Travels Through Psychiatry

  Seeking help in a mental health crisis is daunting, especially when that involves entering the emergency department (ED) at a hospital. For me, it’s always been like stepping through a portal into a realm with no certainty of respect, efficiency, or good choices. Yet, step one in accessing acute care starts in the ED, where blood and urine tests and EKGs are run, and where mental health assessments happen, and where the wait time for an available psych bed can become excruciatingly slow. I’ve often been through ED screening and always thought it could be done less harshly, without the sharp edges, in a way that doesn’t leave me, and other patients, further traumatized. And now, a hospital in my area has invested funds into improving the psych ED experience, providing a specialized waiting area and an alternative to psych unit inpatient stays. This is long overdue and will hopefully become a model for many other healthcare systems. (In this blog post, I won’t be naming the hospita...

  I’ve been called by these two descriptors throughout my life: inconsistent and elusive. At this point, rather than hearing those as insults, I accept. It’s not that I embrace; I accept. My life has been a series of partial accomplishments that I abandon. My life has been a series of friendships that I let drift off with the wind. My life has been about gathering courage and belief in self and desire to reach a vision, taking steps, impressing myself, then hitting fear. I’ve left jobs and schools and projects and groups because I became afraid and self-conscious about others seeing me stumble. Even the mental illness I carry around, bipolar disorder, is about cycling through highs, and then falling into lows, potentially losing my way as I shift and rock to and fro. I’d like to know more about my patterns, at least in this regard. I see a therapist now who makes me feel comfortable and I talk on and for an hour, going over my history and how I function. My therapist says I have ...

  My mind and body balance all aspects of me so well at times, then not. I’ll be thinking I really have it together, creatively drawing and painting, enjoying cooking and tidying and going out for walks, even liking some light socializing out in the big world. My goal is to move forward, carrying stability achieved as I accomplish and develop more skill and expression in art, as I find home activities and exercise and being in real life more natural and less infused with anxiety and need to force myself. So, there I’ll be, pulling elements of good life for me together, and then a small piece breaks off. Maybe I’m extra tired, or maybe I get a twinge of how useless it all is, or maybe the buzz of doing gets so exciting it spins all colors into a whiteout and I can’t tell what I’m moving through. So, I stop, a little bit, joined by more bits, until I’m walled in by what I feel I can’t do, until I’m paralyzed inside, just gazing out a small window and wondering, so bitterly, why eve...

  I wrote a guest blog post for Psychiatry at the Margins, which is available to read at this link: link to Psychiatry at the Margins

  For me, psychiatric treatment began in 1980 and I thought it ended in 2019. I’d only found misunderstanding, abuse, bad attitudes, and overmedicating there, culminating in a psychiatrist stopping 5 of my 7 meds without any taper, leaving me with nothing but a deep imprint on my psyche. But I’ve always clawed my way out of the pit, chipped and bruised, and this last insult is no exception. So, how have I been recovering from all that badness in the name of care? There’s no guide for healing and finding goodness again after mistreatment in mental health systems, so I improvise. And I follow what feels right to do, trust my intuition, because I don’t want to sink into an abyss. At first, my anger spilled all over the place, into every relationship, online, and into the mental health center complaint department. I was like an evangelist shouting about psychiatry’s evils to the populace, determined to save some souls and have justice prevail. After quite a while of this, I simmere...

  Around age 8, I became fearful of bugs possibly being in my bed, and I can’t remember any incident that set this off, but I started doing a bedtime ritual. I’d pick up my pillow, look under it, then repeat a specific number of times. This is where my obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) began. My OCD was pervasive, but not so pronounced that it interfered heavily with functioning. And I kept it secretive, not wanting anyone to know I had special routines to ward off the bad. As OCD rituals increased, I often didn’t associate them with warding off anything in particular. It was more about feeling anxious if the placements and counting weren’t properly done. Also, I don’t recall how new OCD practices were added, which was happening all the time, or how they might be modified, these actions becoming a part of me, automatic so to speak. I had protocols to follow, all day long, morning to night. Most involved placing objects a certain way, lifting them, then placing them down again...