When You Picture Someone with Mental Illness, Picture Me in a Nice Tailored Suit

http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/osher-guensberg/when-you-picture-someone-with-a-mental-illness-picture-me-in-a_a_22082506/

by pmoriarty • 9 years ago

68 38 9 years ago

huffingtonpost.com.au

goldenkey7• 9 years ago

Ive lost my mind before. I had a manic episode, my first and only one. Felt immense euphoria. Saw incredible detail like rainbow diffraction of water from the sink faucet. I thought I was Jesus and there were only 2 forces in the world, pushes and pulls. Gravity aka dark light pulls. Light pushes (radiation pressure.)

I felt enlightened and had an altercation with the police who ended up beating the living shit out of me causing 3 herniated discs and TMJ that cause me agony and chronic pain daily. I have to take opiates to deal with the pain - otherwise I would be unable to have an active life.

This guy didn't experience what happens in most mental breakdowns. If you can get yourself to the doctor you have truly not lost your mind. But its a cute story.

Keep downvoting me for posting the hard truth. Real discourse...

lardo• 9 years ago

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Gatekeeping

safek5• 9 years ago

Since you posted the link, can you please share why you think gatekeeping in the sense sketched by those examples is necessarily a mistaken thing?

psyc• 9 years ago

I too had a manic episode, attained enlightenment, and then caught a beat-down from a police officer. The documentary "Emerging Proud" premiered today, and is relevant.

samatman• 9 years ago

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times...

goldenkey7• 9 years ago

I'll have to take a look at the documentary. Sorry that had to happen to you also. Guess we are brothers in arms. Thanks for sharing.

sha666sum• 9 years ago

This guy didn't experience what happens in most mental breakdowns.

Your case is really not what I would call "most mental breakdowns" and it's unfair to belittle someone else's issues because they don't match up to yours. Mental issues are an everyday reality for millions of people, and by their very nature might mean the world to those suffering from it while seeming insignificant to everyone else.

You don't need to emphasize the severity your own experience, feeling shit is not a competition.

goldenkey7• 9 years ago

You're taking things out of context. If you know to get to your doctor, you haven't "lost your mind." That's what I said. And it makes perfect sense.

xkcd-sucks• 9 years ago

“When you are crazy you [had better] learn to keep quiet.” ― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

kranitz• 9 years ago

That sounds horrible, and much worse than my experience with "losing it". I had a medication-induced hypomanic episode. I stopped eating and sleeping for three days, but never felt tired. I was paranoid, severely agitated and would fly into a rage over small things. I also had what are called "ideas of reference". I thought ordinary things I encountered were placed there specifically for me.

The solution was worse. I was put on risperidone to halt the episode. It was a total 180, in a bad way. I felt stupefied and sluggish. I couldn't put two thoughts together most of the day. I ate everything, everything; once to the point of vomiting. I had extremely vivid and bizarre nightmares nightly.

It was a Catch-22 situation. I needed the antidepressants to battle winter depression, but SSRIs were the only ones that worked. However, those have a well-known side effect of triggering mania in people (and in my case, for sure).

Happy ending is that I moved to the tropics and haven't had to take any medication and have had no relapses since the move.

goldenkey7• 9 years ago

Yeah those zombie antipsychotics are terrible. Whatever they fix is not worth the total anhedonia they cause. They can also cause severe liver damage. Glad you found a way to cure your ailment.

ebiester• 9 years ago

He lost it in a different way than you lost it, but it doesn't mean he didn't lose it.

goldenkey7• 9 years ago

He went to a doctor. He by very definition, did not "lose his mind" considering he had enough of his faculties to goto the doctor.

abraves10001• 9 years ago

I don't think "[losing] my mind" has a very specific medical definition, I'm not sure how or why you are attempting to define it so narrowly.

InclinedPlane• 9 years ago

Having a psychotic break is one facet of mental illness but it's not universal to all people who struggle with being non-neurotypical. And it's almost always possible to call upon a more extreme and more harrowing example to overtop another, but it's not worth it. What is served by diminishing the suffering and struggle of others? What is served by trying to sort hardship on a scale? It's not a competition or a race. There's no advantage to trying to prevent wider acceptance of the commonality of mental illness nor to trying to block compassion towards others who are just trying to figure out how to live their lives.

goldenkey7• 9 years ago

Anyone can have a psychotic break. Has nothing to do with "nuerotypical" or any of that jazz. All I was saying, was his "loss of mind" was cute. Because he got himself to a doc.

safek5• 9 years ago

I'm disappointed by the downvotes this person is getting. I have a close friend who went through a manic episode, and can imagine how "cute" stories like this might seem.

