On mental illness

Let me talk to you about my brain.

It’s not working so good right now. It’s soldiering on and getting me through the days but on the whole, it’s pretty down and a bit anxious. I’m more aware now of the ways in which this is different to feeling normally down and feeling normally anxious and I want to talk some more about that. Because, I guess, sad and negative feelings and worry are natural human emotions and everyone experiences them so it can be difficult to understand how this is different when they are caused by an illness rather than just occuring in response to life. And the way I recognise and understand that is through experience. Like this

* It is 2 pm and Bean is finally asleep, which is good for me, because my head feels foggy and everything is a little tough today. Someone raps on the door and I go down to answer it; a woman is there from an electricity provider, trying to sell me service. Because things are foggy in my head, it takes me a while to understand what she is actually saying so when she asks me for a copy of our bill I decide that the easiest thing is to just go fetch one, because then I can get a moment to think. Of course this is a mistake, because she takes it from me and tucks it on her clipboard and it’s clear that the speil she gave me about ‘not really needing to change companies’ was a total lie, and she wants me to go through the whole process of switching supplier. I don’t want to do this, and I tell her so. She ignores me. The conversation goes on and I start to disassociate a little: I can see myself just standing there like a big lump, not knowing what to say. I’m thinking what if I had a disability that made standing here difficult for me? What about elderly people, she could frighten them half to death. Why won’t she just leave me alone, this is my time to rest and I need to rest and she’s in my personal space. I try to say these things to her: that she’s intrusive, she’s bossy, she’s not welcome, she’s wasting my time. But I don’t because I know I will cry if I do. I feel about four years old. It is only when she raises her voice and wakes Bean that I have the strength to grab back my document and close the door on her. Bean has a tantrum because she was woken up, and I am so angry at myself for letting it come to this. For hours afterwards I feel pathetic, cowed, weepy. I’m big and smart and articulate and three decades old but none of that matters because I can’t even fight through the fog to say what I mean out loud.

* It is some time in the morning and I’m trying to get Bean dressed to go out. She wants to go, she’s been begging me, but she won’t lie still and I can’t dress her. She’s jumping naked on the bed, squealing, laughing: it’s a game. But not to me – today I am all hardness. Sudden rage bubbles up, and I yell and yell until she cries and lies still. In a moment she’s bouncing and happy again but for me, the shame smarts all day. (Actually, it still does now, still makes me weep). I want to tell her: that wasn’t me. I’m never that angry at you, I would never hurt you, I never want to frighten you. And I do say it, but she’s two years old so there’s no way of knowing what she’ll remember.

* I have had a difficult day. Everything got on top of me, the house was a mess, The Fireman was late home, dinner was late and disastrous and not the right thing to satisfy my hungry body. But that is okay, I think, because I’m off to a study meeting and I will be out of my house and out of my own head for a few hours. Adult time. Except that I’m still reeling from the day but I don’t know it, and the night is dark and the street I have to park on unknown, narrow, windy and steep. I can’t see where I could park my car safely, another driver blinds me with highbeams, I’m not as early as I hoped, but none of these things is insurmountable. I’m a grown-up, I can drive just fine, I can meet new people, I can get on with it. Except that I can’t. My teeth start to tingle which is the first sign that I’ve been hyperventilating without even noticing and so I have to do breathing exercises and try to navigate my car at the same time because there is nowhere to pull over. I feel light-headed and nothing seems real. And then I am crying and shaking and ashamed and I just drive home and sit in the driveway and weep because what kind of pathetic person can’t even do a simple thing like go to a meeting and when will I ever be able to do anything in my life if I can’t even do that?

I’m getting some professional help for my brain really soon; and although I feel worse than I have for months and months, it’s not so awful, really. Except that I am exhausted from limping through the days. Some cruising would be nice. Some sunshine.

In which I speak its name

I used to say that I had ‘had a mental illness’.

