But to me it is terribly sad, the synthesisers and trumpets sing a solitary tune, complimenting the otherwise impermeable membrane of what is a celebration of the major key. It’s the search for himself that troubles me, and the fear that he doesn’t “want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard.” I fixate on this lyric and convince myself I am in that “cartoon graveyard” already and that I have lost my identity, reduced to an etching on a gravestone.

Or perhaps you would like the further challenge of explaining the melancholia I feel when I hear Pure Imagination from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It’s superficially jolly, but I find it creepy (and not because I find Gene Wilder unutterably terrifying). Because if you did live in a world where you could wish yourself into “a world of pure imagination”, what would you really find? I am convinced that I would fall through the rabbit hole and never come back. For me pure imagination is petrifying. So I listen to it again and again and believe its appearance to be more frequent than other tracks even when the playlist is set to shuffle. It isn’t.

But depression loves company and so to the addition of the rest of the music included in my list. I have a title list of keywords which I am conscious of now, but not so when adding them ravenously and desperately to the collection:

Lose

Need

Now

Always

Down

Dream

Bad

But this is not special behaviour for depressives. This is entirely prescriptive. And this upsets me the most because even my depressive behaviour is prosaic. My retreat into a universe of confusion, melancholia and destruction is plain boring. It is not atypical to sit and categorise one’s life into genres and themes. It isn’t unusual to want to hear externalised the pain that corrodes your insides. I want to hear the corrosion, but I ask it to confirm the suspicions I have about myself. I want it to drag me way down where only I feel the vocabulary of sadness; down further than any other soul. I want it to want to drag me down because I deserve it. I deserve to let the chords and words and twangs bleed out of my skin like liquid fire.

This is an indulgence. I should simply unplug the headphones and expose myself to the natural noises of daily existence. But I cannot cope without the poison I so adeptly pour into my own ears. Whilst travelling my twitter feed I saw a meme that said ‘music makes the pain fade away’ – whoever said this is an idiot, because for me, pain needs to be rode like a loyal steed. It does not fade away, it stays and stays. It is the motor that revs my engine. It’s not that I’m preoccupied with the morbid or the painful, it’s that I’ve set up the architecture of my life upon the foundation that I am not going to get better. That this ebb and flow of my moods is systemic and cannot be soothed.

I’m not alone in looking into the future and seeing a life ridden with untamable moods and excruciating depressions; an existence with an intense dread that dare not speak its name. I fear I may give up, give in. But if I keep my universe small, a universe of notes and voices, I may stave off what feels like the inevitable. Keep my headphones in, keep the playlists evolving. Music and lyrics can’t save my life, but might just hold some of my pieces together in a familiar bubble. Don’t let my bubble burst.

This blog post has been sponsored by the following:

You Can Call Me Al by Paul Simon

Pure Imagination by Gene Wilder

Berlin by RY X

Lose You by Pete Yorn

Where Did You Go? by Jets Overhead

The Heart’s Filthy Lesson by David Bowie

Youth by Daughter

Explosions by Ellie Goulding

On loop, from a playlist of 586 ‘songs to contain the morbid mind’.

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Layer Cake: Misery, Meditation and the Panic Monster

Posted on October 31, 2014 by gulliverunravelled

[TW: some content inappropriate for those in a precarious state]

I am in a state: I am in sea of agitation and panic. It is easy to see, but impossible to tame. I can’t make decisions. I can’t speak fluently. I want to buy a bottle of water? Wait. I have to find the exact change, but what if I can’t count out the change? What if the barista in the franchise coffee house thinks I’m slow, stupid or scary? Everything upsets me. I want to resist resorting to the precarious blanket of my little yellow diazepam tablets, but I am painfully aware that I need a strata of my mind subdued and softened. Because it has split itself into distinct, nightmarish layers that distress me, but also, perversely (mostly) protect me.

