“We can spend so many years trying to convince people of how sick we are then, when we’re finally diagnosed, we’re left by the health care system to fend for ourselves as if our family and friends network was fully formed and operational, as though we have a working understanding of what the disease is doing to our minds and bodies, as though we should know and understand what the medications will do to our minds and bodies.”
Salted Lithium “A Perfect World Would Start With An Intervention”;
January 12, 2007
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“…real mental illness is boring. Depressives are toxic and dull. Manic depressives are irritating. People with schizophrenia or autism are largely indecipherable.
Most of them are best treated not by charismatic psychoanalysts who carefully excavate the early, repressed trauma that has “led” to their illness, but by doctors who administer psychotropic drugs of one kind of another.”
Tim Lott, “Losing The Plot”; Guardian Unlimited, Dec. 12 2006
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“I need a fucking intervention… I need people who know what they’re doing to stand up and hand me a plan. Because, really, I’ve spent twelve of nineteen years not knowing what it was I was supposed to do… and it’s gotten me exactly here.”
Salted Lithium, “Looking Forward To An Intervention Any Day Now”;
Feb. 12, 2008
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“God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”
The Serenity Prayer
The first year of our recovery from Manic Depression is pretty much like our first year of Sex Education. We’ve been shown all the diagrams, we can name some of the parts, but on Friday night we still think the best way not to make babies is to pull out and hope we don’t make a mess.
We walk out of the doctor’s office and straight back into the same world of disappointment, grief and guilt we were in earlier that day, but now with a little hope and a prescription. Two weeks later the disease has us by the groin again and we’re crushed. We thought we had a cure, but here we are just as fcuked as ever.
No one with this disease ever thinks life will get better. And for just cause, because without treatment it never will. The only way to get better is to find a doctor and follow their instructions. You have to fight back against this disease and recognize manic depression is something that actively works against you.
But that’s you getting into the office. That’s you accepting you have a problem and finding treatment.
So what happens when we finally get into recovery? I’ve been coming across a lot of posts recently on a lot of blogs written by people who have been in treatment for a few months or even less and who see no hope because the manics are still there and, worse, so are the depressions. They’re confused and the only solution some of them have is to find help by swallowing a lot of the wrong pills.
And that’s common. None of us know what’s supposed to happen in the first weeks and months of our recovery. None of us understand that because manic depression is a disease with identifiable effects and symptoms we can learn from the people who went before us.
Because before we even start our recovery, we’re mostly alone. But I believe we can all learn from each other, I think we all have something to teach. So this is some of the stuff I’ve learned… and if you have any, please leave some advice for others.
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The quotations are from comments I’ve left on ‘Perfect Defect’ and ‘Exact Science’; taken from responses I’ve made to comments left here on Salted, or from posts I’ve published here, some of which can be found here and here.
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...salted lithium. 