I used to tell people when I was younger, I had depression. Or I used to have Panic Disorder but I don’t have panic attacks anymore. Or maybe, if I knew them well enough and trusted them enough, I would tell them that when I was nineteen I took several handfuls of pills because the pain was so bad I thought I’d rather be dead. And then I would say but everything is different now. That was a long time ago.

And it was a long time ago. Twelve years.

The first time I was treated for depression was more like twenty years ago. The first time I communicated profound suicidal ideation was around twenty-two years ago.*

I am thirty-one years old.

Currently, I am being treated for depression and anxiety. Both of these conditions are with me now, although they are certainly not debilitating. I am withdrawing from my medication, I am off the fortnightly roster with my psychologist. On the whole, I am sleeping and eating and living as a well person and feeling pretty good. I am definitely coping – although coping is not a good indication of how I am really, since coping is something I do well. I have adapted to a very high level of coping even throughout times of extremely low levels of wellness. It’s kinda my thing.

Within the last twelve years (the time period during which I got used to telling people I ‘used’ to be depressed), I have experienced at least two lengthy, major depressive episodes. One of those came in the year following the birth of Bean and crept up underneath the cloak of sleep deprivation, only to say ‘boo!’ right after she stopped breastfeeding. The other went largely untreated because I – and others – put it down to ‘workplace stress’. And the many shallower troughs? They became my personality. I am a troughy kind of person – or at least I was, before I was medicated.

All of this is my way of saying that I will no longer call myself someone who has ‘had a mental illness.’ Because this is not in the past. This experience is not something I can put down to a troubled late adolescence or even to the upheaval of postpartum life. Actually, this illness: it is chronic and it is almost always here and it is part of who I am. I live my life in ways designed to cover my gloominess and compensate for my fears. I go for days, weeks, or sometimes months without that energised soul-singing feeling, because my brain chemistry is such that joy doesn’t have a direct line: sometimes the connections are static-y or the service is cut because the bill wasn’t paid. And I get tired, and irritable, and lose concentration; and I get insomnia, anxiety attacks and mood swings.

No one can tell me why my brain is this way. It’s likely that early loss and trauma plays a part, as well as past and present physiological causes. Genes are a possibility – a significant one, considering my mother’s likely mental illness and her own mother’s apparent psychotic symptoms.  I don’t know how much of the chain of ‘bad’ mothering that stretches before me can be put down to illness but I would be surprised if the answer isn’t most of it.

Which is a sobering thought for a woman, who has a mental illness and is a mother of a daughter, to think.

But my mothering is all about changing how the story ends – and that starts off with telling it straight. Even if this is the hardest post I’ve had to write.

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*The last time, in case you’re wondering or worrying, was over ten years ago. In many ways, everything is different now. Even when I’m not okay I’m pretty much okay.

Body and soul

I  recall pregnancy as a time of great fascination with my bodily functions. And I don’t just mean in the crude pee-in-a-cup-for-the-doctor and tell-the-midwife-what-your-discharge looks like kind of way. What I mean is that pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding have been transformative experiences for me because they have altered and enhanced my understanding of and yes, my love for, my body.

Most of us are divorced from our bodies for much of the time. We’re so busy thinking and therefore being that we forget sometimes to just shut up and breathe. We also treat our bodies like foreign lands, places we tourists visit for exercising, eating or having sex. The rest of the time we forget about them, or talk about them only as a collection of parts. Usually not in a nice way either, if truth be told.

During pregnancy, I was allowed to talk about my physical self and emotional self interacting. I was encouraged to celebrate what my body can do. I had the curious feeling that my biology was taking over in a new and emphatic way: when I felt tired, I couldn’t push on. My limbs steered me towards bed or couch. My body was not to be ignored.

I had not been in the habit of trusting my body: after all, it had taken two years to conceive this baby and a lifetime of perceived clumsiness and ugliness preceded that. But I learned that, contrary to what is popularly believed, our bodies are well-designed for birthing and that in the right conditions, hormones ease the mother into what would otherwise be a more distressing process. When the time came I decided to let my body have its way and my trust was not misplaced. For the first time in my life I was proud of something I had done, physically. I was in love with my body.

