Cousin Rachel

My cousin Rachel committed suicide in 2004. She was 41 years old. She overdosed on medication.

We weren't super close. Our families lived 2000 miles apart.

However, I was saddened to hear of her passing. I didn't know she was struggling so hard. I don't know if anyone did.

Rachel had what is termed "medication resistant depression."

People, including mental health and medical professionals, have a tendency to treat medication as a be all and end all. It isn't. For some of us (like Rachel and my son) it simply doesn't work. 

For others, like me, the "cure" is worse than the problem. I react badly to most medications. For instance, SSRI's, the darlings of the psych industry, cause me to become manic and psychotic, two things which I am usually not and I don't enjoy either of them. I have type 2 bipolar disorder, which causes hypomania rather than full mania and does not have psychotic features.

I am not the only one that SSRI's do this to. Motley Crue's Mick Mars describes a similar experience with SSRI's in the band's book, "The Dirt." Mick has a debilitating musculoskeletal condition called ankylosing spondylitis. When the doctor noted he was depressed, Mick said: "tell me something I don't know."

The doctor's response was to put Mick on SSRI's, which triggered psychotic episodes. Rather than questioning if the medication might be doing this, the doctor put Mick on antipsychotics, which really messed him up. Fortunately, Mick is a smart guy and realized that it was highly unlikely that he'd suddenly developed schizophrenia, which usually onsets earlier in life. (Mick was in his mid-fifties at the time of these events.) He stopped taking the medication and his mental state returned to normal.

At one point I was put on Zoloft, which caused me to feel as if my brain had grown tiny hands and was trying to pick its way out of my head. When I told the doctor this, he admonished me to stay on the medication. I didn't. Within a few days, my brain no longer had tiny hands. Amazing how that works!

Many people, including medical professionals, treat patients with psychological anomalies as if they are failures if their depression/anxiety/psychosis does not get better. Its bad enough living with these conditions and knowing we will never be "normal" even if we pass for "normal." It's worse when we're being shamed for something we can't change on top of having to live with it. 

I give a derisive laugh in the general direction of everyone who ever told a person with a mood disorder to "just cheer up," "just snap out of it," "just stop thinking that way," "don't be a Debbie Downer," or other such brilliant and witty admonitions.

I realize that it's a rare thing for me to be happy. The times when I thought I was happy I was actually giddy. It's not the same thing. Before finally learning when I was nearly forty that I had bipolar disorder rather than depression with anxiety or adult ADD or any of the other things that I had been diagnosed with, hypomanic states could be easily triggered by environmental factors. 

These states involved magical thinking. By magical thinking, I don't mean that I believed the genie from the lamp was there granting wishes or that I could control the weather with my mind. I mean that I believed I was finally happy and that I would never be unhappy again. I admonished myself that I would stay this way forever. When the elevated mood inevitably wore off, I was left with a high degree of self-loathing to contend with as well as a depressed mood.

I can't say for certain, but I wonder if Rachel might not have committed suicide if she'd been encouraged to accept herself as she was rather than admonished to "get better."

People with psych anomalies have the double-edged sword of not only being treated as "bad" and "wrong" but as failures if we don't comply and "improve." We are told that we are "being lazy," "not trying hard enough," "seeking attention," and any other number of harsh criticisms.

Stop trying to "fix" us and stop telling us that we need to be "fixed." 

Accept us or leave us alone.

~Cie~