This week marks a year since my last suicidal episode. This time last year I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital because I had become so frightened by the thoughts in my head, I knew I needed to be saved from myself in the most literal way imaginable. I needed to be placed in hospital my phone chargers and knitting needles taken away from me, so I could be spared. From myself. Or rather, from my illness.
In the weeks prior to my being admitted, Id become gripped by an obsession: I was never going to be well and I was going to kill myself. As always for me in these episodes, the decision to end my life, while obviously bleak, always comes with a sense of relief. There is a way out of this stupid, exhausting, draining and seemingly endless cycle of terror and despair.
Im bipolar II, so my mental illness slams me up and slams me down. During past episodes I have believed myself to be already dead. Ive believed that I was possessed. Ive believed that my life was not real and that my family had been replaced by entities. Mental illness for me has always been a state of scalding, paralysing, choking terror. Yes it is being low, being numb, being unmanageably high and being paranoid, but the abiding state is one of terror.
My life is drenched in terror. Its terror at the potency of the illness. It is a possession. The pervasive dread of a nightmare has seeped into my waking life and all I can think is This. Will. Never. End. And certainly trends have shown that, for me, it probably wont! Ive had acute breakdowns in 2007, 2009, 2013, 2014, 2018, 2020. Ive had more acute breakdowns than Ive had decent pairs of jeans. Ive also had good stretches, really long stretches of feeling well. I cannot control when another episode will hit and I see this aspect of mental illness frustrating for people whove no first-hand experience. If your brain has never turned on you, it can be hard to imagine why you cant just shake it off.
Get out for a walk! Phone a friend! Cheer yourself up with an ice-cream! Stop thinking youre possessed/dead/ not real!
When Im brainsick, my body feels like a coffin. I am locked in and walks and friends and ice-cream are beyond irrelevant to me. Tell your friend who has cancer to get out for a walk. Mental illness consumes like a cancer and it is fatal. Not only can the illness be fatal, the shame of it can be too.
Im aware that a section of people will scoff at this article. I am used to that. One reviewer scoffed at my last book a work of non-fiction about being mad and sad and called me needy. I had to laugh. Who among us doesnt need? When I am mired in obsession, delusion and fear, the thing that I so desperately need is reassurance.
Youre not possessed, youre real. Youre not dead already. You wont hurt your children. This. Will. Pass. Take your meds, drink water, hang on for everything. People with mental illness are seen as weak, we cant cope, were unstable. Lol. No, Susan. Were very f**king resilient. Even if it grinds us all the way down to the end, well still have survived a lot.
Anyway, Im here 365 days since I lastsaw death as an option, a respite. I wanted to write this because taking steps like telling people youre sick in the head or that you need help or medication or hospitalisation can still have people scoffing. And also because with no other illness is the treatment itself viewed with such suspicion. Even in the year 2020, I was still so scared of going into hospital because there are not enough stories about psych wards that arent One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest or Girl, Interrupted.
Before I did it, I was scared of what taking medication or admitting I was ill might mean for me. And even after I was more comfortable with those things, I remained scared of what being put in hospital might mean. It felt like crossing the Rubicon. Untakebackable. On the day my husband drove me to the facility, I thought: now I will forever be someone who was so mental, Id been hospitalised.
And when you are hospitalised for this flavour of illness, the reactions or indeed, non-reactions you encounter can provide sinking confirmation of your own creeping fears. Like any Irish person, a traditional greeting in my family will likely include a recitation of every and all acquaintances recently dead or hospitalised. The accompanying tone has two settings. Sympathy for those who are sick through no fault of their own. Poor Felicia, stage four and theyd no idea. And for those who are sick because of their own failings. What did he expect on 40 fags a day? Why, in gods name, would you take up wakeboarding at 60? Or: It was the thrink that did him.
(Sidenote: this is the first time Ive ever attempted to write down the specific style of saying drink our elders use when communicating their disapproval of it! Am I doing it right? The demon thrink!)
Anyway, for the mad and sad, our sojourns in the bin often dont make the cut for the recitation. Our issues, it seems, are quite literally unspeakable. I know that this reticence may well come from a desire to respect the privacy of the mad, sad patient but sometimes the non-reactions can form a thick, almost corporeal silence that effectively gags us all. When I was hospitalised, it was ignored by all but a handful of friends. The ones who truly know. When another friend was released from hospital for a different illness, she got flowers and messages of love and celebration at recovering. I did not. Its cool, I bought my own flowers.
