30 Days of Mental Illness Challenge: Day Three

Question: What treatment or coping skills are most effective for you?

*sigh* Okay, dammit. I guess I have to include a “hidden” post now. It’s not in your computer settings and there’s no “hide me” button. (I wish I owned a “hide me” button. But then, doesn’t everyone?) This is something I wrote out on Day one, but didn’t include. It’s tightly tied to the methods that calm me and will help me answer the list a little more completely.

Here it is! TA-DA!

Day 1.5 Question: Any other diagnoses? Explain it a little.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

About 2 years ago, I heard about a sexual abuse survivor’s support group. I always knew it happened to me: as a child and again as a teenager, by two different people. I also knew the bullying I received in school was a little different from the others’. I was SINGLED OUT. I was never into the popular stuff the others were into, and besides that, I had a blossoming mental illness with extremely early onset. (I lost touch with reality totally by the time I was14.) It only served to isolate me and complicate matters. Although I already had a therapist, I had never been truly honest with them. I decided to find a therapist I could trust and relate to right before I found the survivor group. I finally laid out my story.

I argued with myself over this post. Should I, or shouldn’t I? Honesty that might heal, or silence that might protect? A friend pointed out that I have already been scathingly honest as it is with Lost On Ethel. It also brought up the question of how many people have been hurt (mental illness or no) with the so-called “protection” of silence in the matter of abuse? So I name my second diagnosis here, but I really don’t feel I need to hand you the details like a gift-wrapped box of poisoned bon bons. The minutiae of my past are dented and bruised by too many hands already. There are enough fingerprints in my private spaces to last me a lifetime. I’ve swam through enough muck to know the danger of an audience I can’t see.

“It’s no wonder,” you’ll say, “that the haunting, horrible Hands grope at her. It’s no wonder she doesn’t sleep or feel safe. It’s no wonder she doesn’t trust us.” And I don’t. Not really. Sometimes my delusions and hallucinations and paranoia are simply flashbacks to a childhood I wish had never happened.

But this is not for you to worry about. I do what I can with my new therapist. Even some of my “treatment resistant” symptoms of schizophrenia have subsided from psychotherapy and EMDR. The groping hands are less intrusive, and I am FINALLY learning (at this late stage), about boundaries and real social interaction. I draw a line, then, by sparing you the blood and gore and guts of my tale in full. I’m not proud to have been so horribly wounded, but I am honest enough to say that I have been scarred and left a little dead by what others have done. How this affects the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia – and how schizophrenia affects PTSD – is a story for another day. But this is key: if someone out there is reading along and this turn slaps them in the face with an ice hand and they realize they are not alone in whatever diagnosis they might have, I’ll have done something worthwhile. 

collage of my brain matter 2014

… And now back to our regularly scheduled program.

Day Three

Obviously, I do continue to take medication for schizophrenia. Without it, I spiral into a down-sliding vortex of delusions that eventually lead to catatonia. It’s nearly impossible to communicate with me in such a condition: just ask anyone who attempted to relate to me in high school.

I don’t name the names of the drugs I have to swallow to create my prosthetic synapses. I don’t feel it’s a good idea to suggest that what works in my case works for anyone else. Besides that, I’m not a big endorser of Big Pharma. (America seems to prefer to medicate the living fuck out of people to meet standards we don’t even comprehend. If you don’t agree, take a poll of 10 different people’s idea of “normal” and compare them. I’ll bet you’ll get at least 11 opinions.) I choose to sacrifice my body for the sake of my mind, but I refuse to pigeonhole another person into mandated treatment. However, I will say anti-psychotics have helped me and they continue to do so. But they’re not the only trick in my magic show.

Talk therapy and dream analysis have helped me unravel quite a bit, although without a specific therapy (called EMDR), it does little more than help me identify my feelings (which is important), and keep me coping for another week.

EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) is a fucking Relief Bucket of Wonder. I wrote out the words in the acronym so it will be easier for you to look it up if you wanted to. Perhaps you’re already aware of the benefits it affords people with trauma, though, and I don’t want to waste time explaining its finer points. I hope it suffices to say the hallucinations of the Groping Hands have been recognized in EMDR for what they are (flashbacks), and I have almost completely reprocessed them.

Mindfulness is a great therapeutic endeavor for me. It puts me back inside a dissociated body that needs paying attention to. Once I feel my stomach cramping before the stress hits, I know how to combat the stress. I pay attention. It makes a bigger difference than you’d think.

These are the treatments that keep me grounded. Of coping skills, I only know two.

The first is creativity. I write and draw and collage and knit my way through the heavy days, when the world is a weight in my skull. Those are the days I have to be alone, the days when I need insulation and solitude.  My poems are cryptic, doused in a language that loves riddles. My short stories are often disjointed and not-quite-right. My doodles are painful to absorb. Knitting is a great distraction. Its challenges keep my mind occupied, and its rhythm calms me at the same time. My journal entries (and I guess this blog too), are the most straight forward ways I have of communicating my struggle for sanity.

The second is the community I’ve accumulated around me for support. There is my family, who are always willing to embrace me and hold the space for me and my crazy… even when it’s out in the open on my sleeve. Then there are the friends I’ve gathered in the last few years, when I finally decided to step out of my shell and realized it’s okay to reach out. (You know who you are, and thank you.)

Wow. This was a long post. I hope the collage aided in the consumption of so much information. If not, I hope you come back and finish reading sometime. I also hope I helped someone.

These are large chunks of me. Be kind to them, please.