We are privileged to share blog postings from our Ambassador Jessie Close, Adrienne Gurman, Henry Boy Jenkins, and other guest bloggers. Please visit regularly as our content will be updated often.
I have PTSD from my manic episode of 2014, because of how severe the mood swing was, how long it lasted, and the damage I did to my family and myself without being fully cognizant of my own actions until it was too late to undo or take back everything that happened.
Mental illness can wreak havoc on our memories, but we can learn to live with that. Sometimes it’s like waking up from a dream and trying to reassemble it, never quite having all the components on hand. It’s a challenge, but one I’m willing to face to feel whole, complete, integrated, and stable.
I decided a long time ago that I didn’t have the energy for the tap dancing that bowing to stigma requires. This wasn’t a bold or noble move on my part. It was the need for efficiency. The stress and maintenance of this circus requires everything I’ve got. Superfluous activity and emotions are discarded to make room for problem solving.
My anxiety is through the roof. Left unchecked, it’s a tsunami of emotion. I’m prescribed an anti-anxiety medication at the maximum dosage, yet some things still get past the pharmaceutical firewall. To cope, I depend pretty heavily on my therapist.
A friend of mine is concentrating her graduate studies in drama therapy and is currently assembling a seminar on schizophrenia. When asked if I would like to contribute, I happily obliged. She wanted an excerpt from my unpublished manuscript to read in her presentation, so I opened up the file and started combing through it, searching for an excerpt that would most accurately convey my lived experience.
But as I navigate the waters of our overburdened and underfunded mental health system, there is a wall I keep butting up against. It is a specific limitation which needs to be addressed: Why does the medical establishment seem to stop caring about schizophrenia once the patient is medicated and compliant?
Considering that I lived in a world of my own, replete with sights and sounds that manifested sparkles and colors by the nature of my young life on the spectrum, that was enough for me. While the rest of the year held little intrigue if there wasn’t a parade or Frisbee in sight, Independence Day always delivered.
Like millions of other people whose only connection to the life we might have known once is an online conference call or video chat where a familiar face is only that and nothing more. No actual contact, no handshakes or hugs, no fascia or pheromones. Something’s missing. Something human.
What a mystery, this thing, mental illness. But what exactly is the critical issue? Just how horrible it is? How ugly, how dehumanizing? Or is it something more intricate, more profound than that? A thread throughout the historical narrative of this disease is that the afflicted one believes he is talking to God. Or God is talking to him.
For me, dissociation arrives without a triggering event. I sense that something is out of place until I realize that “something” is me, I’m out of place. I’m not an animal, mineral, or vegetable. I’m out of context, void of content or meaning.