Let’s start at the bottom and travel upwards. Let’s be Dante in Denim. It is the bottom that has the loudest presence; the bottom with the most recognizable form and texture and the greater penetrating voice. When I hear it, and I should emphasize that I hear it above and below my daily activities, I listen hard because I don’t want to miss a beat. I listen to Plath’s ‘great tap root’[1] because it knows me better than anyone. ‘Tap root’ Emma believes herself to be eloquent and insightful. But what she says might frighten and disgust those closest to me so, for the first time, this post comes with a TRIGGER WARNING. ‘Tap root’ Emma hates herself, feels worthless, empty, worn out, fraudulent. She looks at the past and the future and want out. She provides calmly what seems like entirely appropriate solutions to her mental turbulence. She dots all the ‘i’s and crosses all the ‘t’s. She knows what she wants: simply to finish what her aching and tired body has started.

‘Tap root’ Emma sees the world in stark, sharp sunlight and dark, pitch darkness. Sometimes simultaneously. It lives in her solar plexus and in her ears. She hears her heartbeat melding with the sounds around her; the iPod on as a constant buffer between the jagged barbed wire of the noise of real life. When outside, there is not a single moment where a carefully compiled playlist is not dictating the extent to which she can protect herself. But then come the ear-worms, the ‘head music’ that she has allowed in unwittingly. Loops and loops and misheard or mangled lyrics winding up inside her head like a spinning wheel.

One song in particular returns again and again and I am sure it wants to kill me: Life on Mars? by David Bowie. I cannot put my finger on why it frightens and sucks me in like a black hole: “It’s a god awful small affair” and maybe it is; is life really a “sunken dream”? Perhaps I have fallen in love with the idea of Mars being an empty, quiet space without a human being in sight. But I don’t really think that I can deconstruct it to that degree because I have so much of a visceral response to it. It is quite inexplicable. It hits my solar plexus as viciously as the dark and destructive thoughts that live in my deepest recesses. It punches me square in the forehead too, winding me.

So to the solutions: quick and easy or punishing and long? But I’m a coward, so no proper spoilers. Maybe freeze to death in the snow, shaking and shivering amidst the silently falling snowflakes. I’ve tried this and I decided that being really, deeply cold wasn’t particularly pleasant, so I went back home. Then there are the most obvious approaches – too boring and prosaic to mention here. But I also have bursts of impulsivity that tell me to run head-long into hard objects, usually the fireplace in my bedroom, which seems rather silly now that I’m actually writing this. This is the dark heart of me.

Then there is middle ‘Idiot Wind’[2] Emma, who converses with ‘Tap root’ Emma frequently, but wants desperately to do things, to fulfil obligations and be responsible. Go to work, fucking cope, get on with it you little shit. I don’t have the kind of job where I can take time off, so I slide into work and slip quietly away at the end of the day to sit with exhaustion at holding it all together. I suppress the urge to cry during the day and I try to find distractions, to find books to divert me. I always gravitate to the morbid or the dense and consuming. But she carries on like a shark slowly moving through an oil slick. ‘Idiot Wind’ Emma ensures that food is on the table, even if it is only oatcakes and hummus. She feeds the cats and sets the alarm clock extra early to accommodate the dragging, medicated corpse that flops out of bed in the morning. Not quite ‘Tap root’, but definitely blown around in her own ‘Idiot Wind’.

And so to Five Alarm Panic Emma. She is the top layer. She is the PANIC MONSTER. The lightning bolt that shoots through me in spiky waves and halts my breath and stuns my brain. It has two manifestations: firstly, I shake and sweat and become confused, I often cannot read or follow instructions (tube maps, for example are like spaghetti to me); secondly, I begin to stutter, sometimes completely blocked and unable to say anything. I can’t make decisions or continue the thread of conversation if it is free flowing and organic; organization has been lost at this point and I have become trapped in an adrenaline firework display. Sometimes I see the same face everywhere. And it is horrific. So how can I address this?

