Blogs
Traumatic experience of many kinds, as well as repeated exposure to trauma, can lead to PTSD. Our guest, Michele Rosenthal, experienced a very traumatic event at the age of 13 and lived 24 years before a diagnosis with PTSD helped her to heal.
Today I read another article on a reasonable person's assertion psychiatric medication doesn't work. The evidence is thin, they say, and the studies don't always show a meaning difference between the drug and the placebo. According to them, everyone with a mental illness doing better on psych meds is experiencing the placebo effect.
OK, so let's look at this for a minute.
I have always been very open about my past struggles with alcohol abuse and eating disorders. I also struggled with generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and self harm. I often felt like the only one who struggled with so many comorbid diagnoses. The reality is people rarely struggle with only one disorder. We simply do not fit in the pretty boxes of diagnoses, nor are we supposed to.
I attended a meeting last night of a community health care consumers group. Essentially, they are a group that seeks to inform and educate the public on local and national policy making, while also taking the temperature of the public and their view on certain aspects of health care. One of the attendees was discussing all of the technological advancements in medicine in the last half-century, but duly noted was a lack in advancement (aside from pharmacology) in the area of mental health and treating mental illness.
This got my wheels turning.
Sometimes borderline personality disorder (BPD) can make us do extremely stupid things. A case in point happened after a heated argument with my mother. I stormed out of the house into a below-freezing night, with only one spare set of clothes (khaki pants and a short-sleeved T-shirt), very little money, and no plan. My mother's anger quickly turned into fear and when I returned the next day, I learned she'd considered filing a missing persons report.
It's no secret that psychiatric illness is treated as a whole different animal than "physical" illness. I find myself comparing the two often, usually trying to determine the best way to cope with Bob and his behaviors. Perhaps the most prominent difference (or, in my opinion, at least the most frustrating) is the elusive nature of psychiatric diagnosis.
So far all my posts here have been from the parental point of view. As you may know, I am the mother of a wonderful kid, now 29, who was unlucky enough to develop paranoid schizophrenia in his mid-teens (diagnosed at last by age 20). My book Ben Behind His Voices, is told mostly the parental perspective - though writings from Ben himself as well as from his sister, Ali, round out the story as best we can.
The title of this blog, however, is Mental Illness in the Family - and so I don't want to leave out the experiences of siblings, spouses, and children. This post is about - and for - you.
I have taught NAMI's Family-to-Family course over a dozen times, as both teacher and trainer (guiding others to becomes teachers in Connecticut), and each time I am reminded that my experience as parent shares much with the other "relative groups" - but not all.
At some point in the past 40 years some (undoubtedly) new-age guru decided saying nice things to yourself in the mirror was the key to happiness.
"Yay me. I'm so great. Look at me go."
Really? Seriously? You need to look in the mirror and say that to yourself? And you're buying it? Are you four?
It takes two to tango. I despise that phrase because it implies equal responsibility for the abuse inherent in an abusive relationship. It is true that for every abuser, there is a victim of abuse. If the victim refused to stay, there would be no abuse at all. While that is true, it puts equal responsibility for the abuse onto the victim, and that isn't right (Things Victims Say and Do To Cause Abuse).
Our guest, Chrisa Hickey, is a mom like so many other women, but in some ways she is quite extraordinary. She parents a son with schizoaffective disorder, Tim, who was diagnosed at the age of 11. She shares with us the challenges of parenting a child with schizoaffective disorder (bipolar type), what the journey has been like and the reality of what they will likely face in the future.
My point being, I'm right there with you. I hate the rollercoaster. I just want to live life without being in a state of constant fight or flight mode, only for his character to change and de-escalate and I fall for the person I fell for all over again.
Exhausting is a horrible word. The understatement of all understatements, if you will.
I wish there were better support groups for this kind of mental health condition.