I recently read Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness. She’s a psychiatrist with manic-depression, and her book reminded me what a glamorous sort of mental illness that is. In her manic phases, she did things like fly to Paris on a moment’s notice and go on shopping sprees during which she would spend tens of thousands of dollars. During her depressive phases, she made dramatic suidice attempts. Like many manic-depressives, she resisted taking her medication, missing what she called her mild manic stages, when she was not quite over the edge but humming and buzzing with energy. No wonder so many movies have been made about people with manic-depression. All that drama and excitement!
No one will ever make a movie about my mental illness, Generalized Anxiety Disorder with Obsessive-Compulsive Tendencies. Even though I have been pretty much recovered from this for years, it’s never far from my mind. I am always watching for the first signs that it is sneaking up on me again.
GAD is not glamorous. There’s no jetting off to Paris with GAD (the plane might crash, after all). There’s only day after day of paralyzing fears and worries, fears and worries so petty on the one hand and so strange on the other that when I tried to write a heartbreakingly honest piece about my anxiety some years ago, the audience laughed when I read it at a reading (I’ll post it in its own entry after I post this, FYI). The most dramatic thing that ever happened when I was anxious is that I had a panic attack once. I think the idea of having a panic attack was suggested by the reading I was doing when I was in recovery; panic disorders and anxiety disorders are highly related, so the literature of recovery tends to talk about both. I don’t think I would ever have had a panic attack if I hadn’t been reading about panic disorders in my anxiety books. But the fact that I had been reading about them meant that I knew exactly what to do: I walked into the kitchen, got a paper bag out from under the sink, sat on the floor, and breathed into the bag until I felt better.
That’s drama for you.
The other dramatic mental-health related thing I’ve done happened after Eric was born, when I had post-partum depression. I was lucky in my PPD: David and I had enough experience to recognize it quickly and know what treatments were available. I responded quickly to both medication and cognitive-behavioral therapy. Unlike some of the women in my PPD support group, I never thought I would hurt myself or the baby, and I never lost my sense of connection to the baby. It felt more like my relationship with the baby was the one good thing in the midst of everything else falling to pieces.
On my worst day with PPD, which manifested in part through a resurgence of my anxiety symptoms, I became terribly overwhelmed. I didn’t feel I or the baby were in danger, but I didn’t feel I should be alone with the baby. It was more than I could handle (not that the baby was being difficult. I seem to remember him sleeping through all of this). I couldn’t reach David on his cell phone. I could think of plenty of friends and acquaintances I could have called and asked for help, but I didn’t want to tell someone I knew what bad shape I was in. I wanted either David, or a stranger. So I went to the emergency room. I told them I had PPD and was having a really bad day. They asked if I was thinking about hurting myself or the baby. I said no. They put me and the baby into a cubicle and we hung out there until David showed up, and then he took me to Community Mental Health, where I talked with a counselor for awhile, decided that the crisis had passed, and went home.
Boy, that’s some drama there, too. I felt overwhelmed; I wanted not to be alone, but to be in a safe place for awhile, so I went to a safe place. Later in the week, my therapist commended me for making a good choice.
I want my movie of the week, damn it!
I remember when I realized how anxious I was. David and I were in couples therapy, and in one session it came out that I worried about things a lot. Our therapist suggested I start a list of all the things I worried about. It was about twenty items long before we got home, and included things like whether the cashier at the grocery store was judging me for buying so many frozen dinners (it astonishes me in retrospect that I had fears like that, but I really did).
Once I figured out that my mind was not functioning normally, things fell apart dramatically. The first year I was being treated for GAD was the worst year of my life, mental-health-wise. Once I recognized that I had a problem, all of my dysfunctional crutches and coping mechanisms stopped working, but my mind was still out of control and I had no healthy way of dealing with it. It got ugly for awhile (the next entry, written in 1997, is from this period), and then it started to get better. And it got better and better and better until I became Recovered. But Ever Vigilant. Toward the end of my piece about anxiety, I wrote, “I would like to live that with that clarity and good humor for a month at a time, a year, the entire decade of my thirties, but I won’t.” But I do. I mostly do.
And for that, I thank God; Dr. Valerie Geurnsey, D.O.; Carol Ducat, Ph.D; Brenda Swope, A.C.S.W; David; and my own powers of recovery. That I respond well to mental health treatment is the gift that has done me the most good in my life.
Posted by Su Penn at May 11, 2004 03:30 PM | TrackBack