Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is

Sharp-eyed 19 fans may have noticed that I have been a little neglectful of the blog of late. Apologies to all concerned – this has been due to something of a nasty bout of the ol' agitated depression. Thankfully, I'm now on the mend after some swift intervention and the ministrations of my psychiatrist, J. Bit Valium'd up but hey, for now, it feels lovely. As a point of reference, for any fellow children of the 90s who remember the Mr Soft advert, it's a bit like that. For those who don't, check it out here – a glimpse into the World of the Sedated. 

So yes. Intervention. It really was swift this time: historically in times such as these I have form for letting my highs fly and my lows fester, or for adopting the somewhat flawed TRH (Trying Really Hard Not To Be Crazy, see downblog) method. The point of hauling myself to J's offices back in October, however, was precisely to break this cycle and to find a way of living and working with my condition which did not involve the rug being pulled from under my life every few months. In short, I wanted to find a way not to shun my bipolar or to reject it, but to live and work with it as I would with any other chronic condition, from epilepsy to diabetes. As more and more awareness is generated of what conditions like mine actually entail, such theoretical comparisons have become commonplace in the debates surrounding serious mental illness. This can only be a good thing; however, it strikes me that we still have a long way to go before this theory can be applied in practice, especially in public spheres such as places of work and study. Clearly, as is widely discussed, there is much to be done on the side of employers and institutions to address the widespread stigma and ignorance around mental illness, but the question that arose during my most recent episode was this: what can we, the very people with first-hand experience of serious mental illness, do to bring an end to our prejudicial treatment at work and study? As the City wide-boys who trained me for my short-lived legal recruitment role used to say 'communication is a two way street'. (NB, they also used to bandy around the phrase '8 is late, 6 is safe' to describe desirable starting hours, and favoured the use of 'onboard' as a verb, but ignore that. Also, if you're rightly wondering how on God's green earth someone like me ended up selling lies to lawyers for a living, I was hypo at the time so it was GREAT for precisely 3 months and has provided a lifetime of anecdotes which I imagine I will share in another post at some point). One thing I have noticed, though, is that the culture of silence surrounding conditions such as mine seems to ensure that many sufferers keep schtum about their illnesses, calling in sick to work or lectures with 'food poisoning' from time to time or simply walking out whenever an episode hits. This perpetuates the vicious cycle of employers/tutors believing sufferers are any manner of Bad Things from 'flaky' to outright dangerous, and sufferers feeling guilty about their conditions and believing that they are incapable of doing a 'normal' job. As someone who has matched the above with startling precision all my life, one of the most difficult things I found myself doing during my most recent episode was breaking this cycle. It was also possibly one of the best, and it went a little bit like this:

Barring relatively minor fluctuations in mood, this was the first really bad episode since the one last Autumn which kick-started this whole blogging business. I spent a merry Sunday mainly pacing the flat, intermittently cowering in corners and bashing my head against the walls (I should also add that I live above a pub, which on any given Sunday tends to resonate with the inescapable sound of people being bloody happy and functional. This Sunday, they were having a vintage music festival, upon which it would appear the entire population of South East London had descended for good, clean, loud fun. Any fellow depressive will, I am sure, recognise the depths of self-loathing to which this will induce one to sink). In a moment of clarity inbetween the waves of 'orrible, my brain did shut up for long enough to let through the realisation that I probably shouldn't attempt to teach the next day. I merrily called in with 'food poisoning' the next morning and consoled myself that, in a couple of days I would be fine. Fine! Fine.

By the time a couple of days later rolled around and I had begun to hear everyone in the (silent zone of the) library vying with the voices in my mind to provide reasons why I should top myself at my earliest convenience, and suggesting a variety of imaginative ways in which this could be achieved, I called D. Still valiantly clinging to the notion that I could definitely teach a class in two hours' time and that I was just being weak and needed a bit of a pep talk, it came as something of a shock when he informed me in no uncertain terms that this teaching lark was not going to happen. Instead, he theorised, I needed to go and see my tutor to explain the problem and take some time off. This proposal was alien to me for two reasons:

1. Actually getting in there with an explanation before hitting the peak of an episode was an entirely new concept. There was a little bit of my racing mind which was already two weeks down the line, at the bit where I break down whilst teaching, run for the door and never come back, change vocational direction at the first sign of a rise in mood and begin the whole sorry cycle again. Surely this was the only way, no?