Detailing the health of everyone in a five-mile radius is an obnoxious, intrusive practice. But being left out of it almost feels worse! I want equal-opportunity obnoxious intrusions! Not to be included makes us feel like our illness is even more unacceptable than we already fear it is.
I wonder if Id heard my granny and her sisters talking about Felicias hospitalisation for stage four depression when I was growing up if it wouldve made me accept help and treatment for my illness sooner. What if we didnt have to be despairing and desperate, bewildered and terrified and suicidal and pushed all the way to the edge of the void before we could speak about the unspeakable?
The euphemisms piss me off the most.She went through a rough patch. He was feeling a bit low. We hear these flaccid prognoses right before they died suddenly at home. If I die suddenly at home, if I am ultimately brought down by this, dont couch it in softer terms. Dont diffuse-light my suicide, because that is helping no one. It is only mystifying this illness more, obscuring the realities and making it even more nefarious, as undefeatable as any dead-eyed celluloid demon you care to name. Except this dead-eyed demon has your face.
How does one going from feeling a bit low to dying suddenly at home? Imagine for a moment you were diagnosed with an illness whose progression was routinely explained away like this. Frightening, no?
Reporting of suicide must be done carefully and responsibly, but the old idea that talking about suicide may encourage it, is wrong. The erasure rather than decreasing the problem merely forces the problem further underground. Talking about suicide is difficult and indescribably sad, especially for those who have lost people theyve loved to mental illness, but talking about suicide and self-harm can also bring profound relief to anyone experiencing these symptoms of mental illness.
Similarly the disproportionate attention in the national conversation given to mental health in favour of mental illness reinforces the idea that these illnesses are unacceptable, while simultaneously letting us off the hook as a society. You got your awareness week, were talking about anxiety, what more do you want?
The persistence in recasting mental illness as mental-health issues really makes me want to scream in the streets. This linguistic sidestepping is not only reductive, its downright offensive. The word issues implies a personal culpability. The man savagely screaming in the locked room on the ward next to mine does not have issues, he has an illness. Imagine saying of your friend who has died, She died, she had cancer issues with that meaningful little inflection on the issues! Sorry to laugh, but really, what else can I do?
So how did I go from feeling low to not dying suddenly at home? I went to the loony bin and lemme tell you, 10 out of 10, would recommend to a friend. In lieu of a Yelp or TripAdvisor forum, I will write my review of being hospitalised here.
Hospital was f**king amazing. I felt safe. Suddenly the asylum part of mental asylum made sense. Someone checked me every hour at night. I was safe from myself. I made friends, I did laugh, it wasnt all misery. The nurses and doctors were the most compassionate, incredible people Ive ever met. After a while, I got better enough to go home. I got new meds, a new diagnosis. Bipolar II! Mood stabilisers! New dosage of my antidepressants! New understanding of my illness! Newfound appreciation for my health insurance.
Before now, Ive wavered on theusefulness of being explicit about these elements because I dont want people to read about me and self-diagnose. Or to read about me and scoff or judge me or call me needy or rule me out as a person who can be useful and productive and live a good life. However, lately Ive been thinking about how frightened I was taking Olanzapine (an antipsychotic medication) back in 2007 for the first time. The name seemed to confirm my worst fears I was a psycho. I was afraid the meds would lobotomise me; such was some of the prevailing attitudes to drugs like it at the time. Dont even talk to me about the people who fume that psychiatric medication is the easy option.
While I have found Olanzapine a tough drug to be on, its undeniable: it has saved my life every time Ive been put on it. I now call the drugs my Olanza-pals and see it as a sort of break glass in the event of fears of possession thing. I feel now that it is useful to say the specifics of these experiences.
I want a T-shirt like one of those signs outside a town proclaiming the days since the last traffic accident. My T-shirt will read: X days since last suicidal thoughts. Today, as Ive said, that T-shirt says 365 365 precious, hard-fought, exquisite, grateful days.
On the day the T-shirt read 0, I couldve done with seeing someone else in their T-shirt. Because, my god, there are a lot of us. And we need to see each other. We need to see everyone who has survived. We are not needy, were not weak, were not outliers, were survivors and goddamn it, we deserve to be on the family list of the recently hospitalised! OK, that particular accolade may not be for everyone, but dont make us and our experiences unspeakable. Its lonely enough already in our heads.
Helplines: If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this article, click here for more information
