Mentally Ill People are NOT Evil People.

I had a post all ready today about the gun control arguments happening all over the interwebs sparked by the random shootings that have taken place over the past few days. I have even participated in several heated discussions regarding the Second Amendment and everything guns.  The gun control issue will not be resolved now, or anytime in the near future. And it won’t be resolved on the internets.

But gun control is not the only issue brought up by the recent shootings.  It is brought up with every random shooting.  And yet is it blown off, dismissed, and not taken seriously.  It is the matter of mental illness.  People are all too quick to jump on the he’s evil bandwagon, because claiming the shooter is evil is easier than saying they are mentally ill and could have gotten help.  It absolves everyone of any kind of responsibility.

It insults and offends and hurts those of us who are mentally ill, are getting treatment, and yet can understand and empathize with how their actions are possible.  I can not speak for anyone else, or any disorder, but I can speak for me.  I am convinced that I have been bipolar on some level since I was 15.  We just never considered it, there were always less frightening, less embarrassing than mental illness to explain my behavior.  I have only been diagnosed and treated since 2007.  Without getting in the whole explanation of bipolar I will say this.. bipolar disorder has two distinct spectrums, one includes hallucinations.  Bipolar does not party alone, it almost always has other disorders with is, such as borderline personality disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, eating disorders, anxiety disorder.  Once being medicated for bipolar disorder, you must stay on your medications.  If you stop taking them, and then start again, it takes the medications much longer to effect the mood swings, and stopping medications is a fairly common occurrence because suddenly a person feels better.

Mental illnesses are difficult to understand, even for doctors.  The term mental illness has the stigma of ‘Crazy’ or ‘Unstable’ and that’s because the only ones that bring mental illness to the public’s attention, are the ones who do extreme acts of violence.  The ones who function in society without killing someone are never noticed. Because of the attention in the media, because of the horrible acts mental illness is scary and nobody wants to take the time to try to understand.

Let me tell my story.  I have had mental breaks. More than one. When I have a break, I step into another world in my head, a parallel universe if you will.  I react to things the way I see them, my logic, my compulsions can be, and usually are dangerous and harmful to myself.  I am angry, I am out of control, during one break I destroyed my bedroom.  And just as quick as it starts, as violent as it gets, it stops just as quickly.  The emotions, the compulsions are sometimes overwhelming.

And to those who aren’t in my head, those who don’t understand my illness can not comprehend why I have done some of the things I have done. I have people in my life who don’t understand, who don’t want to understand my disorder.  There are people in my life who are embarrassed because they still see mental illness as crazy.  There are people in my life who blame me for all of my actions and are pissed off because of some of the choices I have made.  They haven’t taken the time to learn anything about my disorder, they have made no effort to understand my disorder, they want to pretend it doesn’t exist.

And that is the problem.  Mental illness still has a stigma, it is still an illness nobody wants to talk about.  Maybe because it’s just easier to say they’re crazy.  Truth is, we are, to some extent. Because of the stigma, a lot of people refuse to get help.  Unless you are crazy, you can’t understand crazy.  When you’re in Nutjobville, you don’t always know you’re in Nutjobville. Until you’ve burned half the town down.

The shooters this weekend were not evil people.  They are people who did evil things.  They were mentally ill, and therefore not in their right mind.  We, as a nation, need to learn to separate the people from their disease.  not and evil person, I am not my disorder.  My disorder does not define me. Sometimes my disorder is evil, and its at those I am

*The quote above in the image is by Glenn Close on the website Bipolar Planet.

I Have Never Told This Story Before, The Breakdown to Celebrate my 37th Birthday

Mama’s Losin’ It offers writing prompts every week. And while I don’t usually use them, I have them sent to me on the off chance there is one I would consider using.  One of them was write about what you were doing 10 years ago today.  Ten years ago would have been 2002, and I would have still been married to the girls’ dad.  We would have been married three years, and I was two years away from a divorce.  Muri would have been 5 and starting school, Megan would have been 3.  Their brother, Ian would have been 8.

