Professional Help
What do you do when you are dying? When your body registers
that you’re about to die, it fights to survive, doesn’t it? In those potentially
fatal moments, a moment that could be your last, everything in you kicks up a
gear to try and avoid death. When a fire starts, usually you don’t sit in your
chair and think about your own quality of life and whether or not it’s worth
getting out the burning house – or do you? At which point did my illness become
something that overtook all my common sense? At which point did my moods derail
my life? How do I stop?
I try to stop myself from thinking, but I’m thinking about
thinking and it makes it worse. I punish myself for thinking then I get
addicted to punishing myself. I hate myself for punishing myself, so I become
obsessed with hating myself. One after another, like dominoes – watching your
life fall down in slow motion. There wasn’t a second I just blinked and thought
‘Wow, what devastation!’, I recognized my actions as I done them and I knew the
destructive nature of my moods but I couldn’t stop it. My sensibility was frozen;
the only way to thaw it out was to get someone to intervene.
My nurses always compliment my self-awareness; in fact,
everyone compliments my self-awareness and my ability to articulate what others
can’t conceive of. I think in such a peculiar and different way, I am a very
deep person and that gives me a new breed of intellect, which is creative – the
capacity to understand what others can’t. It is my purest quality and it is the
point that makes me unique to others, I am the woman who men get to know and
get stuck in a loop of conversation about their innermost thoughts with. I am
intimate and I am able to make sense of a lot. When I go into an episode,
because of the qualities of myself, most of the time I will be able to pick up
when I am unwell. I know when I’m taking ill and I know my moods very well.
However, where I struggle is getting help – not because I don’t know where to
get it, or don’t realise I need it – but because my mind is telling me just to
suffer through it.
I am more inclined to get help for my mania than my
depression. Mania stops me sleeping, makes me irritable and before I know it I’m
acting like this radical human being. Some people love Manic Mimi (Oh gosh, it
even has a ring to it!), but she’s beyond reckless and I can’t control what I’m
doing to the state where I lose my moral autonomy and start jumping out of moving
cars. Mania often means I get so reckless that I don’t care for fixing it,
because I always feel like I have no time to and sometimes, I even enjoy
periods of it. However, with a Manic episode – more frequently, comes the
psychosis. Sleep deprivation, irritability and then the psychosis – are the
factors that urge me to get help. These
symptoms tell me I’m manic, and because I’m very aware of psychosis, and I am
able to differentiate it as an illness, I always get help for it. With
depression, I tell myself that I know I am depressed but it’s just impossible
to stop and by the point where I even consider getting help – I just think ‘Why
should I? Who really cares?’. I elect to suffer because depression basks in
suffering. To my close ones, mania is easier to see than depression – perhaps because
Mania is loud and depression is quiet, so they urge me to receive help.
My mixed episodes of the last few months were rapid cycling,
I had never experienced that before. Every few days, every week, there would be
an opposite episode. My mood was entirely on a pendulum. It wasn’t until I
started having dangerous thoughts that I sought help, I remember thinking if I
took all my sleeping pills amongst the other drugs I keep and just lay in my
bath if I would die peacefully or not. Something in my brain was motioning me
towards doing something dangerous. I’ve never been a self-harmer, when I have
dangerous thoughts it isn’t to cope – it’s a plan to end my own suffering. I
remember after having that conversation with myself, which by the way was
usually a verbal conversation with myself aloud, that I decided my psychosis
was getting too intense and I just left my house and went to my local surgery
asking to see someone immediately. Something cracked in my head where I just
thought ‘I can’t let myself end up like that’, and I don’t know what it was at
all but I’m grateful I had that moment where I became immediately motivated to receive
emergency care. Maybe I was scared, maybe I found my common sense – I don’t
know, but I knew I had to see someone.
They do little assessments of you where they ask loads of
questions to make sure you’re able to return back to your own house after your
care. It’s like a little interview to trip you up, the way they ask questions
to try and figure out how you’re feeling – it feels odd. I got loaded back onto
my medications and some new ones, and I kept in touch with who I needed to –
just to support my recovery. This care is life long for Bipolar Disorder, so
what I’ve learned is: giving up my medications and my appointments will result
in me getting unwell again. The doctors are really nice and the nurses are
nicer. I’ve had a few psychiatrists I don’t get along with, although I’m
secretly convinced they try to aggravate me so they can ‘expose’ my episodes.
One thing they all have in common? They all try to help. Maybe I’ve just had a
positive experience, but keep going back to your doctor if you need them. I can’t
recommend enough how necessary it is to see a professional if you are not
feeling like yourself and it’s seriously affecting you and your daily
activities.
I’ve not had any lasting side effects; so far I think my
medications have been successful, as my mood feels very stable after just a few
weeks. There are things you can do to help yourself with your mental illness,
and I always say that it’s so important, but know when to see a professional. I
wish I could tell you all the ways I decided to improve my life and get to the
place I am now that I just decided to do for myself, but getting professional
help was one of those steps and I’m grateful for the nurses, doctors and
professionals who worked to save me.
