True confession: Friday, June 29, 2007
When it’s raining out and I have to take an umbrella with me, I worry that I’ll leave it somewhere — like in a doctor’s office, or on the trolley. So I force myself to chant: “UM-brella, UM-brella, brella brella UM” over and over again. Sometimes I mix it up, and put the emphasis on “brella,” but that’s rare.
[Isn't this girl lovely? She's lebonbonmulticolore, and she's from Montreal, which I hope means she has a cute French-Canadian accent.]
liz | 4:52 PM | Uncategorized
First Person, Singular: “This Last Month”
Thanks so much to Susan S. for sharing this chronicle of a recent bout of depression. It’s such a perfect articulation of what it feels like to be depressed. Susan, we all hope you’re feeling better.
This last month has been impossible. Sure, I’ve weathered more, harder, depressions, but this one seems unique. I cannot stop sleeping, and nothing makes me want to wake. I have no reason not to, it takes me away to a kinder, gentler place where I dream a million dreams and hang out with friends, long dead. In my dreams, I am model tall and thin, with legs like a Rockettes. In my dreams I am beautiful, I can get the attention of any man I wanted.
Now I know I am dreaming.
A dream I haven’t had since childhood repeats. I’m flying. Flying over cities, flying over the ocean, but not landing.
My lithium seems to be working; I am not suicidal this time. This time it’s different. I am too depressed to dress, so I stay in my pajamas or sweats for days on end. My hair isn’t washed; I don’t have the energy to wash it. It gets adjusted daily in its scrunchie, but that’s about it. I’m too afraid to go outside, even to collect my mail. It lies in the mailbox adjacent to my door, all I have to do is open the door and stretch my arms. But I cannot. It’s too much. Overwhelming.
I went to the store two days ago because I needed cat litter. I came back home ASAP. Talking to the checker was too difficult, even walking a few blocks was overwhelming. I have forgotten how to drive. And when I figured out how to start the car, I couldn’t recall where the store was.
Everything is overwhelming. A daily call to my parents is overwhelming. Trying to read a book is overwhelming.
I cannot seem to write or read.
For the first time in my adult life I feel adrift, cast away from everything. Rudderless, anchorless. There is no rhyme or reason. I’m not working. The money I saved up is almost gone, and I cannot in good conscience go cannibalize my 401k and IRA. I haven’t worked in two years, I’m frightened. I know I need something to bring money in, I just don’t want to spend the next 10 years of my life working in a job where I was overqualified, underappreciated, and bored sick. I don’t want to be in a place where I cycle down, or hear voices that aren’t there, or get paranoid where I think my co-orkers want to kill me like Rasputin.
This morning at 5 a. .my eyes opened as the sun was rising. I could hear birds outside. My cat was bouncing on my chest, wanting me to wake so we could listen to the birds together. I moved to the couch, she jumped on the windowsill and meowed at them, as the sun rose. It was the highlight of my day. Simple pleasure. The cat gets the simplest pleasure out of watching birds outside, and seeing squirrels scamper.
I wish I were like her. I get no pleasure from anything anymore. I feel like I am living death. I’m too blue to even think about suicide, but nothing, not even chocolate is cheering me. I don’t have the strength to lift my arms, as I grab the pillows behind my back and neck and try to re arrange them.
I hear voices. To counteract them, I listen to my iPod, listening to various talk shows and books on tape to hear another voice cancel out my voice. Right now I am listening to Anthony Bourdain talk about food. It’s not even making me salivate.
Last night I dreamt I was flying. This time, I flew around NYC, circling the Chrysler Building. I flew into a window in a brownstone, where I saw myself sleeping in bed, only this time there was a man and my cat in there with me. Maybe there is hope for me. But right now, all I can feel is overwhelming sadness and ahenodonia.
[Photo by Kessiye]
liz | 12:30 PM | Uncategorized
Friday Is Funday?
Try as I might, I can’t find any upbeat stories about mental illness. Today it’s all gloom and doom. It’s raining here and is one of those days that makes me want to stay home with my head in a book. Right now I’m reading The Forsyte Saga (a trilogy with an interlude) by John Galsworthy, and it’s just about the best thing I’ve ever done with my time. The interlude — “Indian Summer of a Forsyte” — made me cry so hard, I simply could not recover myself for hours. I still feel sad about it.
After my talk at DBSA, the group gave me a gift card to Barnes and Noble. How could they have known how perfect that was? It calls to mind my favorite quotation:
“People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.”
That really sums up my entire existence.
[Part of this image's name is "LZZZZZ." Were I in the frame of magical thinking, I'd see that as a sign.]
liz | 10:56 AM | Uncategorized
MOST IMPORTANT NEWS OF THE DAY
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a man is too mentally ill to be executed. This is a big development that I can’t blog about right now because I’m in meetings all day (the inventors of PowerPoint should be executed, if you ask me).