2. I hate Taking Time Off. Mainly because I still associate it with failure, even though I know logically that that's not remotely the case. This is probably why I've always had to have Time Off forced upon me to date. For all that I've espoused since my diagnosis, and for all that I've documented here whilst mentally well, namely the importance of seeing bipolar as a fundamental part of oneself, the importance of learning to work with it, it being 'normal', all of it went immediately to pot the moment I became ill again. There is nothing more humbling, nothing more guaranteed to make you feel like an invalid than being overwhelmed by the sort of madness that renders you unable to recognise what is/is not real and forces you to be utterly reliant on others to make this distinction for you. During this episode, my bipolar definitely did not feel like it was a part of me. It was a tornado of an exterior force, one that I was battling with tooth and nail for control. Perhaps most painfully, there was a part of me that recognised, at least some of the time, that the world I was momentarily inhabiting wasn't real and that I really was quite ill. Far from consoling me, my depressive state turned this into yet another reason to despise my malfunctioning brain. The Czech have a word, litost, which defines this feeling. It literally means 'a state of torment at catching sight of one's own misery', though my friend R describes it, in a much more British way, as 'feeling shit about feeling shit'.

There was, however, a tiny, embryonic Voice of Reason (possibly shoved into my wailing brain by the ever-reasonable D) which managed to break through the cacophony long enough to ask: 'well, mate, if you're not going to put your money where your mouth is, treat this and – crucially – represent it to others as a manageable long-term condition, then who is? Who else is going to demonstrate the 'real face' of bipolar disorder if not the real people who live with it? Stretch out the Delhi Belly for as long as you like; walk out and turn off your phone if you want to, but it will mean that you don't really believe any of this stuff you write about; you'll just be perpetuating the very stereotype you purport to fight.' So, never one to be trumped by a metaphorical embryo, I dragged myself down the corridor to my tutor's office, sat down and did it. And miraculously, it was fine. No scenes, no being frog-marched off the premises, just practicalities and a non-intrusive kind of concern. If anything, there are actually two huge positives to come out of all of this. Namely:

For the first time ever, I actually listened to myself and others and accepted, however grudgingly, that I really wasn't well, and that cancelling life for a little while would mean getting better more quickly and not enduring months of self-abuse (not the fun kind).

I managed to take responsibility for said cancellations rather than forcing myself to follow through with commitments until I either fucked up so spectacularly that my I would never be allowed back through the door, or walked out and stopped taking their calls. Although it went completely against the grain, it really was a step towards re-establishing some kind of self-esteem and relieving some of the contingent anxiety of being ill again: no matter how crap I felt, I actually managed not let anyone down or (hopefully) to lose too much respect. They knew the score, and I had a grace period of the dreaded Time Off in which to recover without worrying about fulfilling unachievable commitments .

Of course, I could have just got really lucky and hit upon one understanding tutor. It's also undoubtedly the case that education is one of the most sympathetic sectors (something tells me I would have got a slightly different reaction from the denizens of Cannon Street). But I think and dare to hope that it is not just that, and that my experience represents a small step forward for sufferers of mental illness in employment and education. And perhaps it has something to do with the one thing the City did teach me (apart from how to keep a straight face when someone shouts, with all sincerity, 'IF YOU WANT A FRIEND, GET A DOG!!!' during your training) namely that whichever industry you are in, in our commercialised, 21st century world, you are a commodity. Whether you represent money-making value or keeping-us-at-the-top-of-the-league-tables value, you are worth something to the people at the top. This means that, alongside their contractual duty of care, it is in the interests of whichever organisation you are a part of to do whatever is necessary to help you get better, back on track, and performing for them. Although it can be a little dispiriting to think of things in this way, what it means in practical terms is actually pretty good for us – by being upfront about what we need and why, by talking openly about our needs and the practicalities of recovery, we instantly dispel many of the myths around serious mental illness simply by virtue of representing them in the same way we would if we had epilepsy, or even the flu. By demonstrating that our conditions are manageable and showing that we take responsibility for them, we enable those who really need to, to see first-hand that we are not the dangerous, undesireable flakes that purveyors of stereotyping would have them believe. We also become an active part of the goal we share: that of setting mental illness on a par with long-term physical conditions. It is for this reason that I believe the shift in the way that I think and communicate with others about my condition may be one of the most important steps on the road to living with it successfully.

SCHIZO NAZI HAS SKY IN JAIL: the language of marginalisation, from Suffragettes to schizophrenics.

