Lifestyle

Diary of a Broken Mind

At thirteen, it is clinical depression that will be aided by a prescription written with feigned condolences from Lilly, singing how the ‘medicine goes down’, conspiratorially in her mesmerising voice.

At fourteen, it is self-harm tendencies and reactive depression, caused apparently by a break up with a teenage boy the year above me. A shy, reticent boy who always looked somehow uncomfortable, awkward, whether in the presence of his rumbustious friends from the football field or girls, who stood gossiping in perfectly formed formations, with hair tied tightly in neat buns and faces made up to look ten years older.

At fifteen, it is the slow burn of an anarchic relationship. The rumblings of a mature, stifling adulthood and the wielding expectation of intimacy when romance and its resultant euphoria seem somehow amiss, wrapped in a surge of unknown depressions and defeats, as one sits perplexed on the bedroom floor with a bottle of paracetamol.

At seventeen, it is given a different, quite unexpected but serious name such as Postnatal Depression, as I limply hold a newborn with the sheer responsibility of motherhood biting at my heels. The revelation that ‘to be with child’, the more romantic term obviously than ‘to be pregnant’ which simply conjures up images of a young irresponsible girl, telling her stricken and hugely disappointed mother that she is pregnant, is so very different to lying on a bed with a real live infant strapped to your chest. The enormity of the situation, the inability to escape this chapter of your life, the nervousness and shame that will not allow you to let slip that you feel that the tantalising and gloriously expected bonding has gone astray leaves you alone, isolated and depressed.

At nineteen, with the remnants of Postnatal Depression finally departing, you start to feel hopeful that life will change. Motherhood will come more naturally, bonding which has now delightfully taken place will somehow get you through the proceeding years of motherhood, so that you have the opportunity to look back and not wince accordingly.

At twenty, you are not so sure that optimism was appropriate, that instead of the ravages of postnatal depression, you now instead just have the ravages of depression. A dull, grey persuasive quality colours your life, like a sticky insipid disenchanting dye that morphs aggressively with everything it touches and slowly contaminates the atmosphere.

At twenty-two, the anti depressants are old news, the black unsettling moods and days in bed legendary. Now though, there is a different mix, something added, rather than taken away. The weeks proceeding the stifling wretchedness, are filled with a stupendous energy, darkness ebbing away to be replaced by florescent blinding oranges, blues, green and pinks. A body so used to low energy, is now pulsating with an inextinguishable vitality and stamina, as ideas flow, as words rhyme and thus fall obsessively and deliciously from one’s lips. Euphoria is now one’s constant companion, everything is now for the taking, limits falling away as you pirouette around the room, dressed in bright and garish odd ensembles. The eternal need to create something spectacular from the vast away of ideas that fire through your synapses, to do something visionary that only a person of your nature could do. To finally become an enlightened creature or better still to become Buddha himself, as children clamber over his restive form and snails sit atop his beautifully proportioned head as you go out and share the understandings and wisdom you have learnt. Grandiosity knows no bounds!

However, as these episodes of wonderment were not heartedly discussed or even admitted to when in general conversations with yet another psychiatrist, my diagnosis remained somewhat the same. Clinical Depression, Reactive Depression, Postnatal Depression, Recurrent Depression with anxiety…….the list goes on.

It was all too obvious that I was not going to be able to hide these other episodes forever. Eventually, someone was going to notice the avalanche of energy, the inability to stop, the worrying lack of sleep, the rapid and hard to follow speech, the sheer elation or the unsettling irritability, the continuous amount of ideas that flowed from my fired up brain, the money spent, the relationships lost……………..

I had gone along to see my G.P. I hardly remember why as everything else contained within that, appointment pales in significance compared to the three words that left his matter of fact thin lips. Finally, a sense of clarity prevailed, a diagnosis that made sense in my hard fought sense of sanity.

In the intervening days, my Psychiatrist would agree with the diagnosis, as I carefully gave a more complete and nuanced history and then inquired as to what would be the next step. Still so young and inexperienced, I somehow believed that the Psychiatrist with his medley of drugs could fix a broken mind, if indeed it was broken.

Over the proceeding years, drugs would be tried and forcefully rejected, therapies undertaken that failed to help, courses taken with other patients that taught me little and books, websites and journals scoured. Still with the idea that it was somebody else’s responsibility to somehow fix me, to make me brand new, to carve out a life worth living, the ego was fierce, the tantrums explosive.

One day, compassion would be heaved upon my young ego bound mind, the lack of responsibility remembered vividly, the long battle I fought, and the tentative first steps. Those life changing words, uttered by my kindly G.P,  would some day be seized upon, as not a mental illness but in fact one of the gifts that I have been fortunate to be given. Those words; Bipolar Affective Disorder.

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