U.S. Supreme Court blocks execution of mentally ill killer
Supreme Court halts Texas man’s execution
High court spares mentally ill killer from execution
liz | 4:48 PM | Uncategorized
The Trouble With Spikol: Print Edition: Paris Is Learning
I’m sorry to say this, but I followed Paris Hilton’s jail-time woes quite closely. This isn’t something I wanted, believe me. But I’m now working with a prison-reform organization called the Pennsylvania Prison Society, so when Hilton became one of the 2.1 million people imprisoned in the United States, she became part of my constituency. (Someone at the organization suggested we send her a membership envelope, but we’d have to change the dues to—as she would say—like, a gazillion dollars.)
When I first heard she was going to jail, I’m ashamed to admit I felt a satisfaction that runs counter to my mission of fostering a just and humane correctional system. If I want others to be treated fairly, I suppose I should’ve advocated for her as well. But since most people are treated like shit, I kind of wanted her to be treated like shit too—just so she’d know what it’s like, especially for women.
Women in prison have a rough time of it. While men in prison often have mothers, grandmothers, girlfriends and ex-girlfriends at visiting hours, women’s friends and relatives have a tendency to slip away, perhaps because it’s not cool for a woman to be in prison; it’s just sad. Seventy-five percent of the women in prison have children, but those visitations fall off too—an inevitable but crushing disappointment.
Women imprisoned in the U.S. are often supervised by male guards (against international standards), and are subject to harassment—a depressing follow-up to childhoods fraught with physical and sexual abuse. There are women in jails who remain shackled and handcuffed all day for months at a time—even if they’re sick, even if they’re pregnant, even if they’re in labor. And women in prison lack sufficient access to mammograms, pap smears and other gross and painful things women need access to.
In Pennsylvania 19 percent of the women in state and city prisons are serving time for a drug-related offense—the kind of time Hilton neatly avoided despite magazine photos of her indulging a penchant for substances. (She should also have been imprisoned for not wearing underwear when she knew she’d be photographed by paparazzi—more evidence of the legal system’s failings.)
The only thing Hilton has in common with most women in prison is that she’s part of a growing trend of incarcerating higher numbers of female offenders. Between 1990 and 2002 the number of women behind bars rose 121 percent—almost double the rate for men.
Welcome to the party, Paris!
Even if I wanted to ignore her jail time and enjoy a Paris-free month, such hopes were dashed when, three days after she went in, she was released—albeit with a clunky GPS system attached to her leg. The reason for the release was some vague medical problem, which was trumpeted on TMZ.com as attention deficit disorder.
Poor girl wasn’t getting her meds, they said. Paris Hilton may or may not have ADD, but given the amount of drinking she does (hence the jail term), the medication can’t be having much of a salutary effect.
Another wrinkle is that her ADD medication is Adderall—the stimulant hard partiers take to enable them to drink longer. I’m not surprised she has a prescription for that.
Sniping aside, what’s most upsetting is that Paris Hilton wept a few cranky tears and received immediate help, while the truly mentally ill languish. Bureau of Justice Statistics research shows that fully half of state prisoners have a mental health issue, the tragic result of an inadequate healthcare system and a lack of funding for community resources.
In March the Boston Herald featured a piece by Jamie Fellner, the U.S. program director for Human Rights Watch. Writing about the mentally ill in solitary confinement, Fellner noted, “Why are mentally ill prisoners in segregation? Because prisons have become this nation’s mental health facilities.”
Most people agree solitary confinement is cruel and unusual punishment for the mentally ill, who are three times more likely to commit suicide than their counterparts in the general inmate population. But last year New York Gov. Pataki vetoed legislation against it, and it looks like Gov. Spitzer is poised to do the same. In fact Spitzer’s only concession has been to cut solitary for the mentally ill from 23 hours a day to 21—not exactly a boon for someone whose illness worsens under those conditions. It’s no wonder people with mental health issues are more likely to cycle in and out of prisons and jails.
I have a feeling, however, that despite her alleged mental problems, this was Paris’ last stay in jail. Having now found a sense of herself as a serious person, the self-described blond icon will perhaps become the Princess Diana of the incarcerated set, taking up the cause of, for example, the people of color who are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system. After all, some of her sort-of best friends are sort of black.
Perhaps incarceration will complicate her cartoonish image, like sticking a swizzle stick into a cup of axel grease. Maybe she’ll join Bill Gates and Bono and Angelina Jolie as the newest charter member of the Hollywood U.N.
Last week her father told Greta Van Susteren, “She sees the light at the end of the [23-day] tunnel.” Just another thing that made her different from the rest of the prison population.
[Image of Paris right after her release from jail.]
liz | 1:08 PM | Uncategorized
Whew!
Just got home from talking to a DBSA group in Princeton, NJ, and I want to thank Susan S. so very very very much for inviting me. I enjoyed meeting everyone, but I made a faux pas — it wouldn’t be me otherwise! — because I made some kind of comment that sounded perhaps as though I was denigrating social workers. But I wasn’t! I swear to god! I don’t know what comes over me.
Let it be said that social workers are the true heroes of this society. They do the most important work, with the least renumeration. And the least acknowledgement.