In our bid to secure a future a the top of the food chain, every human society has created behavioural boundaries governing its members to ensure that we keep our animal instincts in check. The French philosopher and all-round bad boy Georges Bataille (who spouted a lot of rubbish, but came up with a few gems of which this is one) theorised that, by suppressing our instinctive urge to career through life having loads of sex and killing each other for japes, we could gang up and develop our superior intellect enough to become the dominant race. The eight world religions reflect this, having broadly the same rules based on controlling our more animal of urges (don't kill, be nice to your neighbour, avoid the temptation of the wanton shag) and therefore channelling our energy into Getting Shit Done, 'shit' in this instance being furthering our dominion over nature by building cities and pyramids and things, and inventing stuff along the way to make this quicker and more comfortable such as the wheel, the telephone and Perfect Fried Chicken. Trouble is,goes the theory, we are actually still animals at heart, so we get a bit restive after too much rule-following and need to let off steam at regular intervals. Recognising this, societies the world over have created handy amendments to the rules above, which I like to summarize in the following way:

Don't kill. Unless they've done something really bad, like a murder or being a funny colour. Then think of a really nasty way to off the bastards and do it in public. You may like to bring a picnic, and the kids.

Be nice to your neighbour. Unless you're bigger than them and they've got something you want, in which case you can go to war with them. Take care to think of something vague yet ominous to justify this, such as 'they're threatening our way of life!' and repeat until you and enough people believe it. Then go wild on their ass.

Avoid the temptation of the wanton shag. Don't rape people, or have sex with your mate's partner. In fact, don't have sex at all, unless you're married, and then only for the purposes of procreation. Unless there's a war on, in which case feel free to lay your sweaty mits on as much non-consensual sex as your smutty heart desires.

This errs somewhat towards the extreme end of the scale, but it demonstrates the need we have to transgress our boundaries. What's also interesting is the fact that, once we've broken the rules of society, we feel the need to reassert ourselves as a society almost immediately. When we declare war, we instantly define ourselves in opposition to the enemy. Communities become stronger in the face of this common foe; old divisions are forgotten as we come together, united by virtue of not being the undesireable thing. It doesn't really seem to matter what 'the undesireable thing' is; what's important is that everybody gets to gang up and wreak some destruction whilst also feeling reaffirmed in the safety of the community by virtue of not being the bad, scary thing over there. Societies have been performing this ritual at various levels since time immemorial, and being the language geek that I am, one of the most interesting things I discovered when researching this phenomenon was the recurring terms and imagery used to describe the 'undesireable'. I've outlined these below:

1. THE UNNATURAL MONSTER. This is a tabloid fave - it's a pretty poor day at New International if at least one paedophilic or serial killing monster has not been EXPOSED or found to HAVE SKY IN JAIL. We also tend to call things that we find particularly abhorrent 'unnatural' - old Hamlet's fratricidal murder, for example, was 'most foul and unnatural,' whilst the film of serial killer Aileen Wuornos' life is entitled 'Monster'. From his cell in the Bastille, the Marquis de Sade produced a life's work which still terrifies society today, chiefly because it goes against this very rhetoric. De Sade continually returns to the idea that his heros and heroines – a jolly bunch comprised chiefly of rapists, thieves, gluttons and murderers - are by definition not only natural but an incarnation of the violence, unfairness and indiscriminate make-up of nature itself. It is the society around them, with its restrictions and hypocrisies, that is unnatural. And all things considered, for all our protestations about the 'natural' goodness of humanity, he's got a point. Millenia of history tells us so - rape, murder and paedophilia have existed for as long as we have. They are no less human than we are; indeed, they are by very definition human traits. Trouble is, as a wise poet once said, our poor human souls cannot bear very much reality; the idea that we are in such perpetual proximity to the violence of nature is a pretty scary concept when you've built a civilisation on suppressing it. So just as we corset our natural landscapes into cities, we continue to squeeze animal instincts into an unnatural model of 'humanity', ram our fingers into our ears and carry on.

2. THE MAD PERSON. This term was and is still applied to all manner of societal pests, including de Sade, but also the Suffragettes (who were also, somewhat predictably, 'unnatural women') and, most recently, Anders Breivik. The word 'mad' is an interesting one. Although it is still used to reject the traits of the labelled person, unlike 'unnatural' or 'monstruous', there's a hint of derision in there too. You don't laugh at a monster. You don't dismiss one. A monster is a threat, to be feared and slain as soon as possible. A madman, though? A madman might be dangerous, but he does not inspire the same fear. You can definitely laugh at a madman (witness the pay-per-view sideshow that was the Victorian asylum). In colloquial English, something can be 'mad' if it is ridiculous, or unexpected. Laughter and derision allow us to dismiss a threat without necessarily needing to purge it in the same was as we would an 'unnatural' monster.