At the beginning of the week, I agreed to do some guided meditation (not sure if it was maybe some kind of hypnosis, I didn’t actually ask!) to address my high anxiety. I was, admittedly, rather skeptical about this approach but, at this point, you’ve got to try something, right? But what I experienced was highly unpleasant. Every time I was asked to focus on what might be the most stressful or anxious thoughts I had, I began to panic more and felt sick with anxiety. I started to sweat. I was reduced to the point of tears (but as is becoming strangely frequent, tears without actual tears). Suffice it to say, this approach was somewhat of a failure, but I wanted to explain why it was a failure: the core of the matter comes down to how I communicate with my inner layers. Five Alarm Emma is a sentry. Five Alarm Emma holds back ‘Tap root’ Emma: she agrees with her sentiments, but is frightened about the consequences of fulfilling obligations to her deepest voice. But she also feels so agitated that ‘Tap root’ Emma seems slow and pathetic. She tells ‘Idiot Wind’ Emma that she is more of a shit than ‘Tap Root’ Emma. So this state is more upsetting than either of the other layers: even as Five Alarm Emma stands sentry, she also stands in judgment. She can’t hold a pen, but she could hold a knife if it weren’t for ‘Idiot Wind’ saying that that it is essentially idiotic and selfish, but also messy.

So, I’m stuck at the top and the bottom of my depression. Gone is the Emma full of enthusiasms and grand ideas and energy. Perhaps the layers of depressed Emma just about hold the pieces together, but I get the sickening feeling that Five Alarm Emma only has a finite amount of strength left before the dialogue is reduced to a squabble between my deeper levels: who will win, ‘Tap root’ or ‘Idiot Wind’?

[1] Elm (1965) from the collection Ariel: ‘I know the bottom, she says, I know it with my/great tap root:/It is what you fear./I do not fear it: I have been there.’ (stanza 1)

[2] ‘Idiot Wind’ from Bob Dylan’s 1975 album Blood on the Tracks

Posted in Bipolar Disorder, depression, Disability, Mental Health, psychiatry, psychotherapy, Society | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Russell Brand preaches revolution, but will disenfranchise the vulnerable.

Posted on October 15, 2014 by gulliverunravelled

Who will guarantee those with mental health conditions legitimate representation?

A few months ago I posted a short piece discussing Russell Brand’s revolution narrative. I criticized him for essential duplicity: he calls for revolution, he calls for disengagement with the political establishment, but he fails to understand true democracy and the implications for social cohesion as a consequence of revolution as a form of protest. It leaves the vulnerable more vulnerable. True democracy should represent the people – all the people. If we don’t vote, we have no representation and those who are vulnerable, for these purposes those with mental health conditions, slip to the bottom of the political ladder. In a world where a political voice is a voice of abstention, democracy fails. And it fails all strands of the community, especially those whose voice is often overlooked or deliberately discarded.

What social entity should we expect if we don’t vote? Indeed if we all abstain and reject our democratic right to voice our preference we do forfeit our place in the traditional political forum, but, yes, perhaps we do then command a change in the landscape of political discourse. But if we don’t vote we must also have an idea of what future political arena we hope to bring about. Must we accept a minimal state as a starting point to craft a new future (a utopia) for politics? If we do, are all of us going to be treated as ‘inviolate individuals’ (Nozick, 1974, p.33)? Who would protect the dignity of all individuals when the louder the voice, the more they are heard? And what is louder than deliberate silence? But silence is precisely what those with mental health conditions experience on a daily basis: either through fear, through misunderstanding or because those with a mental illness simply feel disconnected from politics. I have a mental health condition and the first thing I ask for is simply respect; we should expect a life where we can ‘realise our ends and our conception of ourselves, insofar as we can, aided by voluntary cooperation of other individuals possessing the same dignity.’ (ibid, p.33) This is what we should expect now, but we don’t. Nozick explores the features of utopia and the effects of a minimal state (what is anarchy and what is utopia) but Brand seems brazen in his call for a revolution without framework, without legitimate manifesto and without empathy. So I agree with John Lydon when he referred to Brand as a “bum hole” – simply put, but essentially apt.