It was my first time using Philly Car Share, and of course I got lost, and it took me a million years to get home. So I’m just taking the meds now — several hours late. What does this mean to you? I won’t be blogging till later in the afternoon tomorrow.
liz | 12:58 AM | Uncategorized
And that’s our last word on the subject!
Today’s final dispatch, from Kent R. Thanks to everyone for their participation.
I think some of what I said may have been mischaracterized slightly here. My original story about not taking drugs wasn’t offered as a critique of psychiatry itself so much as a refutation of the claims by some powerful and well-funded groups that people with a psychiatric diagnosis must take some kind of medication pretty much forever, and must even be forced to do so if they don’t take them voluntarily. I know that no system is perfect, but I think that systems with the power to force people to accept their treatments have more of a responsibility to do things right than systems that have no tools of force or coercion at their disposal.
I don’t have a lot of time right now to get into a lot of details about the evils of psychiatry, so I’ll just refer you to a couple of posts from another blog (Allison Hymes’ “Charlottesville Prejudice Watch”) that do get into some specifics about this issue:
In What Reality is an Increased Death Rate Evidence of Improved Treatment?”
<a href="http://hymes.wordpress.com/2007/06/16/common-myths-about-the-commitment-process-in-virginia-and-elsewhere/#comments
“>Common Myths About the Commitment Process in Virginia and Elsewhere
liz | 5:06 PM | Uncategorized
Just cutting and pasting, people
In our ongoing debate about psych meds, Joe writes:
The paradox is that “medication management” may be the only “care” persons seeking outpatient services can access. It is the perfect storm – an underfunded, under-resourced mental health system attempting to cope with an ever increasing service population where complex human issues are addressed by medication alone. The situation is made worse when consumer expectations including expected outcomes are largely driven by false representations. Services are often claimed to be available on demand, comprehensive, culturally competent, effective, evidenced based and predicated on the principles of wellness and recovery. One merely need reach out for help and all will be provided, not.
Medication is simply a tool which is neither appropriate nor effective for everyone. (See both the CATIE and STAR*D studies.) Moreover, strict reliance on medication is antithetical to representations of consumer empowerment and consumer choice. There are too many personal issues and needs that can’t be medicated away. There has yet to be a medication that cures loneliness, provides a hug when one is sorely needed, houses the homeless, resolves family, workplace or social issues, raises self esteem, fosters a sense of self worth, and so forth.
[Image of a real vintage Thorazine ad from Deco Dog's Ephemera. In the first panel, the guy is in the hospital. In the second panel, he's so frickin' happy to be home on Thorazine, he's willing to hold yarn for the woman he lives with -- probably his mom.]
liz | 2:09 PM | Uncategorized
Yum yum: debate continued
This just in, from Laura:
Could Kent possibly comment on what he believes encompasses the evil side of the psychiatry industry? I get that he believes there is one, and I’m inclined to agree to a certain extent, but let’s talk specifics. Just being glad one is not taking psych meds and doing reasonably well is not an actual critique. Maybe I missed a post somewhere??
No system is perfect and no treatment plan can work for everyone as we are all so different. I think there are many incarcerated people, however, that would love an opportunity to experience psychiatry in its current state. It’s sort of a continuum, in my mind. But let’s hear some call to action points from Kent.
And from Adam:
I definitely agree with Kent – the system as it stands does a lot of damage. And surely, it does take courage to ask for help – and absolutely, there are people who HAVE been helped. But I think that it also takes courage to trust yourself and your own judgment enough to say, this is NOT helping me, this is NOT safe for me.
liz | 12:35 PM | Uncategorized
Yum yum: more healthy debate
Here’s Kent R. again, responding to some comments to his post of yesterday. These issues are live ones here, and I strongly encourage continued dialogue on them.
I don’t take medications or the mental health system frivolously at all. But in my experience the mental health system in the United States is much more likely to be a source of harm than of help. (Though, as I think I indicated in my story, I see that it also has some possibility for good). In some ways, I am lucky to have survived psychiatric treatment at all, since many people who have had encounters with psychiatry similar to mine have not. Their stories are seldom told.
Both the opponents of psychiatry as well as its proponents are often very passionate about their views. Usually I avoid expressing such extreme passion – I try very hard to be logical about things. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t thought very seriously about the things I speak of, or that I don’t feel very strongly about some of them. I don’t really believe in the medical model that modern psychiatry presents, but I don’t object to other people believing that way themselves – because I strongly believe in the right of people to make their own decisions and take responsibility for the consequences of their decisions. Most people seem to have some kind of psychological problems, and I don’t see such a sharp line between crazy and sane, but rather more of a continuum of different degrees of severity.
It’s just that the overall bad of the system seems to so outweigh the good that I think it is something more to avoid than to seek out. I know some people have had very positive experiences with the mental health system. They may have never seen its evil side, but that doesn’t mean such a side doesn’t exist. Is it courage to run towards something that you have seen do great damage, or stupidity? When you have had a lot of experience running from a monster that is often destructive, you aren’t likely to ever turn to that monster for assistance.
liz | 11:26 AM | Uncategorized