3. 'ILL'. This innocuous little syllable is by far the most problematic of our defences against the undesireable in our midst. It gets pulled out of the hat routinely once the outright rejection of the 'unnatural' and derision of 'madness' have failed to keep the undesireable at bay. It's a final hurrah of an attempt to keep a taboo on its last legs wheezing through another generation. To illustrate: it is 60 years ago exactly that a man who played a central role in my being able to type this and you being able to read it, father of computer science and creator of the Enigma machine Alan Turing, took his own life. He had been arrested for homosexuality, and chosen instead of going to prison to accept 'treatment' for his 'illness' in the form of chemical castration. Shortly afterwards, he dipped an apple in arsenic. Gosh we've come so far, haven't we? As far as..oh yeah, as far as extremist Christians proposing the advertisment of 'gay therapy' on our public transport. Oh good. (That's a bit faecetious, clearly we have in fact come a long way since Turing's time, but it's worth raising the point that this unspeakably destructive philosophy is still alive and well in relation to something as fundamental as one's sexuality.) The most poignant example of the use of 'illness' to describe the undesireable, however, is currently Anders Breivik. There's been much speculation surrounding the mental state of the perpetrator of the 2011 Norwegian massacre, with the press – always suckers for a good ol' psycho killer, let alone a white supremicist one to boot – getting stuck right into the juicy headline-generator that is a potentially schitzophrenic Nazi. So far, so standard. Then King's College psychiatrist Simon Wessely went and kicked up a heck of a buzz amongst us mental health scenesters by going on the record stating that Breivik does not in fact show symptoms consistent with schitzophrenia. He goes on to say that society 'comforts' itself with the erroneous idea that horrific acts must be linked to - if not the direct result of - mental illness. For this, Simon Wessely, I love you (call round sometime; there can be cake. And gin. How we'll laugh, putting the world of mental health stigma to rights!) Schizophrenia is one of those conditions that most people have heard of, but have very little real idea about. People often confuse it with multiple-personality disorder, or simply think of it as big, bad, scary and definitely Proper Mental (which makes it a handy term to chuck about if you want to make someone sound bad, scary and Proper Mental). A recent study showed that the perception of sufferers of psychosis (one of the defining features of schizophrenia) as violent has more than doubled in prevalence since the 1950s. In reality of course, those with schizophrenia are in fact significantly more likely than the rest of us to be victims of violent crime. Far from being calculating agents of destruction, they also experience high incidences of homelessness and isolation, in great part due to the fact that the active psychosis is the third-greatest cause of disability, topped only by quadriplegia (total paralysis) and dementia, and followed by paraplegia (partial paralysis) and blindness. It is, to put it lightly, a nasty, nasty thing to suffer – after my limited brush with psychosis I cannot imagine existing with the kind of terrifying hallucinations it induced on a day-to-day basis, let alone doing so whilst holding down a job, paying rent and 'engaging with wider society'. It should come as little surprise, really, that pretty much anyone who has ever experienced a psychotic episode will tell you that once in its grip, they are far more likely to be found cowering under something, trying to shut out the voices and the visions and/or smoking themselves into an even earlier grave than their 15-year average reduced life expectency and 5% increased suicide risk would suggest, than going at anyone (other than themselves) with a knife. Still less, reasons Simon Wesseley, meticulously planning and executing a massacre.

A couple of final thoughts on the 'ill label': firstly, one of the most worrying thing about it is that as soon as we call something an 'illness', we also suggest that it can be 'cured'. This has allowed societies to carry out all manner of horrific 'treatments' from lobotomies to the chemical castration suffered by Turing. Indeed, in the case of 'undesireable elements' such as homosexuality and severe mental illness,'cures' have historically owed much more to the philosophy we adopt during wars and executions – ie. a 'purging' of a the undesireable. It's really no surprise that the group mentioned above who recently proposed to advertise 'anti-gay therapy' on the capital's buses call themselves the 'Cure Issues Trust'. Secondly, the Breivik debate has thrown up an oft-mooted opinion that labelling a criminal mentally ill excuses their crimes to an extent. I would argue the opposite. The 'illness label' does indeed serves as an excuse, but it is not the 'sufferer' who is excused, it is the rest of society. Society declares that the 'ill' person is not like them; they are an aberration. They are 'unnatural'. It's a neat loophole which allows society to acknowledge the actions of the 'ill' person whilst keeping them safely outside of the definition of 'humanity'. Society at large is thus 'excused' from the possibility of being 'ill', of being 'unnatural'. The effects of these attitudes are unbelievably damaging to those who suffer with de facto mental illness. To tackle the 'cure' issue first of all: my bipolar is not something I can cure. It's something I can't change, and which – as I've blogged before – is as fundamental to my makeup as my hair colour. What I'm doing is learning to live in partnership with it, not purge it out of myself. Just like when nutritionists tell you to listen to your body and feed it what it needs, I'm in the process of listening to my brain, and learning to give it what it needs to work as well as it can. And if I say so myself, it's not functioning too shabbily at the moment. But to the problem of society 'excusing' itself from Freaks Like Us: in addition to the woeful misrepresentation of severe mental illness via the SCHIZO NAZI HAS SKY IN JAIL-style headlines we're subjected to on a daily basis, it's this action of 'excusing' that keeps us firmly in the box marked 'undesireable'. Admittedly, we've come some way since the days of Bethlem, but it won't be until we address the myth that we stand outside of society because of our conditions that real progress will be made. Being 'ill' is just that – being ill. It is what it is; we have our episodes and we manage them as an epileptic would manage their fits. We are not to be feared, or pitied, or laughed at. Actually, scratch that; I don't mind the laughing so much – I have been known, at the height of a high, to iron the socks of everyone in my shared house at 3am. A relative was convinced that there were friendly aliens hiding in the trees outside her flat. If you can't find humour in that, I probably don't want to be part of your society anyway.

