Layer One- My first diagnosis

I was first diagnosed with a mental illness at 19 years of age.  I feel like there are 2 parts of a person with a mental illness: before diagnoses and after diagnosis. Signs that say, take her to a psychiatrist and have her tested.  Maybe medications would help.  This was not how my pre-diagnosis life was, but I hope that it will be even for just one person.  So, my first shared layer I am starting with my part 2 of my life because this part will be my longest lived compared to pre-diagnosis.  Both are just as important to share because I want other people to learn to read the signs more and to be proud and accepting of reading those signs and openly discussing what the next steps are for care.

I was first diagnosed with depression and given a drug for it.  One night of heavy drinking and being on that drug for a couple weeks, I had a suicide attempt the following day. I say drug and not the name because drug companies get enough money, and everyone is made up different chemically so what works for me or did not work for me is not important because medications are different for each individual.  I will always share how many different drugs I am on but never the names because your combination is specific for your chemical imbalance. That was the first time I was hospitalized and the first time I saw truly mentally ill people.  I saw all the inner workings of this side of the hospital. It was scary yet my mental state, what I was thinking, was I was not as bad as the others and at the very least seemed to be more under control than what I saw. At the beginning you think you understand the illness or that you are not that sick.  It is almost laughable how much I thought I had my newly diagnosed life in the bag. Depression, I have this, and I will not let it win.  I am not depressed.

There were 2 wings of the psycho ward of this hospital I was admitted to, at the time that is what I thought it was called- psycho ward, I mean the movies would, right?  Mental illness= psycho.  When I was first admitted I was in the wing where patients were so dazed on drugs and did not even know their names. Or even worse they were loud and talking to no one with 5 different names.  I was in the wrong place.  I mean I was working full time, going to school full time, partying full time and overall living a fast yet controlled life.  I mean I started seeing a therapist on my own.  I knew I needed help for my dark thoughts, so I got help.  I seriously thought I had a normal life and I was doing all the things you are supposed to do at 19 and then some!  I was a good kid that was just admitted to the hospital for a suicide attempt.

After being moved to the next hallway through a secured door I was then in the nicer/calmer side of the psych ward. I honestly cannot remember why I was moved but I was.  I was able to use the phone and called my best friend and looking back at that call I was so non cholent with being in the psych ward of a hospital and completely acted like it was a mistake I was there.  My friend’s voice was low, and her tone was so concerned, and I was laughing this off as a crazy night out that lead me here.  Throughout my life after this first incident it haunts me hearing my friends and family’s voices and having them remember their reactions to all my incidents or dramas or waves of moods.  I remember her voice so well and thought deep down she really cared about me but in the moment, I made light of the situation and did not in any way acknowledge how scared she must have been.  And angry, maybe angry.  I could only sense the fear and made sure to make her laugh.  It would be too heavy to say out loud to my best friend that I was scared, out of control and yet I was always fine.  Too much to go into so let us have a laugh and move on.  

After that call I made another to this guy that I liked, I had driven to his house drunk after I was dropped off at my house when the bars closed at 1:30am.  I had even promised my friend when she dropped me off that I would not drive over to see him but the minute I went in my house I grabbed my car keys and drove 20 minutes completely blacked out. This is what I was calling a normal 19-year old’s life.  Scary.  This guy was my next call, this guy that did not care I drove over at 2 in the morning and did not care that I left before he was up and went back home to kill myself.  Yes, that is where I was mentally.  This guy mattered some how and was my second call from the psych ward.  I am not sure if I am stressing this enough so for the cheap seats in the back, I tried to kill myself a couple weeks after being diagnosed with depression and I was concerned about this guy that I had a crush on and was telling my friend I was totally fine. I was not crazy or mentally ill like that first hallway of crazy patients, I was diagnosed depressed and there I was trying to make people laugh and see how my crush was.

My focus was all off and that my friends, is a mental illness.

I feel as though I need to back up from my story.  When I left this guy’s house, let us call him Preston because he is about a decade of my life after this layer and you will hear more of him later.  I drove back home where my 2 sisters were having breakfast.  I was living at home sophomore year of college and going to a local university.  I had my own room downstairs and it was like a little suite, it was perfect for me and my privacy.  I even had my own phone line and a cordless phone.  Yes, that was 1997.  On my drive back home at 7am I decided that I was going to kill myself with the medication I had and anything in my Mom’s medicine cabinet.  I think I decided this because I was overwhelmed with all the things I was doing.  School was a lot while working full time and being social was a lot and to make it easier I drank a lot.  Maybe.  Maybe that is why?  By the time I got home and saw my 2 beautiful and amazing sisters you would think that would take me out of the mentality of killing myself.  It did not though. 