For as long as I can remember I have kept a journal.  Not a diary, but notebooks that I could ramble in.  And thank god Wal*Mart sells them for less than 20 cents every year when school starts.  I can buy more than enough to last me through that year without going broke.  I have journals from September 16, 1993 up to July 1, 2009.  If ever you want an accurate description of my mood swings read those journals.  If you can stand them.

There are days I ramble on and on and on about nothing important for four pages.  About some guy I was kind of dating, about the girls’ dad  dealing with the first year of our divorce, about me trying to balance money and my manic tendency to spend what I didn’t exactly have on a lot of things I absolutely didn’t need.  There is page after page after page when I write “I just want to crawl into a hole and disappear.  I can’t wait to get home, get the girls settled and just crawl into bed.  Every morning it takes more effort that I am sure I’ll be able to muster, to pull myself out of bed and face each day”.

I have my 37th birthday which is the birthday I celebrated by having my first mental breakdown.  I spent 37 hours in bed crying, not sleeping, and just rambling in my journal. At 1:35 AM of July 4th, I wrote that page up there.

“Yesterday was my 37th birthday and it’s the last one I ever hope to have. I see no reason to stick around to see 38. Even my children would be better off with no mom instead of the emotional grave yard I am now.”

Eight pages of saying goodbye to my family.  At 5:30 AM I wrote “Another sleepless night” and I wonder now how many sleepless nights there had been. I don’t remember them. But I remember fighting so damned hard for weeks to just get through the day.

By 7:00 the morning of July 4th, I had managed to get about two hours of fitful toss and turn sleep which did nothing but make me realize just how far gone I was.  I couldn’t get out of bed. It took too much energy to pull the covers off of me, and the thought of getting up and walking was beyond overwhelming.  I had nothing left to give.

I finally called my mom, and the girls’ dad, they came and took me to the emergency room where there was no psych doctor on call.  I had played the game of ‘put on a good front, hide the horrible garbage that lives in my mind’ for so long that once I was out in public, I appeared fine.  I could smile, I could function, I actually told my mother that I was feeling much better and this trip to the ER was really a waste of everyone’s time. Except that I wasn’t.  I was so exhausted, I was so empty.  It was the manic phase that had hidden beyond the depression of that night. The manic phase that had kept my mind racing in downward spirals, had kept me awake for 37 hours. It was that part of my disorder that took over and hid the depression from the world. I got some medication from the doc on call who really couldn’t give me anything effective, beyond anti-depressants, which… are the worst thing you can give a bipolar in a depression.

By 3:40 PM on July 4th, I was home. I was showered and dressed which was an improvement, but I went straight to the couch and stayed there.  I was exhausted and had no desire to do anything.  I was once again alone with myself.  And even then I was two years from being diagnosed.  The doctors treated the depression because it was easy and obvious. The manic was what I considered normal.

The thing is, even in the midst of it, as I sat there in my bed crying, awake, alone in my own head, willing and ready to give it up, nothing I wrote conveys the depths to which I had sunk.  The darkness I was in, the hopelessness I felt, none of that has a voice in my words.  Even in the midst of my darkest day, I lied to myself, and I lied to everyone around me. Had that been the last thing I left behind, nobody reading it could have known how far down the road of no return I had gone.

I wish I could say that was my one and only breakdown.  I even wish I could tell you it was my worst one.  There have been others.  Reading further into my journal, I spent the month following that night in a manic high, about how my life was perfect, how it was going great for me.  Until August 14th, when I once again wrote

In the darkness where you feel nothing, there is no pain, no rejection, no emptiness. just floating in a void. Can I be there? Can I go there? Where I never have to feel unloved, rejected, forgotten, unworthy, insecure, unsure. In the darkness I don’t have to hear the silence of the phone not ringing.  Am I looking for someone to come save me? You bet, because I can’t save myself, and I’m not sure I’m worth saving. Maybe somebody else does.

Looking back it is so glaringly obvious I needed help.  The mood swings are clear, the depression screams from the pages, barely whispered by my voice.  We missed the signs, most people do at first.  It’s easy to see the depression and treat it, and the manic is just ‘normal’ even when it isn’t.  I have walked a tightrope every day, balancing myself between the two extremes.  Most days I win.