#googleeffect: mental health and employment prospects

In response to today's #googleeffect discussion on Twitter, sparked by this blog post by Erica Crompton on the Rethink Mental Illness site re: how being open about one's mental health may have an adverse effect on employment prospects.

I studied languages as an undergraduate, and as my year abroad approached, I applied for the popular British Council Assistantship scheme along with the majority of my peers. The scheme is the preferred option for the year abroad amongst language students the length and breadth of the UK and has an acceptance rate of something in the region of 97%. Being the young, naïve bug that I was, I declared my mental health history to date in the relevant box of the application form, attached the requisite medical documentation and sent it off. I then got on with what any self-respecting Francophile would do, namely lounging around in cafes smoking Gitanes, and daydreaming about the soon-to-be-realised prospect of lounging around in cafes smoking Gitanes in my adopted country, prefarably whilst being propped up by wistful wisps of men named Jean-François.

A short while later I received a lengthy email from the admissions team which I have abridged for your perusal below:

...as your application stands at the moment, there is a serious question mark as to whether the French authorities will accept it. The fact that a candidate suffers from or has suffered from drug overdose, anxiety and depression is something which any school employing a language assistant will require clear information about before they consider making an offer of appointment as all language assistants are in charge of classes of young people.

We will need a full report from the psychiatrist who treated you (giving the cause and history of the depression, and including details of the drug overdose), as we feel this will clarify the situation from the French authorities. Without this report, we cannot be sure they will accept your application.

I would very much appreciate it if you could ensure that the psychiatrist’s report reaches us no later than 31^st March. You must be prepared to meet any charges this report may incur yourself, since I am afraid the British Council does not have any funds for this.

You can probably guess what the outcome of the tedious exchange that followed was. Needless to say, I was indeed deemed a risk to myself and others, and the French authorities did not see fit to accept my application. Incidentally, I've since tutored French to young people with learning difficulties, become an ESOL mentor to a refugee and her child, and currently work as a bilingual nanny, the proceeds of which are funding my training to teach English as a Foreign Language. To the best of my knowledge, I've yet to scar a pupil of any age too deeply, although I am teaching the Five Kinds of Conditional this week, so I'll keep you posted. As for my year-abroad adventures, I managed to find a French university that would have me and, amongst other things, signed up for every theatre course going and found myself part of a trilingual troupe performing in France and Germany. To those who are as concerned as I was with the pressing effect of my rejection on my and Jean-François' nascent love affair, I can also safely report that I didn't do too poorly in this regard either. Not bad for a year's work.

The effect that the exchange with the BC did have, however, was to drive me deeper than ever into the MH closet. It confirmed my suspicions that being honest about my health would lead to being viewed with suspicion (what I like to call the susp-vicious cycle, ho ho ho). It also played a part in ensuring that I continued with the TRH approach (Trying Really Hard Not To Be Crazy, see down-blog), which, as anyone who has attempted it knows, does not have a tendency to end well.

It is my belief that until we reach a point where mental health issues such as mine and the thousands of others in similar situations are understood as what they are: chronic, manageable conditions, we will not see and end to the attitudes displayed in the correspondence I received above. The fact is that, whilst we must applaud the much freer and more open discussion of mental health over the last 20 years, there still exists a great deal of fear and ignorance around what certain conditions really entail. The words 'bipolar' and 'psychotic', for example, are often used to dismiss a person's behaviour, to set them outside the acceptable norm and label them as weird, or scary. As soon as we do this, as soon as we allow ourselves to give a knee-jerk reaction to a convenient buzz-word, we are essentially giving the OK not just to rejecting a person but to making them the subject of derision and, often, of ridicule. Scratch the surface of the email above, and it's not hard to fish out a couple choice examples: equating a suicide attempt to a “drug overdose” is poorly worded at best; however, implying that depression and anxiety could lead to my causing harm to my students is woefully ignorant. Similarly, the idea that all depression is subject to the laws of cause and effect, rather than being simply a state in which one exists for variable periods of time, betrays a lack of common understanding of a condition affecting a sizeable percentage of the population.