As an observer, the most alarming thing to me about this whole "raising awareness of mental illness" movement is that it's another judgment-forbidden sort of "every subjective experience is equal" movement. It's gone mainstream, too, in the usual sickening, missing-the-point way; you now have neurotypical college students with essentially easy lives drawing posters and holding fundraisers. It's not surprising people with authentic mental illnesses are rolling their eyes.

The downvotes this person is getting are a symptom of exactly this problem. "How can this person belittle someone else's illness?" In other words, everyone's illness is equally important. We've got to be diverse and inclusive. Never mind that some cases of mental illness are actually more severe than others. If everyone's entitled to their own perspective and experience, isn't this person entitled to theirs? Why downvote that? Because it doesn't fit into the modern mental-health-awareness agenda?

I think it's important that instead of lazily saying "everyone's suffering is a problem," we discern between degrees of suffering. Partly because perspective matters, but also because being told your problems are non-problems compared to someone else's is a helpful thing. The truth is, most people's problems are to some extent self-inflicted/self-created, and it's never a bad time to examine the size of that extent.

re• 9 years ago

If everyone's entitled to their own perspective and experience, isn't this person entitled to theirs?

The downvotes (not mine) aren't for their experience, they're for the dismissiveness. It's like the paradox of tolerance; you shouldn't be surprised if people don't support your viewpoint about not supporting other viewpoints.

Because it doesn't fit into the modern mental-health-awareness agenda?

Because it doesn't actual contribute anything substantive; it invalidates the author's experience seemly just to make a point that the author already acknowledged ("It seemed the only real difference between us was that I knew something was wrong")

being told your problems are non-problems compared to someone else's is a helpful thing

How so? Far more often, people tell others that their problems are non-problems in an attempt to shut them up, not to help them. What actual value comes from attempting to precisely determine who has it worst?

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_as_bad_as

zaptheimpaler• 9 years ago

When a message goes mainstream enough it is inevitably distorted. Like a big game of chinese whisper, it starts (ideally) with the experts saying true things, and ends with people with little background/experience of mental illness repeating the parts they understand/agree with. Society as a whole is too disinterested to grasp a complex message like yours because most people are not affected by mental illness.

Given that, its a good thing people are raising awareness of mental illness. I'm especially glad that they convey a message of witholding judgement because there are a lot of people who feel entitled to be mean/judgemental to "weirdos". Those people will only stop if they are shamed for it - its a matter of emotion not knowledge. The "everyone's suffering is a problem" is like a "society-approved response" to those who shrug off problems they can't see and judge too quickly.

Broken_Hippo• 9 years ago

1. I'm sorry you've had to go through this. Really, I am.

2. This was Your mental break. Folks with other diseases and issues have other ways of breaking down. Some folks can get to the doctor because the fear goes a different direction, and the doctor is a safe spot. Please don't discount other's troubles because they don't match your experience. Yours could have easily been a suicide attempt or something like that as well - my ex did so to try to silence the voices. His paranoia made it difficult to seek help until he got help, but not everyone has this.

goldenkey7• 9 years ago

Thank you. However, suicide is a totally different beast than manic/depressive episodes. People who try to commit suicide have something extremely wrong with them in a far different way than standard mental delusions. It's good that he got help.

petercooper• 9 years ago

A similar situation arises if you're autistic (not a mental illness, but with parallels in public perception) with assumptions of Rain Man savant-like abilities and mannerisms as being the norm.

sharkweek2• 9 years ago

I suffered in private for years with OCD and didn't know it. I honestly thought I was just slowly going crazy/was a terrible person with repetitive, disturbing thoughts. On the surface, I'm a professional, married, great family life, etc. but kept my suffering VERY private.

After finally getting fed up/building up the nerve to talk to my doctor about what was going on in my head, she clarified what OCD was doing (intrusive thoughts -> anxiety -> mental compulsions to make the anxiety go away -> intrusive thoughts get worse, more compulsions "required" to make it go away) and gave me a diagnosis of such, as well as some treatment recommendations.

I just recently wrote about dealing with OCD and posted it to social media, announcing it publicly. There was an outpouring of support, and even more satisfying, a few private messages of people discussing their own, very private battles with mental illness.

It's a huge, private struggle for most, and I think we'd all be better off if we talked more openly about it.

gosheroo• 9 years ago

I'm a professional

Nowadays that is no guarantee of respectability! Seriously, I think the typical professional carries a substantial psychological load due to the conformity and personal constraint entailed.