All it made me do was go hug each of them and tell them how much I love them.  I was so happy with this.  I got to say goodbye and I felt like I made a good decision with taking my life.  I know!!  Where is the logic in that?  What was so great about killing myself?  There is another layer that I will share, and it involves my first suicidal thought in 8^th grade.  Killing myself was always a dark thought apart of me hence the depression diagnosis.  For right now though, wanting to die was a normal, frequent thought I had in my head.  I went upstairs and grabbed any bottles from my Mom’s bathroom and then went downstairs to my room and took them all.  I was woken up at around 4pm in the afternoon.  My Mom had gotten home from work and she was so angry with me because I spent the night out and did not tell her.  She was yelling and asking me if I was supposed to be at work and again just so mad at me for sleeping at 4pm.  Her thought was I should be studying or getting ready for dinner or helping my sisters with whatever they may need help with.  And she was right to have that thought.  I think those things would be a little more normal for a 19-year-old girl.  I think.  Whatever normal is.

I was so out of it I could not speak to her though.  I was mumbling and could not really sit up straight.  She thought that I was still drunk, she had no idea what was wrong, and in her fear, she showed anger.  When I was finally able to tell her what I did, with my little sister’s face peering from behind my Mom’s figure, she started yelling at me and made me call my doctor, my psychologist business card was on my nightstand or dresser or something so my Mom made me call her and tell her what I did.  Somehow, she answered, she was a small business on her own so she would have answered I suppose.  Anyway, she told me to hang up and call 911 and they said, get me to an ER.  This is when my mother left my sisters at home (by the way they were 9 and 14 years of age) and drove me to the ER.  The nurse that took me in was a mother of a girl I played basketball with back in high school.  I will never forget the mortification that I felt my Mom having.  I was so embarrassed for my Mom.  What I remember though was this woman rubbing my mom’s arms and telling her it would be okay.  Over 20 years later I have finally understood what “it takes a village” means.  Being mentally ill you are so in your own world and I just did not see how many people around me truly cared and wanted to help.  I just could not get out of my head and the dark thoughts and cruel voice that was always there.

After the 2 calls that I remember making in the hospital, it was late in the evening and dark out.  It was summertime so it was for sure past 9:30pm or even later.   The psychiatrist finally came to see me.  I convinced this on-call psychiatrist that it was an alcohol induced ridiculous mistake.  This doctor was so obviously overwhelmed with way more crazy patients than me. I want to point out that it was now around 6 hours since I was admitted to the hospital with a suicide attempt that I finally had an experienced caretaker looking over me.  Within 6 hours of being there I was in one side of the psych ward and moved to the other and allowed to use the phone.  I am not a doctor and although I have seen a ton of doctors, to this day it does not seem right that a suicidal human was not really treated as a human.  I was a liability that they needed to count and make sure I stayed alive.  My take on my stay thus far was that this doctor did not need to waste time on my insignificant life.  I was only ‘depressed’ and knew my name and I was normal, I was in school, I was working, and partying and I was not crazy.  I brought this on myself by making a bad decision, just one bad decision that night that lead to that morning.  I told her I did not really want to kill myself.  I told her I had this under control.  She then signed off on me and allowed me to leave the next morning since I had my mother picking me up. 

Looking back now I see how sick I was.  I was so misguided and sold people on whatever they wanted to hear or whatever I needed to say for my benefit at that time.  I wanted to leave and go home so I wore a mask and was brave and acted tough and sane.  More to come on this “mask wearing” if you will.  Many times, during my life I put on a show to get by.  The photo at the bottom of this post is one that a girl I worked with at this very time in my life had written for me.  She wrote it on the back of Nelson Mandela’s 1994 inaugural speech. I guess she was studying that in school, not sure.  Unless she read it and printed it specifically for me, I will never know.  She did make the effort and wrote me a note and gave it to me.  She saw that I was putting on a show and living such a fast life that I was not able to slow down and realize who I was and what I really needed and wanted.  There are so many wonderful and not so wonderful characters from my life, but she was such a bright star and saw me so clear and I think I knew her for less than a year.  So weird how people affect you and who you remember.  I wonder if I would have slowed down and allowed people to care for me what that would have looked like.  There are so many other layers and masks that come later.  Slowing down was not in my near future.

