Mental Health Update

The best medication in the world is absolutely worthless if the patient does not take it as prescribed.

In psychiatry, this is the number one cause of treatment failure. The stronger the denial, the more likely a patient won't follow your instructions. Some patients can be too inquisitive for their own good, making package inserts, Internet information and Law firm TV commercials back fire for them. I am strongly supportive of patient education and pro-active involvement, but few things enrage me more than a relative or patient bringing me information from one of the above sources about the potential side effects of a medication I have prescribed.

We got so involved in discussing the issues surrounding depression and counselling that we ran out of time to mention the movie or book which inspired the title of our theme. Most people would have heard of the film, Girl, Interrupted, starring Winona Rider and Angelina Jolie. It is based on a book with the same title, the true story of Susanna Kaysen. The protagonist in the film is diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder.

Harriet had some serious bullying issues at school, mostly relating to her personality. I always knew something was quite 'right' with her and it took until last year when she was 17 to get a diagnosis that she did indeed suffer from bipolar disorder. But we had to live with her self harming and other impulsive behavour. No help from hubby here.

Have I mentioned I hate people? OK. Not really hate people, maybe despise crowds is a better way to say how I feel. Holiday shopping season has started, and I no longer want to leave my house. I think I felt social anxiety at the hardware and grocery stores yesterday. And, the shopping rush isn’t even in full swing until this weekend. That’s when driving around town becomes unbearable. Thank goodness I can do all my shopping over the Internet.

Interestingly enough, the symptoms of an atrope-enduced psychotic episode, which are often mistaken for schizophrenic reactions in hospital staff who have not tested for these drugs, have more in common with night terrors and somnambulism (sleep walking) then schizophrenia.

Youngsters are being pushed into eating only the ‘purest’ foods, creating eating disorders in children as young as nine.

Avoid overscheduling yourself. Use an agenda to keep track of your holiday commitments so that you can physically see what you are committing yourself to. Along with your commitments to others make sure to include some downtime for yourself - even if it is half and hour here and there. Knowing that you have some personal time will help you to stay positive.

The reasons for not telling people are both simple and complex. The simple answer is that I feel like it’s none of anyone’s damn business. But the complex answer is tied up in that stigma I mentioned. People to this day think of mental illness like BiPolar (or manic depression if you will) as some sort of mental defect, or even worse something that is all in my head, like I have the capacity to control it with my will. When people think like that it is as if people who have BiPolar are not able to function normally. It’s as if people think I’m not capable of acting rationally. I really don’t need to have people feeling that way about me. It’s a hard enough struggle without that added bonus.

The mania was never really mania…I was never that happy. But what they called mania was my futile attempt to suppress the depression. I had lived with depression (reminder: sadness from the bad and lack of good, nothing to do with serotonin reuptake) my entire life…I had just always accepted it as the norm and never fought back. 1995 was my year to fight back against the depression, against anyone and anything who crossed me. So I fought. At times I fough hard. I didn’t want to be depressed anymore so I convinced myself that I wasn’t. The power of the mind is an amazing thing but it was only the beginning of my long career in mind control, so to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t very good at it. Sometimes I went too far, convinced myself that I was too happy. Most of the time though, I just wasn’t strong enough…it would last for a while and then something bad would happen and I would realize that it was all a facade and go back to the depression. This happened over and over, which yes, may have appeared to be manic depression, but in reality it was just an empty life with an unsuccessful dream.

This is part two of the post about dealing with bipolar disorder.

I can remember clearly around this time last year with the impending birthday only a couple of weeks away that I began to feel a little anxiety.

There have been several studdies recently that link certain enzymes in the body to the overall safeyt and effectivness of perscription drugs. For example, Codiene can become deadly if a user has quick-metabolizing enzymes. The tests for the enzymes can be expensive ($100-$500 per test) but they only need to be done once per enzyme and the results are valid for one's entire life. These tests also help with antidepressants and anestesia.

It’s not the same as when they are older. Oh there’s the occasional “I wonder what she’s doing now” thoughts about the oldest, and the nagging fear of with the boy, wondering if he’s okay. But it’s not a missing part. With each of them I had nagging feeling between boredom and anxiety waiting for them to get home from long school trips, birthday parties, outings with a grandparent or family friend. When they walk back in the door, full of tales of their adventure everything is normal again.

The nuns' attacker, Mark Bechard, had a long history of mental illness. He had been hospitalized nine times for manic depression, schizophrenia and alcoholism. Since the attack, the media have irresponsibly nourished the public's fear of the mentally ill, a fear that has been around for centuries. WLBZ-TV, Bangor, did a story about whether the mentally ill should be allowed to live on their own. In a segment on the Feb. 16 edition of Dateline NBC, anchorman Tom Brokaw asked viewers whether laws that allow the mentally ill to "roam free" are endangering their lives.

I am ending a relationship of two years. That is time wasted. It seems insignificant when the tribulations of the relationship are considered. This person has been the center of my world for two years. All of the initiative drive inside of me has been directed in ways to uplift our relationship. Now all that is has vanished. That drive inside me was now altered directions and is now headed for destruction. In a way it feels almost healthy. It gives me the feeling of when I just get out of the shower and have a clean slate. That feeling is minimized by the feeling of missing something. My chest literally hurts and my thoughts are consumed by this fog of depression.

This blog entry is not news, but rather an idea I have been nursing. I am interested in exploring the connection between a “fantasy-prone personality” and mental illness. I believe that a major study on such connection will greatly benefit persons with mental illness and further enhance the treatments and knowledge of such disorders as autism, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety disorders, and bipolar disorder.

I admit to being a little overwhelmed by my knitting lately. That I apparently have developed KADD - Knitting Attention Deficit Disorder - isn’t helping. I have also developed a real knack for choosing yarn that is beautiful, yet really hard to knit with or patterns that appear straightforward, but really aren’t.

Still going a bit strange, although I’m now on the XR version of my antidepressants, which makes it sound like I will transform into the human equivalent of a sports car, all curves and va-va-voom, rather than, er, one tablet a day rather than two. Damn these lying pharmaceutical companies! It’s highly disconcerting, this feeling of losing control of one’s brain; it may simply be that I will become righted by a little intervention into the reuptake of my serotonin and noradrenaline and it will all start coming together again, but in the meantime I feel like a badly-put-together jigsaw, or a Dali painting - an arm coming out of my ear, a foot on my head. (Metaphorically, you understand; my body parts are all in their correct orders at the moment, although given my current state of mind I feel as though this may change any minute and my arse will start growing fingers, or something.)