Travels Through Psychiatry

  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...

  I was 14 when I first encountered a mental health clinician. She was a psychologist, and there I was in her office, after a suicidal gesture, depressed, feeling very isolated within family issues, and full of fear about how to grow up. This psychologist administered psychological tests, including lengthy questionnaires and Rorschach inkblot tests. The process was intimidating and made me feel odd. At the end, when all summations were made, I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, but no explanation was offered, and, in fact, my mom and I were told not to probe into it. I was referred to a child psychiatrist for therapy and things didn’t improve. That clinician had me draw a picture and then tell a line of a story, and then she’d add a picture and add her line to the story, and so on, and it was a bit infantilizing and failed to open me up to discuss my problems. I quit that therapy and struggled along on my own. A couple of years later, I found a book, this book:...

 *This post is a discussion of self-harm. Though it doesn't contain any graphic descriptions, please don't read it if you feel it might be too unsettling or set you off. Self-harm is in my mental illness history, and I’m grateful I haven’t had urges in over 2 years. But I’ll never be free from the prominent scars on my arms, legs, and torso that draw unwanted attention when uncovered and always stay in my mind. People (mental health professionals and fellow patients alike) don't understand my hopefully former self-harming. It was brutal, not the type of temporary relief from pain many do. It was, at times, nearly suicidal, though that was never my intent. My motivation was to get into a psych unit, even as that was a crapshoot, an uncertainty about which hospital I'd land in and what type of staff would be overseeing me. I wanted out of my head, or just to be cared for, in episodes where I felt out of myself and lost in the depth of life. It was bipolar and obsessive-...