It reminds me of a statement made by Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan:

For who is so stupid as both to mistake in geometry, and also persist in it, when another detects his error to him?’ (The First Part, Chapter 5)

Brand wants to persist in his error and for us to persist with him. He wants to turn an admittedly crippled political system into a corpse to be picked over. And on the cadaver that remains who sets the new agenda, because there must be one? I am equally cynical about and disgusted by modern western democracy, precisely because the real tenets of democracy are being trampled and circumnavigated. I am under no illusions about the power of my voice. I have experienced stigma as the result of being in mental crisis; the perception of me as unreliable and unstable has played a huge part in the course my life has taken and the presence of my voice has been diminished. I do not want further and wider instability. My political input is driven, as a result of lived experience, by an agenda to ensure that those with mental health conditions can maximise their voice in the public sector. But in a world, yes, gone mad, I would not feel safe to exercise my democratic right. Neither would I feel the price of a new political narrative would be affordable for those who experience mental distress. Who has the greatest voice in buyer’s market? Who sets the price? Rising up together as a community may be seen as an opportunity to encircle and entrap the ‘unstable’ leading to the very disenfranchisement Brand seems so adamant we protest against. This world of nebulous values and murky goals the vulnerable are more vulnerable because building a society from the putrid corpse of failed democracy is simply inevitable.

We need some kind of Lockian ‘Treatise on Government’ to recognise what is governed and what is ungovernable. But this is more complex an issue to tackle in the midst of, or directly after, a revolution. John Stewart Mill asked us ‘to enquire what form of government is best fitted to fulfill [particular] purposes’ (Mill, 1859, p.1). I am unsure whether Brand’s revolution can adhere to any principle of a best-fit government. If it does, I defy him to explain how it would bring about justice, equality and representation for all. For a best form of government must accept that it is a process of compromise. And, yes, compromise may be the root of many ills. I make compromises with myself: I accept that my lifestyle must be curtailed in certain areas and, however unjustly, is subject to the vagaries of political point-scoring. Nick Clegg promises to put mental health on the frontline of the 2015 Liberal Democrat manifesto, but what does that really mean? I don’t want to be a “issue” to be tossed around like a political beach ball. And I am deeply cynical about his intentions. I am cynical about any government or party whose vocabulary is loaded to make the most impact with the least effort. And that is what I assert the Brandian rhetoric does.

It makes me feel more vulnerable

It makes me feel more isolated

It makes me scared

I have bipolar disorder and I cannot be in an environment where the future is thrown aside by noises that speak of change, but advocate an upheaval that introduces more chaos and uncertainty. I will vote and I will continue to ask people with mental health conditions what matters to them and to acknowledge that a hell of a lot more needs to be done without a sound-bite revolution can be given any political legitimacy and representation. There will be no preservation of sovereignty of persons who cannot protect themselves from forces outside their control (both literally and psychologically). The revolution is a lie.

“Bum hole”

***

References

Hobbes, Thomas. (1651) Leviathan

Locke, John.  (1689) Two Treatises on Government

Mill, John. Stewart. (1859) On Liberty

Nozick, Robert. (1974) Anarchy, State and Utopia

Posted in Bipolar Disorder, Culture, Disability, Economics, Mental Health, Politics, Society | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Bipolar Wars: Failure to Compartmentalise

Posted on October 13, 2014 by gulliverunravelled

Recently I have had to confront the consequences of my ill health and begin to tackle a huge element of the sickness that falls upon me with ever-increasing frequency: my inability to compartmentalize the good from the bad. This is hardly unusual. I challenge anyone who can do this with a great deal of success. But, because I have little time between depressions, hypomanias and mixed episodes, I find it impossible to try to break down some of the content and connections, the webbing, that underpins the dangerous and irrational thoughts that I experience.

Today I returned to my old faculty to begin a series of assignments for a student I am supporting. The place vibrated with memories: stark lighting, the smell of books and coffee, the shuffling doors and an element of a school about it all. It was too much. Inevitably, I began to recall my last foray at the faculty.