Given these attitudes, it comes as no surprise that many people choose, like me, to blog anonymously. To those who waive their anonymity, I salute you, and I hope that in the not-too-distant future there will be no need for any of us to fear the stigma to which open discussion of our conditions might give rise.

19 online...follow me!

So apparently I tweet now...follow me here if you fancy.  I will try my best to be entertaining!

Hot Cross Buns Ruined My Easter

Despite being fully possessed of as much emotional baggage and unpleasant childhood/adolescent happenings as the next basket case, I have always been reluctant to engage in any kind of talking therapy.  Blame it on the Yorkshire genes.  Recognising, however, that Being Northern was probably not going to cut the mustard as reasonable justification for continuing with my favoured coping mechanisms (consisting chiefly of vodka, self-harm and hiding under the duvet), I decided to pursue J's suggestion of a practical talking therapy that would help me address and combat my 'triggers' - things that set off a hypomanic or depressive episode - without delving too much into the realms of exploratory psychotherapy.   This turned out to be cognitive beahvioural therapy, or CBT.  CBT exploded onto the mental health 'scene' a few years back and swiftly established itself as the new millenium's therapy du jour.  It's supposed to help you look at the way that you think, identify unhealthy thought patterns and tackle them with the Power of Logic, gradually rewiring your brain until it dispenses with throwing spanners labelled 'EVERYBODY HATES YOU' into the works of your everyday life.  It's actually not a bad plan on paper, and it definitely works for some people - converts to CBT are zealous in their praise of it.  So, all things considered, it looked to be worth a shot.

There are many reasons why it didn't work out, not least the fact that my therapist (let's call her T) and I just didn't hit it off.  But I like to blame it on hot cross buns, partly because it makes for a catchy blog title.  Hot Cross Buns are, for the uninitiated, not the all-butter fruit n'spice bun forever immortalised in nursery rhyme.  They are homework sheets that you have to complete to chart how your mind and body react to bad or intrusive thoughts.  This handy key should help you differentiate:

Hot Cross Bun

Not Much Fun

It turned out that the act of recording my negative thoughts and actions, then analysing them with someone with whom I had zero rapport was not entirely conducive to better mental health. Couple this with my notoriously poor handwriting skills and you come out with hours' worth of exchanges that went something like this:

T: So you've written here....what does this say?
19: Oh, um, yeah that says 'clawing at my face'.
T:  Clawing at your face....mmmm.  OK.  And do you think that was productive?
19: Um...well, no but...
T:  No.  So what could you have done instead of that...that clawing, mmm?  Can you think of anything you could have done?  That could have been more productive?
19: Um...

And so on.

It is possible that events on the day of my first appointment have also clouded my overall view slightly.  By the time I had clad my flu-ridden body in several layers of mangy yet comforting jersey and dragged it the 20 minutes down the road to the hospital, the combination of ill-sweats, flu-shivers and the November drizzle's magical frizz effect had conspired to lend me the air of an escapee from the electro-shock room in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.  This uncomfortable thought was not quieted by the ominous iron bars on the windows of the squat building I had been directed to.  It was this building that was to play host to an event so ridiculously farcical as to have no place outside Sophie Kinsella novels, or 00s rom-coms starring Jennifer Aniston. As I schlepped woozily up the stairs and rounded the corner to the waiting room, I found myself quite suddenly nose-to-nose with A.  A from school.  A who is now a trainee clinical psychologist working in the hospital proposing to treat me, apparently.  Suffice to say that, in a VI Form common room perpetually one step away from descending into a scene from Battle Royale, A and I occupied diametrically opposed (and geographically literal) sides.  It was therefore natural that, in that hideous, car-crash moment of mutual recognition, and despite the fact that A was clearly now a medical professional and therefore this would never happen (would it?), all I could envisage was the Class of 97 gossip phone tree springing into action, poised to revel in the gory details of my inevitable demise. 

A aside (I wrote an email  to her supervisor explaining the situation and requesting that we didn't work together), I'm aware that at some point it might be a good idea to board the therapy train again.  But for the moment, I'm more than happy to put off discussion of my psyche and let the Lamotrigine do its work. At least until I can look in a baker's window at Easter without screaming, that is.

