Brief vent about mental illness and judgmental peeps who don't get it.

I have no idea where this came from. I am non-clinically depressed and anxious at the moment. That is, I have reasons for both!

When you’re depressed every act of will requires an extra push, like a low impact excersie routine done in water because the water provides resistance. With depression everything requires more effort, only you’re not wading through water, your universe has taken on the viscosity of a gel toothpaste. Everything you do is pushed through that medium, taking orders of magnitude more effort than the same actions when you’re not in a depressed state. But how to explain this to the happily unaffected?

It is very hard for those who are unaffected to related to the experience of having a brain that is not under their control. But I’m nothing if not tenacious so here is my attempt to explain…

Almost every one has had a crush on another person, right? It seems that everything they do is perfect, you are besotted, and most importantly, you can’t seem to stop thinking about them. Everything you see or do seems to relate back to them somehow, they are the last thing on your mind before you go to sleep, they may provoke stalking behaviour (especially since it is so easy to do these days!), their presence may equate with dizzying happiness accompanied by bouts of invincibility, they may also cause crushing anxiety and the misery associated with unrequited love. During this experience, you probably could not stop thinking about them even if you wanted to, the thought of the person interferes with your work and play. If you are lucky, this interference is painlessly seamless, if you are unlucky, you are unable to concentrate at all. This person, whoever they are, seems to have hijacked your thoughts, taken some of your mental liberty away.

The same could be said for worries, ever lost sleep because you could not switch of your brain for worry? That is an example of your mind being out of your control, you want to sleep, but you can't for worry. Surely if you had control over your emotional state this would not be a problem?

The main message is: Normal folk do suffer from periods when their mind/brain does things that they cannot control. That is a no brainer really, but I claim that it is these experiences that may help them relate to people with mental illness. So, assuming you believe me that normal people can suffer periods where their mind seems to be out of their control for some reason, try to imagine what that would be like without an object, that is without a crush on someone, without a worry to occupy your mind, without a reason to be sad.

Try to imagine a perpetual state of worry without an object of worry (this can be called anxiety).
Try to imagine a perpetual state of sadness without a reason to be sad (this is called depression).
Try to imagine extraordinary happiness, so happy that you believe nothing could ever hurt you, but without a reason to be happy (this is a symptom of bipolar disorder).
Try to imagine that switching off this worry, sadness or happiness is not an option, try to imagine that these feelings do not shift according to what is happening in your life. This is quite like the times when switching off for you is not an option.

What makes you different from the anxious or depressed person is that you have the comfort of a reason. We think you are so, so lucky. But please try to understand how unlucky we are. We have by accident, injury or design brains that will plunge us into the depths of despair, engage a dire apprehension that will gnaw at our guts or provoke swooping episodes of happiness where we become a danger to ourselves and others. Our brains do this for no reason at all and it can be terrifying.

Please also believe that we do not want to be like this, that we would not wish this state of being upon anyone. But we are tired of the labels of self-absorbed, or lazy, or paranoid, as though we were doing it on purpose. We are tired of the lack of understanding.

So next time you hear about or meet someone with a mental illness, when you read about suicides in the paper or are unfortunate enough to know someone who has attempted it. Try, try, try to remember the last time your mind was out of your control, and try to imagine what kind of hell it might be to be stuck there without a reason. Please.

Blow me down - a positive spin on drugs for mental illness!

I was a bit hard on The Age a post or two ago, but I was very pleased to read this with my morning cup of tea. An article outlining what can happen to mentally ill folk if they don't take their medication, including suicide, hostility toward others and jail.

Without a course of antidepressants when I needed it I would be dead. Period. Without antipsychotic medication my Aunt would probably be in jail. The article stated that the media didn't help with the stigma associated with drugs for mental illness, but from my experience, neither did my family and friends. Here's a snippet from a letter I sent somewhere else, it sums up my feelings nicely!