I started the two years full of optimism. This time it will be better because I’m well. I hadn’t had a serious episode in 18 months and, although I felt a great weight of sadness that the last time my attempted postgraduate study at the university had gone so spectacularly wrong, although it did result in a diagnosis of bipolar disorder which made sense of so much of the pain and disruption that I had experienced for so many years. However, I was determined to make this time count; I was adamant that I would not let anything get in my way. And for the first year, everything went, well, joyously well. I was just about euthymic and had the presence of mind to finish my work on time, carefully composed and with a great deal of success. I had put the demons to bed and believed that I could finally put everything behind me; I could put it into a box labeled ‘shit happens’.

The second year also began well. I had a good relationship with my supervisor who was encouraging and supportive. I even explained that I was bipolar and she didn’t even bat an eyelid. I worked hard, alongside a full-time job as a secondary teacher. And perhaps this was my undoing because, even for a person in their right mind, juggling these two things would be very difficult. But I pushed on, on and on and up and up. Being promoted only served to fuel my drive and self-belief. I knew I was hypomanic, but I didn’t care because I ‘could do all the thingz’. My viva went magically. But by the November I had become psychotically mixed and brought chaos with me wherever I went. I recognized by the December that I should go on sick leave and later I applied to defer study for a few months in order to get myself well.

I did get better. But this wasn’t strictly true. I had been given leave to return to work, but this was very difficult and I found readjusting very painful. During the summer, I began the task of picking through my thesis notes and re-reading my literature review, which I had been assured was very good and needed only a few tweaks. I was however struggling to focus due to the potent medication I was taking. So, in a moment of idiocy, I stopped taking them. Within a terrifyingly short length of time, I was psychotically manic and became confused, furious, violent and driven by such a malevolent force I couldn’t keep up with myself. After trying to understand something ludicrously simple, I attacked my laptop. I crushed my hard drive and effectively destroyed all my research and a good portion of my novel. Some of it had been on my memory stick, but not nearly enough of it and only a small fragment of the introduction, literature review and conclusion.

Now, with precious little time until submission, I attempted to recreate my thesis. I was back on my medication, but was still not myself. Eventually, I conceded that I couldn’t do any more and handed it in. It was only OK and I knew it. I also knew that there were parts of it that were undeniably not good. And it was not good enough to continue. I could have asked for some concessions due to my illness, but I began to worry that that, in and of itself, would be too stressful. And thus ended my (second and more painful) attempt at MPhil/PhD study. I wonder, was this my fault for failing to see the signs? Again.

So now I’m back at the faculty and I worried that I might be seen. I cannot compartmentalise the past, particularly when I was standing in the middle of it again. I felt like a scarecrow, stuck in the ground, arms pinned up and riddled with sharp, scratching straw. All the other pieces that should remain silent have awoken; the memories and flashes that pierce the chest and burn the lungs. The past few days have been difficult and I have found it difficult to contain something heavy and solid that in its darkness has been dragging me down. And now this return to old ground has opened a door to a flood of all the other thoughts of uselessness and self-hatred. It’s welling up with such alacrity that I fear I could get washed away in its wake, that I might drown. The pieces of my past that sit permanently in the corner of my eye have joined forces. These are the pieces that refuse to be placed in boxes, sealed shut. These are the blocks that cannot be compartmentalised. I wouldn’t know how to do it anyway. There are no boxes in my world, but these pieces are me and perhaps hiding them away serves only to deny me the opportunity to learn from them. All the same, if there are any going, could you keep some boxes aside just in case? This return to old haunts is proving to be hauntingly painful.

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The Art of Shame: ‘What do you regard as most humane? To spare someone shame.’ (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Posted on September 25, 2014 by gulliverunravelled

Since writing my last blog post I have begun to think about the roots of shame; the cunning tendrils of guilt that invade the mind and poison the fabric of one’s being. At least that is how it has felt like for me. Even if it is something that I have let poison me, is there an antidote? And am I worthy of this antidote?

How has it happened that I have this deep shame about my illness and my actions? I answer this question with a simple answer: flawed. Something inside me isn’t quite right and it makes me do and say things that betray this fault, this flaw. By extension I am justified in continually reassessing the actions of my past and re-experiencing them with renewed shame and exaggerated blame. I oscillate also between by who and what has happened and who and what other should take responsibility. I then chastise myself for considering that I alone could not be responsible. And I begin to make lists of all the things I believe I have done wrong.