 



 








 

Diagnosis: Part One

October 2011

My most recent plan of action re: combating The Condition (Trying Really Hard Not To Be Crazy, or TRH – see above) had by this time comprehensively failed: all of my concerted efforts to train it or to (quite literally) beat it out of myself had ground to a halt in the face of the worst low I had experienced in years.  Whilst I don’t wish to bore you with unnecessary details/whine about my Inner Pain, it might be useful to have a little bit of context here.  Everyone experiences their highs and lows in different ways, and I guess mine are best described as types of noise, so I've outlined these below:

Ever so slightly cringy as it sounds, if I had to soundtrack my highs I’d choose the overture to Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. It moves at breakneck speed, but in joyful, harmonic explosions which always resolve into perfect cadences. Whilst high, I have genuinely believed myself to be something approaching a superior being, operating at a higher level. I can feel my intellect sparking off ideas: stratospheric, beautiful ideas that make your humdrum world, your dull moral code, seem laughable. In my highest states, I have actively courted danger, exhilarated by the feeling of nihilism and by my proximity to destruction whilst simultaneously believing that nothing as mundane as the effects of physical reality could actually harm me. I also lose all ability to empathise when high – I am separated from the rest of the world, so why would the rest of the world be affected by my actions? The world moves too slowly for the speed I want to, NEED to move at. Physically, I can feel my heartbeat pulsating though my body and my skin fizz-crackling with energy. My head is filled with animated, chattering thoughts.

And so to the flip side of the coin. Most people think of depression as silence, a void. Mine is a cacophony featuring white noise and voices, my own and not my own, whispering, shouting, wailing my uselessness. These build to a crippling anxiety which I feel physically, like a fist around my throat and chest, making me pant. My stomach churns and instead of the world not keeping up with me, I become vertiginous, as though the world is a travelator rushing forwards and I am about to be thrown off. I try to get rid of the noise and voices in various ways – beating them out, clawing at my face and neck, burning them out with cigarette ends. The rush of pain brings momentary calm, and sometimes I can cry. Sometimes the exhaustion will let me sleep. The delusions here are not the symphonic ones above. The only peace I can find is in thoughts of death; of how and when. I wonder how quick being run over would be, I know that jumping in front of the Tube would be easy and instantaneous. I am convinced that everyone in my life would be better off if I were not here, that I’m an utter nuisance because my brain can’t function like a normal person, I can’t function like a normal person, can’t be relied on, can’t help anyone, can’t be useful. I’m disgusting and everybody is looking at me, realising it. I’m an awful person; worse than a waste because I actively drain everyone around me.

So. At the peak of the latest cacophony, I hadn’t slept in weeks, had been self-harming with increased frequency, had forgotten what it was like not to need headphones to drown out the voices, and D was beginning to wonder who had made off with his girlfriend. At this point, and with enough distance from my last fiasco of a foray into psychiatrics, I was forced to admit that maybe it might be possible that in the entirety of the medical establishment, someone might be able to shed a little light and a little relief on the situation.

In the event, speaking to J turned out to be a very different experience from my assessment seven years ago. He was the first person ever to explore my relationship with bipolar, which turned out to be a damn sight more complex than I’d imagined. It was also one of the most crucial steps towards coming to terms with my condition. Although it falls under the category of being a mental illness, most sufferers will tell you that they wouldn’t be without their bipolar. I am amongst them. As for many others, this 'illness' has been at least partially responsible for many of my creative and academic successes. Most bipolar people will tell you that being high is amazing; so amazing that however 'orrible the lows are, they have continually thought of them as pay-off for feeling more alive than the average person.  They will also, myself included, tell you that even at their lowest ebb they cling to the knowledge that they feel more, and more keenly, than most other people.

So it’s not as cut-and-dried as an exterior force that you want to fight. But neither is it – for me, at least – an exterior force at all. I’m told that some people develop symptoms of bipolar later in life, some in their teens, some even earlier. For me, it’s been a constant companion. I have no recollection of a time when my brain did not work in the way it does. In fact, it has come as something of a surprise, over the years, to learn that not everybody experiences a relationship with their brain in the same way that I do; still more that they often do not see their brain as something with which to have a relationship at all, but simply a functioning tool in their bodily machine.

