I have seen many many mental health professionals in my life. It started when I was 19, being treated for Major Depressive Disorder. I have been on 6 different anti-depressants in my life. I have been so depressed I couldn't get out of bed. I have cried continuously for weeks. I have been suicidal on many occasions since my teens. I was absolutely serious about it last year, when my GP made Monkey Boy take control of my medications to keep me safe. When I see a new shrink, we do the usual thing of going through the family history, list the stressful things that have happened to you. I've done it so often I now see it as some kind of entertainment: what will the reaction be when I tell them? Will it be humour? Sarcasm? Offer platitudes? Or a chin drop to the floor? (that happened just once, but was quite funny. Maybe you had to be there. Or be me.) My most recent therapist told me shrinks love people like me because it makes their job all so interesting. I'm a complex case, multi-faceted.
Yes yes, I know I'm fucked up, that's why I'm seeing shrinks.
The family history has always been:
- Mother: controlling, manipulative, emotionally abusive in extreme, chronic depression for which she was given Valium and told to stop being neurotic.
- Father: violent, anger issues, developed Alzheimer's in his 80s
- Eldest brother: depression. Suicide in 1998
- Middle brother: violent, anger issues, turned to God to solve all his problems (is that in the DSM these days?)
- Youngest brother: paranoid schizophrenic. Suicide in 2001
- Me: well you all know by know I'm fucked up in an interesting multitude of ways
(You can tell I'm assuming I am never going to be working again at this point, yeh?)
So the therapist/GP makes assumptions and decisions about medications based on that information. But what if its wrong? What if it is incomplete? What if it is incomplete and you don't even know it?
I'm a great believer in the power of Dr Google. Some may scoff (
So I read a lot of medical websites. Professional ones, as well as teh forumz. And sometimes I read stuff that punches me in the guts because it has described me clearly on paper, and made me reassess things I took for granted as being normal.
Trawling mental health sites and reading up about alcohol dependance, anxiety, depression etc, I came across articles on Bipolar Disorder. I read them out of interest more than anything else, because I have extensive experience of living with someone who had Bipolar 1 with Psychosis. (Fun times.) That is what I think of when I think Bipolar. That is not a label I would ever apply to myself. Ever.
Except I keep reading. Especially the section on Bipolar II, where there isn't the crazy mania people normally associate with Bipolar Disorder. Instead, there is the extreme "whale shit at the bottom of the ocean" depression combined with at least one instance of Hypomania, or Mania Lite.
Cue Oprah's "Aha! moment."
It all fits and that means that maybe if I get the right medication I wont feel like whale shit any more. Woohoo. Except the likelihood is fairly low unless you have a family member who has a Bipolar diagnosis too, which I don't. But you never know right? So I get a referral to a psychiatrist (I hate them, the last one I saw kicked me out of her office after reducing me to sobbing hysteria by telling me that society didn't want to help people with mental illness).
I will have a full mental health evaluation. Doesn't that sound like fun?
A couple of nights ago I had a long Facebook conversation with a family member (the only one I have any contact with) and discovered that what I knew about my family profile is wrong. It turns out that:
- Eldest brother: had Bipolar, prior to suicide.
- His daughter: has Bipolar
- Middle Brother's daughter: has Bipolar
Ummmm.
Well.
Um.
I have had depression for as long as I can remember, and despite the 6 different kinds of antidepressants I am still depressed on them, though not whale-shit depressed. I don't want to kill myself when on the right AD. I become too apathetic to kill myself, which is not really a glowing endorsement for relief of depression, is it? The only time I can categorically state that an AD made me not depressed at all was when I started taking Prozac and the first month felt like I was on Ecstacy. Looking back, I can see it: hello Hypomania!
I am so unbelievably grateful to have this new knowledge of my family's mental health history. It could very well make the difference between a definitive diagnosis and a "you might have this, or you might have this, here try these pills and see what happens." I've had enough of those experiences. I know enough to know that there is something wrong with my brain other than good old unipolar major depressive disorder.
On Friday, I will have what may very well turn out to be the most important appointment of my life.
This is probably the first time in the history of everything that someone has actually wanted to be diagnosed with a mental illness.
Image from here
Well, hey, I'm crazy like that.