I try to rationalise the items or events on the list: am I to blame for these things? Tick for ‘Yes’, cross for ‘No’. Can I blame being ill and in crisis for any of these things? My pen hovers over the paper miming a ‘No’, but it always draws a tick. I am to blame for my illness and my actions should stay with me to remind me that I am broken and can never be rearranged into something functional. Being bipolar is my fault, my shame. I have allowed it to ruin and damage many things in my life.

Example: whilst ill and first diagnosed in 2005 I hid this from my personal tutor and supervisor and my friends had to shoulder a lot of the care for my deteriorating condition. My family was also put under intolerable stress and anxiety. When I eventually spoke with the personal tutor about my illness I was too far gone for the university to cope with and I had to leave what had been a very promising postgraduate experience and what I hoped would become a positive post-doctoral career. All that time and energy I had put in had melted into the air. As did all but a couple of friends. I’ll always be Bipolar Emma to them now.

Consequence: Everything I had worked for was obliterated, academia and friendships. I should have learned from this experience when I upended a subsequent attempt at conducting an academic career alongside a full-time school teaching load.

Verdict: I am to blame for losing my academic career and for losing my friends.

Example: refusing to acknowledge the fact that I was hypomanic, I applied for a position that I would not be able to fulfill to the best of my abilities, although it might have seemed that way at the time. This subsequently put pressure on almost everyone I worked with. I did not know who or how to ask for help and I therefore got all the wrong help. When I was forced (although it might have appeared voluntary) to go off sick after descending into extreme confusion and terrifying mania, I left a complete mess behind. Upon returning, I realized that witnessing a bipolar breakdown great affects people’s perception of you and trust cannot be repaired, on both sides. I cannot think of anything more unpleasant than being Bipolar Teacher to everyone, including oneself.

Consequence: it is intolerable to work in any institution that has seen you at your worst; it is intolerable to feel like you are a liability and untrustworthy as a result.

Verdict: I am not fit for work. I am not fit for purpose. I am to blame for everything that happened to me – even though I know this isn’t completely true. The shame I feel cannot be calculated or described.

Sparing someone shame: is it possible?

If you know that something is going wrong, the seeds of shame have already been sown and it is very difficult to navigate the minefield of reasons and examples that justify your shame. Shame is illogical. Shame lies. Shame is like being trapped in a soundproofed room, deafening you with its malevolent, impermeable silence. Shame becomes your friend. The relationship it has with you is abusive, but after a while you get used to it as if it’s normal. It is a huge part of who I have become, who I am.Could I have been spared even a minor detail of the shame that I feel? Yes. I know that this planet of shame continues to spin because of decisions I have made as a result of decision and situations out of my control. I want some ‘closure’ for things that I believe require even the smallest admission of responsibility. I would try with all my fibre to spare others of this sickness of shame. But I cannot spare myself: I am the deity of my own world and I am as cruel and indiscriminate as any of the ancient Gods.

Can Bipolar Emma forgive herself for the things she has done whilst in crisis? No. Bipolar Emma is Emma. Emma: the Destroyer of Worlds.

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Disparate Threads: ‘Arrange whatever pieces come your way.’ [1]

Posted on September 24, 2014 by gulliverunravelled

gulliverunravelled's avatarGulliver Unravelled

I aimed to write this post some months ago, after an experience in one of the more unlikely of places gave made something unexpectedly positive to hold on to. I believed this to be the piece that had been missing; this would be the critical thread that could help knit me back together.

It was whilst I was undergoing a surprisingly thorough health M.O.T. at my gym that I, for the first time, calmly confronted my diagnosis and engaged in a conversation that left me feeling liberated. It lifted the crushing sense of shame that had been pressing down on me more and more each day. Every molecule of time had felt contaminated and I began to fear I was contaminating everything and everyone around me too.

Sitting in a chair, recovering from a number of fitness tests (which left me convinced I had turned into a blimp), the woman…

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