As a sufferer for twenty years, I have seen it all. From people who will go out of their way for you as though you are an emotional invalid, to people who pretend they don’t know, to the contemptuous and dismissive "get over it" types. Here are some examples, I am sure fellow sufferers will be familiar:

Dismissal of suicide attempts as “a cry for help” or “attention seeking”.

Angry accusations of selfishness after suicide attempts “how could you do this to us?” (irony alert).

Asking loudly and in company how your “depresso drugs” are going, and whether they are working yet.

Jokes about borrowing your prescription medication “to pep me up, I’ve had a bad day.”

Being told you are no better than a heroin addict or alcoholic because you have a “chemical dependency”.

People tip-toeing around you as though you have been recently bereft.

Accusations of “putting it on” to get out of commitments or obtain prescribed uppers.

It's really no wonder people resist seeking help and taking medication. If they do eventually seek help, they keep it under their hats. Recovering from depression would be much easier without having to cope with the attitudes of thoughtless and ignorant people. The people I am most grateful for are the pragmatic ones. They accept that I am sick, satisfy themselves that I am getting treatment and ask if there is anything they can do. Unfortunately, they are the exception.

Voluntary euthanasia or murder?

When I read this article my first response was to groan, "Give the poor girls a break..." But when the initial indignation had settled and I actually thought about it, I realised that the issue of Voluntary Euthanasia is probably going to be settled by beginning in the criminal courts, and so it should be. There are two reasons I see as important, the first is that the real murderers need to be screened out somehow; without a system for the monitoring of voluntary euthenasia the criminal court is all Australia has. Secondly, the public needs to be reassured that voluntary euthanasia is not murder, and what better way than to convict someone of the lesser crime of assisting a suicide? Eventually someone who matters is going to realise that we're filling our prisons with well meaning people who said "yes" when people they loved asked for help with hastening death. They will realise that prison for these people is stupid (finally) and legislate to change the situation. But before that can happen they need to understand that assisted suicide is not murder, or at least, not murder in the morally meaningful sense that the person murdered did not want to die.

There are some folk out there who will think that distinction is meaningless, that murder is murder, period. That's nice dears *pats them on the head* go away and come back when you can handle a world that's not morally black and white, that is, the real world. In the real world palliative care does not work for everyone, some people would rather suffer because they are afraid of death, but there are some who would welcome the relief. Some people can do it on their own, some need help. In my opinion, those who fear death have every right to prolong their suffering; those in their right minds who wish to die have a right to that too.

The Netherlands has a system where one can make a formal request for assisted suicide. One is assessed by at least one doctor and one psychiatrist and more requests are denied than granted. The Netherlands has now produced data showing that the slippery slope many people feared did not eventuate. Peter Singer's Rethinking Life and Death has a good chapter on assisted suicide in the Netherlands, and is worth checking out for anyone interested in having an informed opinion on the topic.

Update 13/5/2008

I didn't want to be right (ok, ok, I really do like to be right), but this and this are both reasons why we need the criminal justice system at the moment, and strong regulation and control of voluntary euthanasia in the future.

Maybe they're depressed becuase they want to die but are not "allowed" to.

In the Sydney Morning Herald today: "Older men have highest suicide rate by drowning."

The reasons for it are purely speculative I know. But this isn't the first article I've read about the elderly committing suicide and it will not be the last.

We are told they have "depression" and it is implied that this is why they committed suicide.

This is just a theory on my part, but is it possible that they could be depressed because they feel they have finished with life but are being denied a dignified death? Is it so inconceivable that a person would rather die on their own terms than wait for death while rotting in aged care?

To me, it is perfectly understandable. But while we have a legal system that is still fundamentally based on a religious ethic that it is wrong to take one's own life, that these decisions are not up to us, that we should "let nature take it's course", the elderly and terminally ill will be denied the dignified deaths to which I believe they have every right.

We need to catch up with the Netherlands on this issue, as on many others.  Perhaps we will also have the courage to surpass them, and allow true dignified death for all who reasonably, and sanely, request it.