It has also come as a surprise over the years that some other people have an objective, constant understanding of both themselves and of the world, indeed of reality itself, often based on a fundamental sense of self-worth.  For years, right up until I found myself in J’s office, I retained the certainty that nobody actually existed in this way. Surely no one really, actively liked themselves, or thought that their voice and opinions were genuinely more valid than the next person’s. They had just learned to act like that; trained themselves tirelessly into this unnatural way of thinking, essentially because they were stronger, better, and more efficient than I. It continues to astound me that there are countless numbers of people walking the planet who, though they appear quite ordinary to the naked eye, do not entertain the company of a voice in their head telling them just how shit they are most of the time. Who operate from a basic level of happiness with themselves; for whom social gatherings are always to be looked forward to as a source of good clean fun.  If this does not transpire, then it is generally for a solid, tangible reason rather than a sudden, overwhelming certainty that the people whom I have just met/ have no reason to dislike me/have been my closest friends for 10 years think that I am a twat, and with good reason, for I am fundamentally a useless specimen. When J probed me on this, I ended up realizing that for years and years, I had been like a slide projector: my outer shell remained the same, but a plethora of wildly contrasting selves whirled around on a reel somewhere inside me, being projected out onto the world in line with my mental state. No ‘self’ felt like a lie until my state shifted, at which point it becomes laughable to think that what I firmly believed only a moment ago could possibly be true, when its opposite was so mind-blowingly clear. In the same way as my interior self could shift, so the exterior world could change shape entirely at a moment’s notice. As the states and the selves shifted, I would berate my brain for not working properly, not seeing the Real Truth. I would also have windows of what may or may not have been clarity between these changing states and changing selves, in which I would become terrified of being crazy, my brain felt like an intruder, an enemy.

The upshot to all of this conjecture, however, is that - for better or worse - bipolar is a part of me. A part as fundamental as my hair colour. And, just like my very boring mousy brown, however much I might try to change it, it never quite matches the rest of me. I might like the change to ice white or auburn, others might like it, some might even be fooled into thinking it’s natural. But I know that it’s not real, and that it’s only a matter of time until the roots start to show.

Eating and Sleeping

There’s a tendency to think of ‘getting better’ as an all-consuming, quasi-spiritual journey, chock-a-block with euphoric highs, cavernous lows and grand revelations every verse end.  Unsurprisingly, I tend to think that in part, that's the bipolar itself talking.  Whenever I had entertained the idea of 'getting better', it had always been vague and romantic, though almost certainly involving a solitary journey somewhere far away, with plenty of tears and filterless cigarettes.  In reality, as J pointed out, what I was faced with was not a problem to be solved by drastic, short-term means, but a long-term condition.  This is infinitely more terrifying to my mind because it essentially means that there is no ‘getting better’ at all.  There is only patient, consistent management of what is there, and as you may have gleaned, patience and consistency are rarely adjectives that feature on the 'Profile' section of my CV (unless I'm seriously desperate and trying to lie my way into a book-keeping temp job).  

The idea that you are not going to ‘get better’ is a hard one with which to come to terms. On the one hand, the idea that there is nothing wrong with you can make you feel quite euphoric. Certainly I have felt vindicated at this notion – 'I don’t need ‘fixing'! I’m not crazy! Why are you all so terrified of extremes? BORING!!'  On the other hand, the idea that you have to live with this…thing, and everything that goes with it – the depressions, the instability, the uncertainty over whether you will ever be able to hold down a job, a relationship, a career, and not least the stigma that goes with it…that can be daunting. Especially when you’ve spent so long telling yourself that you can be normal, you’re just not trying hard enough. In a funny sort of way, that self-destructive attitude was a kind of protection I put up around myself. Basically, if you tell myself that it’s your fault you're not normal, then you don’t have to accept that you don’t have control over your brain. Because that is a scary notion. 

The moment I did accept this, though, was - as ever, when we face our fears - the first real turning point in my recovery.  Almost as soon as I had let myself admit that I didn't have control over my state of mind, strategies for gaining control were presented. These were and are, as it turns out, pretty mundane.  They consist of the following:

Take your medication.

Eat properly. 

Sleep properly. 

Exercise.

Repeat. 

Addicts and those in recovery from other conditions report much the same thing. My sister, S, who has suffered with eating disorders for most of her adult life, describes getting better as simply: 'doing what you did yesterday.'  

It's difficult to maintain a balance of any kind when you're used to living with constant, extreme changes of state.  As I write, for instance, I'm struggling to control my relationship with diet and exercise.  Having maintained healthy levels of both for a while, and feeling the positive effects, my natural desire was initially to push them to the extreme and enter a Triathlon whilst surviving on a handful of nuts and seeds and six cups of coffee a day.  This having inevitably failed, leaving me knackered, uptight and nursing an injured calf, my instinct is now to spend an entire month consuming nothing but cider and mini eggs from the comfort of my sofa.  I am fighting the urge, however, with the help of my unusually patient partner, D, whose encouragement and reminders to eat, sleep and generally not 'be a penis' are - touch wood - keeping me on the straight and narrow.