Blogs
Living with a chronic, serious, or terminal illness is tough. It is life altering and with it often comes a lot of emotional stress. Issues like depression, anxiety, isolation and helplessness are common to experience. Our guest, Dr. Ann Becker-Schutte, joins us to discuss helping those affected by chronic and serious illness to live a balanced life.
Dr. Marsha Linehan, best known for creating dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), admitted in a New York Times article that she struggles with mental illness, once being called "one of the most disturbed patients in the hospital." She would diagnose her troubled teenage self as having borderline personality disorder, or BPD. So why does this matter?
So, interesting thing. Mental illness has a tendency to run roughshod through a person's life. Everything in life goes by the wayside to make room for the unbearable being of crazy. You know you're alive because you're in pain.
And then, against all odds, or at the very least against some odds, you start to feel better. It's a miracle. Breath and life and oxygen and delight fill the lungs. Suddenly life is easy. Cupboards get organized, relationships get mended and Work Gets Done. Life is Good.
Why, then, is it so freakin' scary?
Telling the truth is one component of integrity, but integrity has to do with being "whole" and "complete" in what we do, believe, and say. Our behaviors, thoughts, and words must align in order to have integrity. During the course of my abusive marriage, I discovered I'd lost my integrity and that I told a whole truck load of lies to boot.
I didn't like myself because I was not saying or doing what I believed to be right. Although I lied to protect myself from abuse, the abuse of my most valued characteristic, my integrity, hurt more deeply than my husband's put-downs and wrongful conclusions.
Before telling you how I became a big fat liar, I'd like to remind all victims of abuse that, to your abuser, it doesn't really matter what you say if s/he's in the mood to abuse. In the later years of my marriage, I chose to only tell the truth and there was no difference in the amount of abuse I underwent.
However, having always considered myself an honest person (before realizing how many lies I actually told my husband), my lying had decimated my integrity. I wanted my integrity back.
The process of diagnosis and discovering that you are living with adult ADHD can be trying and difficult. Living well with it is an even bigger challenge. Our guest, Kelly Babcock, a.k.a. Taylor McKinlay, and author of the blog, Tao of Taylor, lives with adult ADHD and does the best he can to make the most of his diagnosis.
Tops in the NY Times this week are reactions to last week's story about Deshawn James Chappell, a man with schizophrenia accused of killing one of his caregivers in Massachusetts. There are those (like our family this week, with Ben back in the hospital after six years of success) who experience first-hand how a cutback in services (to save a penny in the budget) can result in a much-more-costly hospital stay, and the necessity to repeat recovery steps that had worked before. This doesn't even address the human cost. Still, how much worse when the outcome is a horrifying tragedy like the one in reported in the Times; one that many agree could, and should, have been prevented by proper care.
Among the points made in the reactions:
From a letter signed by John Olham, President of the American Psychiatric Association :
"only a very small percentage of people who live with schizophrenia ever become violent, and then it is usually when the treatment system fails them and they discontinue their medications. "
Marilyn and Edwin Andrews of Massachusetts wrote:
"When politicians try to balance serious budget problems on the most vulnerable among us, we all pay the consequences. The mentally ill may not have the influence of the wealthy or the cachet of popular programs, but they most certainly need comprehensive, decent care. "
Solutions? Better care, managed well, can prevent so much relapse.
Depersonalization is a way of experiencing the self. It's a form of dissociation that manifests in a variety of ways that all boil down to a sense of detachment or separateness from one's self. And though depersonalization is a chronic part of living with Dissociative Identity Disorder, it isn't something only those of us with DID experience. For most people, episodes of depersonalization are transient, infrequent, and typically occur during periods of high stress.
Psychiatric treatment is a relationship between you, your mental illness, your drugs, and your doctor(s). That relationship is what matters most when it comes to ensuring medications treat actual mental health issues.
Taking the meds out of clinical practice and studying them in a lab is not only difficult but results in mixed outcomes. The kind we see reflected in the studies which the press pick up on.
Just this week I've read that the drugs don't work, that it's all a big fraud, and that the next Big Pharma pill will cure everything.
Psychiatry, like democracy, is the worst form of treatment except for all the others that have been tried
Eating disorders and loneliness. It is not something we speak or write about often. It is painful to think about being lonely. But I believe people with eating disorders are often very lonely. It is the nature of these illnesses. But it doesn't have to be this way. I would like to shine some light into these dark corners of loneliness, and perhaps help other people with eating disorders feel less alone.
Thank you for your comment. I'm sorry you're having such overwhelming experiences. That sounds hard.
I would say that when I get really wrapped up in talking to myself because of hypomania, it's similar but I don't feel like I'm in an imagined place or dreaming. That's the part that may be concerning.
If you're experiencing distress because of these experiences, you absolutely should tell your doctor -- and make it clear that it's causing your distress. It does sounds like it falls into the mild psychosis category, but that doesn't occur with cyclothymia. That only occurs in bipolar I. Of course, you may be experiencing bipolar and psychotic symptoms, just in an unusual way. (There is a category of bipolar disorder for this called "Other Specified Bipolar and Related Disorder.") https://www.healthyplace.com/bipolar-disorder/bipolar-types/what-are-the-types-of-bipolar-disorder
Experiences like that are normally treated with antipsychotics. A low dose of one of those medications may be just what you need. Antipsychotics are serious medication, though, so you want to carefully consider whether you think it's worth taking them. Thoroughly discussing your options with your doctor should help you make that decision: https://www.healthyplace.com/thought-disorders/schizophrenia-articles/antipsychotic-medications-for-treating-psychotic-illness
If you choose to go down the medication route, go slowly and continually assess along the way. There are many antipsychotics available, so it can take time to find the right one for you.
It's really good that you've recognized these issues in yourself. Now you can work on lessening them.
Good luck.
-- Natasha Tracy