Breastfeeding mothers often experience an almost overwhelming sense of pride as they cradle the weight of a satisfied baby in their arms. I certainly did. I remember looking at Little Bean when she was a few months old and thinking I made her, I nourish her.

Nothing has been more empowering, for me, than the acknowledgement that what I really am is a female mammal. A mammal who is a mother, but also a student, a wife, a teacher, a writer, a feminist.  

Which is why it shouldn’t have taken so long for me to realise that the best anti-depressant I could find, for me, would be moving my body. A walk here, a gym session there, a yoga class every now and then and suddenly it feels like I have a beating heart in my chest instead of a deep void. I feel alive, not numb. Actual liveliness is a way off yet I think, but at least I can glimpse it again.

My body is heavy and wobbly and flawed. I love it, own it, though. Now.

The black dog’s a bitch

So I haven’t been around for a little while.

I don’t know if it’s because of all that’s happened in the last few months or if it’s chemical, but it hit me the other day that perhaps the reason I’m watching crappy TV instead of blogging, eating as much as possible and furtively weeping is not because I think this is a good life plan but because I am, in fact, a wee bit depressed.

I’m quite familiar with the d-word. I say it out loud from time to time because when it comes close to taking your life you learn pretty quick to tell anyone who’ll listen that it might be coming back again. At least, that’s true for me: like Voldemort it seems a lot less scary if I speak its name.

People keep telling me how normal I am to be feeling this way. And as much as I hate to be a walking cliche, they’re right. I’m a woman and a mother. I’m married and I’ve had cause to grieve recently. Statistically I’d probably be an anomaly if I was jumping around smiling like a toothpaste commercial.

But why is that, exactly?

When I was an undergraduate studying 19th century history, I wrote quite a gruesome essay on the popularity of cliterodectomy as treatment for “female hysteria”. I suppose that experience (and the spontaneous discussion I had with a complete stranger over the library shelf about how her gynaecologist had assaulted her) might have been the beginning of a broader awareness of mysogynistic medical language and practices. But it also got me thinking about how the depression I was experiencing then seemed so overwhelmingly female.

My daughter is almost fourteen months old so it’s a bit late for the post natal blues to visit, but then again, she only recently weaned. According to Louann Brizenden (author of the fascinating, though controversial, book The Female Brain) the withdrawal from regular surges of oxytocin and other relaxant hormones at the time of weaning can cause depression in women. Now perhaps there’s only a fine line between saying that womanly hormones can make us sad or mad and the more poetic (and more obviously misogynistic) explanations of wandering wombs and pathological masturbation. But I’ve learned enough about my body in the last couple of years to know for sure that its hormonal rhythms have an impact on my mental state.

What I don’t think we need more of in this world, though, is researchers looking for ways that biology justifies what they see around them. Women are twice as likely as men to experience depression. Five seconds of googling pulls up articles about how this is tied to hormones, sexual or spousal abuse, body image and losing work/family balance. None of these causes is uniquely female and yet, somehow, they each carry that connotation.

When I talked to my doctor about how I’m feeling lately, he jumped on the motherhood thing and then the hormone thing right away. I’m not saying he’s wrong. Just that the statement ‘it is normal for new mothers to feel depressed’ should be outrageous, even though he apparently is right. My chiropractor concurred.  ’You’re not alone, we all feel a bit that way when the babies grow up a little’, she said. And a couple of friends have also shared with me that relationship strain and feelings of despondency seem pretty much part and parcel of the parenting gig. Especially for the women.

What my GP, chiro and everyone else are really saying is that in our society, many mothers’ lives are so full of difficulties and so lacking in recognition and support that mental illness is a natural human response.  It’s enough to make you depressed, when you think about it.