Back to the hospital and the next morning my mom came in to sign me out and take me home.  As we were walking to the car, I could tell she was so worried, and I was walking so fast to the car to show her I was okay.  And what I remember the most in that moment was my jeans were falling, they were too big on me because I was so skinny.  That was the thought I had.  I was doing so much and not eating.  I just did not have time to even slow down and eat.  The first thing my mom made me do was schedule an appointment with a psychiatrist that the hospital was affiliated with. It was during that appointment in my doctor’s office who then diagnosed me as bi-polar. And now it makes a little more sense, right?  I was depressed yet I was so happy and I was working, going to school, had lots of friends, I mean I could talk my way out of a 72 hour hold at the hospital for attempting to kill myself with pills and just before that drive for 20 minutes completely blacked out and before that drinking with friends for hours and before that work and before that school.  That was a lot.  And that my friends was my bi-polar disorder and my first diagnosis was a misdiagnosis.

I remember bi-polar was this new term at this time and you were hearing it a lot because it used to be called manic depression. I had a friend in junior high school that trusted me enough to share with me he was diagnosed as manic depressive. That is how I knew what bi-polar meant. At that moment I felt oddly complete, like all the lines had been filled in and all the questions answered.  But what comes next?  I was 19 and my parents were in the middle of a terrible divorce, I had no true support system at the time, at least I thought that and even if I did I was not slowing down for any of them.  Knowing what I had was only the first step, but it was a huge step.  My fast life continued although after a misdiagnosis of depression to bi-polar disorder I was now living a fast life with 3 extra heavy medications a 19-year-old has no idea how strong these medications really are.  I had no idea that these medications were supposed to balance me out.  Well I knew that much but I had no idea how?  How do they work? What will happen to me? Everything about mental illness and bi-polar in general is to have the right medicines and to learn how to know which work and which ones do not.  Bi-polar is tricky though because sometimes you think it worked perfectly and were super happy but then the meds were not working, and you were still manic.  Or I had medications that made me super tired and highlighted the depression so those did not work.  This was a cluster of youth, lack of focus on the diagnosis and a ton of medications.

This entire stage of my life, the early bi-polar diagnosis days, these are the days that are the hardest and most difficult.  Not just for me but most everyone that has this experience and it is awful.  For years after I never slowed down to focus on my illness and help nurture it to bring the best me out, I was just going fast as a young adult, fast to get away from my parent’s divorce and fast just to show that I was okay even though my whole life before my 19^th year I was searching for why I was not okay.  Deep down I always knew something was wrong with me, my spirit broken or something.  Now that I knew I was bi-polar I was so strong willed to control my mental illness and simply deal with it.  I did not want to burden anyone with my mental illness.  It was mine and it is a sickness that is hard to explain, hard to understand and not openly discussed so what is the point in asking for help? The early years so many doctors would recommend books for me to read and I very admittedly would refuse to read any.  I mean I was living with bi-polar; I knew what it was like.  Here I am at 42 and writing my story so maybe some newly diagnosed mentally ill person will read this and hopefully find comfort, support and solutions for when the beginning is so, so hard. And maybe it will not be the patient but the best friend, the village, the family, the guy, someone else that will force themselves to be around the newly diagnosed person just enough to ensure they are protected.  To ensure they are taking the medications and doing the therapy. 

I want to go back to this medication thing.  I said before that a certain drug given to me for depression was not right.  So now instead of one drug for depression, I now had 3 different drugs for bi-polar disorder.  THREE.  Therefore, so many mentally ill people at the beginning can never find their way.  The drugs are necessary, I have a chemical imbalance and I must have drugs to help balance me.  The part that our society is not learning is that therapy MUST come with the drug prescriptions for medication.  It must. At least in the early diagnosed days. Therapy is the training of taking the medications regularly and talking out to help understand triggers and what medications are working and which ones are not.  Newly diagnosed mentally ill humans need to have therapy with their drugs.  I wish I had stuck with it or been forced to at least.

How in the hell does a 19 year old start taking three different medications, learn what they do to me, go to school full time, work full time, keep up social appearances, how in the fuck does a mentally ill human at 19 deal?  She does not.  As you will hopefully continue to read my layers you will see what happened in the years after and even better, how I got to that point in the first place.  Life has so many layers.  I have so many layers and I am finally ready to share them.  It is so scary but peeling them back is helping me feel so grateful for all the wonderful people in my life.  It makes my heart broken to think of a mentally ill person feeling so out of control and not knowing what is wrong and not having wonderful people in their life or resources for mental illness like I had. 

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