I think we'd all be better off if we talked more openly about it

Well I tend to classify unwanted thoughts as the purely mental equivalent of chewing on chilli. Why would I think unwanted thoughts? The answer is similar to why would I prefer foods that cause pain to my tongue and mouth.

maxxxxx2• 9 years ago

May I ask how you are dealing with it? My girlfriend has OCD and I find it really hard to deal with. I accept that she has these thoughts but I am at a loss how to be supportive or helpful.

sharkweek2• 9 years ago

Yes! Exposure-response therapy [1] has been by far the best treatment I have received. It's scary and painful, because it literally forces you to draw the anxiety out and face your darkest fears head-on without compulsions, but it's the only evidence-based treatment for OCD currently out there. I'm already noticing I'm getting my "mind" back, learning that scary thoughts are just thoughts, and I don't need to battle with them for hours.

There's definitely an element of learning mindfulness that's key too. Learning to accept the uncertainty of random "terrible" thoughts that pop into your head, learning to not engage with them and letting them pass, etc.

I recommend two books: The Imp of the Mind by Dr. Lee Baer [2] and The Mindfulness Workbook for OCD by Jon Hershfield and Tom Corboy [3]

[1] https://iocdf.org/about-ocd/treatment/erp/

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Imp-Mind-Exploring-Epidemic-Obsessive...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Mindfulness-Workbook-OCD-Overcoming-C...

pkaye• 9 years ago

I dealt with OCD in the past and what helped me the most is what they call Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. It was in a group therapy with 5 others patients. It mostly involved identifying the fears that drive the OCD behavior and facing them so as not to give into them. The group environment helped a lot because it made me realize many other people deal with the similar issues and that the fears are not real.

jansho• 9 years ago

The part of my brain that was able to rationalise the distorted thoughts had stopped working, and now I was believing every irrational fear that came into my brain as if it were absolute fact.

I descended rapidly into paranoid delusions which had me convinced that the world was going to end that very day -- and I was the only one who knew about it.

Yeah that's a pretty deep low. Mine was when I was convinced that a classmate was a ghost, and seemed to be stalking me everywhere. Eventually I broke down and confessed to him, and like a smashed mirror, all illusions disappeared. In horror I took a year off my studies.

Recovery from deep holes like that may seem impossible but it's not. Accept also that there is no quick fix, no magic bullet, and that even when you're out of the tunnel, it may still take a long time to be 'normal'.

But this will also make you stronger and more empathic - and that is valuable. I don't mean it in a hippie way, but too many people lack these, and so in a way you're blessed, because your worldview has shifted and you to begin see 'more'. You will also eventually learn to make peace with yourself: it's OK to trip up, it's OK have these 'glitches'.

Final note: I cannot emphasise enough about having a good support network. Even if you have no one to trust, at the very least avoid toxic company. And by the way, you'll be surprised by what you'll get when you reach out just a little. After all, your dignity is nothing compared to your sanity, so confess to your mom, blubber on the phone with the Samaritans, break down in front of your tutor ... usually, you will find that at their core, humans are kind.

Edit: typo

davidgerard• 9 years ago

I remember a discussion at work where my boss said on IRC "how do you know when you're having a nervous breakdown?"

The other four of us, his sysadmin team, we have all worked so hard we had a breakdown from it. It's a hazard of the job: it draws people into overdoing it. We told him to sign the fuck off for four weeks, with possible antidepressants. (He didn't, but he did take his next two weeks off without logging into IRC.)

I've had depressive and stressed periods and I'm happy to publicly say so, so this is not secretive but normalised.

Watch your coworkers and take care of each others' well-being.

njharman• 9 years ago

I don't have to picture anything, just look in mirror.

limeblack• 9 years ago

I can't comment about OCD medication but I'm posting this as a bipolar patient as a warning. Do not I repeat do not take sedatives antipsychotics(there are lots of antipsychotics for bipolar and schizophrenia that are sedatives) for more then a couple weeks with out planning to take it long term. Sedatives mess with your sleep function and destroy your ability to sleep naturally. I can no longer sleep with out a sedative because a drug called zyprexa destroyed my ability to sleep naturally. Zyprexa can cause both diabetes and lots of weight gain and cause other side effects. There are couple of drugs like it but just thought I should mention that a the medications themselves can sometimes bring up side effects that are almost worse then the mental illness can really mess with your brain permeantly.

When You Picture Someone with Mental Illness, Picture Me in a Nice Tailored Suit

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