Beyond Blue

For a long while I was afraid to write things such as “I am mentally ill” or “I am bipolar.” I was afraid of labels.

By calling myself a manic-depressive would I trap my psyche in “sick” mode? By accepting my diagnosis of bipolar disorder, would I prevent healing? By writing the words “I am mentally ill,” was I holding myself to a place that I was, but not where I am now, or where I could go?

I spent a fair amount of time pondering this (I’m a natural ruminator)–I thought about attracting bad karma by writing about my illness, about feeding my anxiety by connecting with others who also struggle with depression, about stifling my spirit by posing all of my questions and frustrations online in an effort to figure out and assemble this humongous, Anchisaurus (a kind of dinosaur) 500-plus piece puzzle of mental illness.

And then I arrived at this guess (because there are no answers): no.

I looked to my mental health heroes–Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Art Buchwald, William Styron, and Kay Redfield Jamison–and realized that they slapped on their labels with pride so to educate and inform an ignorant world about mental illness. Because of these label-wearers, millions of people suffering from depression and other mood disorders have been properly diagnosed and treated.

I thought back to the first days of my sobriety, when abstaining from booze was like running a daily marathon. (I quit drinking right as I left for college . . . the worst possible time in a person’s life to jump on the wagon.) For three years I attended three or more meetings a week, in which I would say something like, “Hi, I’m Therese and I don’t like what happens to me when I drink alcohol,” because I just couldn’t utter the word “alcoholic” two words after the word “I.”
I stumbled and stalled at step one–accepting that I was powerless over alcohol–unable to progress to step two (came to believe in a power greater than ourselves–which I was cool with.) And I obsessed for three years, as my classmates got drunk at the Linebacker bar, about whether or not I was, in fact, an alcoholic.

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“On Wednesday, I will leave my husband of twelve years. He is a depressive. He uses prescribed medication and has available to him a phalanx of good therapists. But he also self-medicates with alcohol. He disdains therapy. He refuses to confront his disease.”

She communicated this partly as a response to my MLK piece (on how mental illness is a legitimate disease, and we should stop discriminating against “crazies”) and partly to fill me in on what was going down in her house.

I cried as I read her words. Because I ached for her. But also because it reminded me of the closest thing to an ultimatum Eric has ever issued me in our marriage of 15 years.

After twenty medication combinations failed to work and five psychiatrists couldn’t get me well, I made the mistake of flushing traditional medicine down the toilet along with my diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

I paid a medical psychic $150 to tell me the real cause of my depression and studied each of my seven chakras to figure out which one was guilty of blocking energy. I took Chinese herbs and tried acupuncture, did sacral-cranium therapy and wore magnets on my ears.

And I continued to tremble and cry.

After months of this, Eric found me in our bedroom closet kneeling in child’s pose, sobbing and shaking, as I breathed into a paper bag.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I didn’t want the kids to see me this way,” I explained.

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“You can’t come home every time it happens.”

He knelt down on the maroon carpet and pulled me into him, combing my hair with his fingers. He held me so tightly that his body began to shake with mine.

“What are we going to do about this?” he asked.

“It’s my fault. I’m not strong enough. Or not disciplined enough. I’m trying to train my thoughts. I’m trying so hard. But I can’t stop thinking about all the ways I could kill myself.”

“This approach isn’t working, Therese. Look at you. I think we better work with a traditional psychiatrist.”

“I’ve read the studies. The brain is plastic and I can alter its patterns through mindful meditation and breath work. I have the capacity to shift my mood and change the ratio of right-to-left activation in the prefrontal areas (which offers a barometer of the moods a person is likely to feel).”

Eric combed my hair behind my ears and pulled me in tighter still.

“Therese, when I was in the fourth grade I watched a documentary one night about Uri Geller, the world’s most famous paranormalist. He was able to bend a spoon with his thoughts. For two weeks I sat down with a spoon at the kitchen table, trying to do the same. I finally gave up, put the spoon back in the silverware drawer, and ran out to play with my friends.”

Eric paused for a minute.

“You’ve been staring at that spoon a long time.”

“But if I label myself as a manic depressive, I’m limiting myself on what I have the power to do.”

I was referring to a story I had just read by Rachel Naomi Remen, one of the first pioneers of the mind-body health field. “A label is a mask life wears,” she wrote. “Labeling sets up an expectation of life that is often so compelling we can no longer see things as they really are…. In my experience, a diagnosis is an opinion and not a prediction. What would it be like if more people allowed for the presence of the unknown, and accepted the words of their medical experts in the same way? The diagnosis is cancer. What that will mean remains to be seen.”

“I can’t be a caretaker my whole life, Therese. Your quality of life can be better. Our quality of life can be better. Let’s go to Johns Hopkins and have a team of top-notch doctors look at you.”

“They will throw out a bunch of diagnoses and pump me full of meds.”

He was growing impatient and agitated. Clearly my condition had pushed him to his threshold and beyond, and I couldn’t help but feel guilty, horribly guilty, for putting our family through this.

“I can’t keep on going into the office petrified that when I walk through the door in the evening I’m going to find you dead.” His voice cracked and he began to cry.

“Please. Do this for me,” he said.

“I’ll go,” I said. “I’ll go.”

I love this tale from India, retold here by Mary Dessein. What a beautiful way of thinking about our illness, frustrating life situations, or crosses we bear.

A water-bearer carries two large pots on a yoke across his shoulders up the hill from the river to his master’s house each day. One has a crack and leaks half its water out each day before arriving at the house. The other pot is perfect and always delivered a full portion of water after the long walk from the river.

Finally, after years of arriving half-empty and feeling guilty, the cracked pot apologized to the water-bearer. It was miserable. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t accomplish what the perfect pot did.”

The water-bearer says, “What do you have to apologize for?”

“After all this time, I still only deliver half my load of water. I make more work for you because of my flaw.”

The man smiled and told the pot. “Take note of all the lovely flowers growing on the side of the path where I carried you. The flowers grew so lovely because of the water you leaked. There are no flowers on the perfect pot’s side.”

I have decided to dedicate a post on Thursday to therapy, and offer you the many tips I have learned on the couch. They will be a good reminder for me, as well, of something small I can concentrate on. Many of them are published in my book, “The Pocket Therapist: An Emotional Survival Kit.”

I know this seems wrong–like it would produce even more anxiety. But imagining the worst can actually relieve fear.

For example, when I was hospitalized the second time for severe depression, I was petrified that I would never be able to work again, to write again, to contribute anything to society. I was literally shaking with anxiety I was so scared of what my illness could do to me.

I called my friend Mike and rattled off to him all my fears.

“Uh huh,” he said. “So what?”

“What do you mean, ‘So what’? My life as I know it might be over,” I explained.

“Yeah, and so what?” he said. “You can’t write. No biggie. You can’t work. No biggie. You have your family who loves you and accepts you. You have Vickie and I who love you and accept you. Stay home and watch ‘Oprah’ all day. I don’t care. You’d still have people in your life who love you.”

You know what?

He was right.

I went there in my mind: to the worst-case scenario…me on disability, hospitalized a few times a year, unable to do so much of what I did before.

And there I was. Still standing. Or lying on the bed.

Sure, life would be different. My family would face challenges. Eric could have a breakdown of his own, joining me for Bingo hour in the community room. My kids might wonder why mom disappears ever few months and can’t chaperone any of their fieldtrips. But we would all still be leading a full life. A different life, yes, but a life. And I was okay.

Really okay.