Why I Went to a
Psychiatrist in the First Place

YOU can fool yourself on a lot of things. Even unintentionally. For thirteen years I have had mood swings that have been damaging to me in every part of my life and it never occurred to me that there was a problem. Never. But that sort of luck does not last forever.

In October 1996, I lost the capability to cope. Or rather I was doing so much, that I couldn't cope with it all. At the time I was the manager of the major downtown park in my city - a high maintenance, long hour, high stress job.

I was also the secretary of the Planning Society in my country; was instigator for setting up a web site for my old high school; was laying the groundwork to open my own company offering City Planning services; was helping rewrite the payroll software that my family's business used; and together with a close friend had just finished coordinating one of the largest celebrations for the Hindu festival of Divali we had ever had in Trinidad Tobago.

I can do this when I'm in a hypomanic (mildly manic) state. It's easy enough. But I'm a rapid cycler – which means that I spend one week being hypomanic, and one week being relatively mildly depressed. So I would spend one week being really efficient and then one week accomplishing very little. For a while the up parts of the cycle were able to compensate for the depressions. But by October I had reached the point where I had stopped going to work completely in the depression part of the cycle and work started piling up. And then things got really bad.

Sometime, in November, I disappeared for two weeks. No one could find me, not the people at work, not my friends, not my parents or my brother. No one. My parents thought I had been killed by car-thieves. When I eventually resurfaced, in apparently good order, my family was too happy to see me to ask many questions - none of which I could answer sensibly anyway. I was the prodigal son returned.

I took back up life as normal. The vast majority of the people either didn't notice I was missing or thought I was just working so hard that I didn't have time to go out with them. I was the manager at my work so no one questioned my disappearance. And incredibly, I didn't think anything was wrong. It was as if there was this blind spot over my memory that prevented me from seeing what had happened and realising I needed help (I still have trouble remembering such episodes).

My parents persuaded me to see a psychiatrist, a old skinny man a generation or two before me who asked me a few questions, explained in a perfunctory manner that depression could be alleviated by medication, and prescribed Paxil, an antidepressant. By the end of the session, I had decided that I did not like him, that I clearly could not be suffering from depression, and that this was a waste of my time. But I got the medicine anyway, took it for a week, and then stopped it when it seemed to have no effect.

Christmas 1996 was a miserable time. Everything limped along at work. Nothing went badly but none of the plans I had had for making Christmas special took place. I knew what was happening but was unable to do anything about it. It was as if I was living a broken life in which I was dealing with what seemed to be crisis after crisis. But I was also an aware observer behind a piece of glass who knew exactly what was wrong but was unable to get the me who was living to change habits or actions.

I remember Christmas being lustreless. I dutifully purchased Christmas presents (at the last moment naturally), gave them out and received my presents in return. There was no joy in seeing my niece and nephew get their presents - indeed it was almost unbearable to be in the noisy house with my parents and brother's family and I escaped as soon as it was polite.

In keeping with my fluctuating moods, between Christmas morning and the following afternoon I somehow arranged with cousins to have a Old Year's party at my house. I remember it as special because my grandmother attended and surprised all her grandchildren by dancing at the change of the years and keeping up with the best of us until the party finished around 3:30 in the morning.

Within the first week in January my grandmother became gravely ill, and about one month later she died peacefully and I think happily in her bed surrounding by her sons and daughters and clouds of her grandchildren and angels.

I don't think I have ever quite gotten over the death of my grandmother. Even when you become an adult, your retain an image that your elders are indestructible, that time has passed them by and that they will remain forever with you, for you.

In addition, I do know that for a very long time I felt that if I had not had the party and if she had had a quieter time, perhaps she would be alive today.

When you are bipolar, the psychiatrists often ask you what might have triggered your mood swings. During January and February, nothing had changed to improve my overall situation. My periods of mild depressions and hypomania were continuing to cause my work and my life to get more and more out of hand in spite of the best I could do. I was sane in the conventional sense of the word in that if you had spoken to me you would have seen me (more often than not) as an intelligent person with a good grasp of the problems and conflicts in my life and with an excellent grasp on how I should be solving them.

The problem was that I just wasn't solving my problems at all.

I did not see my problems as anything other than overwork and procrastination on my part. What was happening was that I was seeing the symptoms of being manic depressive and not the underlying problem of being manic depressive. I was trying to cure symptoms when the very nature of being manic depressive made it impossible for me to actually do so.

By the end of February I was already in a situation which I could never win, could not even gain ground for more than two weeks before falling into a worse situation than before. And now I was saddled with the loss of my grandmother and the feeling that it was my fault.

I know what failing is like because I've often been there. But back in 1997 it had reached an extreme stage. All my projects in work or out of work were failing,.

In a way that was mostly ok. What was intolerable was that I, me, couldn't fix them. My projects weren't failing, I was. In my depressions I felt that I would never be of value to myself or anyone else ever again. In my hypomanic periods I would scramble feverishly and in vain to do something, anything, to shore up the things I was doing. And while I was doing this I was also standing on the sidelines watching in horror as everything that gave my life meaning lost familiarity, faded, failed, and became meaningless.

By March the weeks of depression had become ascendant. I began go out with my friends less, and do everything less. My house began to look like a student's apartment as dirty clothes and dishes piled up and books sprung up everywhere all covered with dust. My garden transformed itself into a small forest. I began to live on fast food and I put on quite a bit of weight. I began to think of my house as a haven, a cave to which I could retreat at the end of work and where I stayed until I was forced to go to work. On weekends I did not emerge until Monday morning, and then only very reluctantly.

And eventually I stopped going to work. It didn't happen all at once, but rather I would reach to work later and later until finally a day would arrive when I didn't make it in at all. And on the days I didn't make it in I would disappear. Basically, I would roam around without telling anyone where I was - anxious because I was doing something I considered wrong, but not being able to stop what I was doing or even think coherently about it.

It turns out the anxiety is an inherent symptom of my depression, but I did not know that at the time and just chalked it up to yet another personal failure. Cowardice was added to my list of character flaws.

This disappearing or not wanting to see or meet with people got stronger the worse things got. In a way this felt like a reasonable response - I was doing something very stupid, I had no answer for it, and I really did not know how to explain it to anyone. The same anxiety that made me it impossible for me to go to work and caused me to disappear made it difficult to return home on afternoons to face the answering machine, my parents, a concerned friend, anybody. Eventually I started leaving home at seven in the morning and returning after midnight just to avoid having to talk with anyone.

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