Posted by Atticus on July 26, 2004, at 10:13:34
In reply to okay....here goes, posted by Jai Narayan on July 25, 2004, at 20:13:38
Hey, I promised to try to answer any questions you had as honestly and completely as I could. No need to feel any trepidation about asking, either now or in the future. :) First, my diagnosis: I have severe clinical depression (I think it's called "major depressive disorder" in medical parlance) with an associated panic disorder. I take a med cocktail of Effexor XR, Klonopin, propranolol, and trazodone. The illness first emerged when I was about 13, and I became increasingly withdrawn and melancholic. My parents (and I) just wrote it off as typical teenaged angst, but it continued to worsen, and I saw my first therapist around the age of 15 or 16. After I'd been in therapy a year or so, the symptoms seemed to subside (to my parents' immense relief), and I came out of dark. I later learned that my father was especially worried because there's an extensive history of mental illness in his family: he and all five of his siblings (three brothers, two sisters) have either clinical depression or bipolar disorder. And my dad's own father experienced alternating periods of depression and mania himself, according to descriptions of his behavior I've gotten from my aunts and uncles. At that point in my life, my mid-teens, I'd never been put on any meds yet. I still had feelings of being an outsider all the time. Even when I was part of a group, one part of my mind always seemed to be hovering outside the circle, dispassionately observing and mentally recording the conversation, sights, and sounds. Then I became friends with Walter (you've seen glimpses of him in the poems), and plunged enthusiastically into the nihilistic night world of punk. Suddenly I'd found a social circle and sub-society where my quirkiness, impulsiveness, and utter contempt for authority were badges of honor. This was a tough period for my parents, I have to admit. I starting smoking, experimenting with all manner of drugs, hanging out in seedy punk clubs until the sun came up, and generally being uncontrollable at home. But at the same time, I was at the top of my high school class of about 120 kids (mainly because the assignments were so damned easy that I could knock them out in about 15 minutes), and editor of the student newspaper, and got varsity letters twice in fencing. It was a weird dual existence, but as long as I did well in school and got into a good college, mom and dad were willing to put up with the punk. (They did hit the ceiling when I came home one morning with a tattoo after an all-night bender. So I reacted the same way any punker would; I got another one.) College was more of the same. I quickly fell in with the university's punk element, and Walter was going to another school nearby. By this time all the acid he'd dropped had done a serious number on his brain; even I could see the deterioration in his thought processes and hear the addled, hesitant way he always spoke, as if his thoughts were elusive and difficult to corral and transport to his tongue. So I steered well clear of LSD, if little else. Maybe all of this amounted to some kind of self-medication. Maybe I just thought it was fun. I'll leave that analysis to my pdoc. I did have a reputation for moodiness among my friends, and coming from fellow punkers, that's saying a lot. My junior year of college, I fell in love with Alyssa, who was a sophomore. We dated all through school and got engaged her senior year (much to her parents' dismay -- can't really say I blame them; I'm sure I didn't look like much of a hot prospect in their eyes). We got married the August after she graduated, and by '94, I was already a copywriter at an ad agency. My mercurial mood swings continued, but I didn't pay much attention to them. Overall, life seemed very good. By the beginning of 1996, though, I knew that something was wrong. I'd go to work every morning with this vague, unshakeable sense of sadness hanging over me. It built steadily until October, when I had my first full-blown panic attack and ended up in an ER, thinking I was having a heart attack. It felt as if a black veil was settling over my whole life, coloring my perceptions of everything. I stopped drawing. I stopped painting. I stopped writing, except for work. And work itself became ever more difficult because I just couldn't find the motivation to write that advertising drivel any more. I lost my job, and the financial repercussions from this really put a strain on my marriage. I started seeing a psychiatrist and a therapist, going frantically from med to med as our bank account grew smaller and smaller. I got another job, but that didn't help my marriage much. None of the meds -- SSRIs, tricyclics, antipsychotics -- was doing a damned bit of good. There seemed to be no end in sight to this dark tunnel that I found myself trekking through, and this was especially hard on Alyssa, as she'd grown up with a bipolar mother whose mania expressed itself as towering, irrational rages. I think, in retrospect, that we both married so young to get away from the mental illness in our respective families, but Alyssa hadn't signed up for a second tour of duty with a mental patient when she said, "I do." By '98, the marriage was over (which, needless to say, didn't exactly help my already rickety mental state), and I was two years into the eight-year battle with the now full-blown illness that culminated in my suicide attempt this past spring. So here I am, taking it one day at a time. The Effexor XR really has done wonders, along with the help I received while in hospital and during the intensive outpatient treatment that has followed. I'm still trying to make my family understand that this chemical imbalance will never go away, that I'll never "get better." The one undesirable side effect that this has inadvertantly produced is to make them treat me with kid gloves; their uneasiness is palpable, as is their fear of me, even though I've never manifested any violent symptoms against anyone but myself. My growing frustration with that, with being treated as an illness rather than as a human being with an illness, led me to write the metaphorical "Atomic Cafe" yesterday. I don't know if your sister ever felt the same way. I'd really be curious to learn how other people with mental illnesses who contribute to this page feel about this. On the one hand, I feel guilty for looking askance at the well-intentioned delicacy with which they now handle me; on the other hand, I'd like to be treated like just another member of the family. The illness hasn't crowded out all of my other qualities. Maybe this will change with time; I hope so. In any case, I can understand why you'd be vigilant for signs of mental illness in yourself; it only makes sense. But at the same time, try to be careful not to overinterpret the things you think or do; that can be a real trap. Right now, everything I do is being seen by my family and friends through the lens of the mental illness, but as Freud said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." Hope all this babbling is helpful in some way. ;) Atticus
poster:Atticus
thread:368742
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20040320/msgs/370665.html