TW: Mental health, suicidality, bipolar disorder
My mental breakdown started with an ill-advised medication adjustment. I complained to a new psychiatrist that I’d experienced periods of hypomania in the last year. Hypomania is not full-blown mania but is a state in which you are constantly revved up. When I experience it I get a lot done, I’m full of ideas, and I’m bursting to get it all out there. I’m also irritable, impatient, sleepless, and anxious. When those periods are over, I am usually heading into a depressive period, and I’ve also spent more money than I’ve had, committed to things I can’t do, and in the past participated in some other really unhealthy behaviors.
So I talked to the PA at my psychologist’s office. She took me off the two antidepressants I’ve been on for years and decided to put me on an antipsychotic. I began to experience high anxiety which would then translate into depression. I’d spend hours each day researching to find out if the world was going to end (I was sure we were on the cusp), frantically trying to set up photoshoots (because if I’m not working I’m not a real photographer), and trying not to fall apart at work (I locked myself in the bathroom too many times to lay on the floor and breathe). My car broke down on the way to visit family in Charleston. The trip back was eight hours because I wouldn’t let my partner take the highway and my anxiety was so high that even the medication I took to sleep couldn’t calm me down. I wouldn’t drive on the highway for another month after that.
My depression continued to worsen until I was crying every day. I began to fixate on death, to wish I was dead. I never made a plan but I did constantly think about dying and how much easier things would be if I could just get it over with already. I began to obsess over other people dying. When my partner left the house, I was convinced I’d never see him again. I was convinced I’d lose my entire family. I was convinced I wouldn’t make it through the year. My psychiatrist took me back off the antipsychotic and started another anti-depressant. When I mentioned wanting to go back to the medication that had been working for me I was dismissed. I essentially fired the PA and went to my GP for the prescriptions I’d been on before.
Suddenly, they didn’t work anymore. My anxiety was so bad I’d wake up straight into panic attacks. I’d spend mornings with my head pressed into the tile floor of the bathroom praying to whoever would listen that I needed relief. I could hardly get things done at work and when I did they were mediocre. During all of this, I was accepted into an MFA program for filmmaking. I agonized over my decision. I had worked hard to get into grad school for the last year, I finally had a chance to learn and make the things I’d been desperate to make. I ended up turning the program down, in great part due to the fact that mentally I couldn’t bear the load of uprooting my entire life at such a fragile time. I had no idea when I would begin to recover if I ever would.
Things came to a head one Saturday when I went to visit my grandparents with my mom. I told them I wouldn't be going to school and just started crying. I couldn’t stop. My grandmother hugged me hard and that made it worse. It was hard to take a love of any kind at that point. My mom made an excuse for us to leave and drove me to a waterfall where we parked along the roadside. I was inconsolable. I was shaking and crying and I wanted to die. She decided the best course of action was to cart me off to the emergency room for a more instant chance to have my meds adjusted and to speak with a psychiatrist. There, I was recommended for an intensive outpatient program, given a prescription for Ativan, and sent home with a booklet of information. That was Saturday.
I started my intensive outpatient program the following Wednesday. The facility was laid out in a sterile labyrinth. Against the white and yellow cinder block walls the hours I spent there melted together, blurred with tears at the edges. In my program, you were expected to come three days a week. The day was laid out like this: your first hour is psychoeducation in a group with behavioral health and substance abuse patients. Then you took a break. Then you had two hours of process group with your category- substance or behavioral. At any time on the days you were there, you met weekly with a psychiatric nurse to get your meds in check. I was interested solely in this. My medication was the one thing that changed and triggered the spiral. Clearly, my medication was the way out.
I was caught off guard by the emotions I felt in group. At first, I cried every single session, over small things. Crying over small things is often easier than crying over the big hurts, the feelings that engulf and consume. Where your body is a hole you’re drowning in. The way out is to swim through yourself. Down in that hole, I sat, watching brief glimpses of a life being lived, filtered down through the opening at the top. These glimpses were so small, meted out so frugally, that everything that I noticed began to take on a heavier significance, an extreme beauty. Day to day though - everything in the hole moved in slow motion.
In my journey through the hole, and through myself, I was supported by many life preservers, so many in fact that I didn’t drown. So many that I am sitting here with the strength to write this to you today. I can’t thank my partner, my family, my friends, and my coworkers enough. I can’t thank my therapist and the therapists and the psychiatric nurse who helped me enough. I can’t thank my group members enough. Other things that helped were writing, frantically, about anything that interested me. Movies helped. Books helped. Running helped. But the main thing that helped, besides medication, was the love that surrounded me, which felt powerful and divine and eventually bigger than the sadness I felt.
By the third week of the program, something broke and I started to feel normal. I began to float to the top of the hole. I was still fragile but I was moving enough to create mental momentum. The medications started working. I stopped crying so much. I remember the first day I made it through entirely without anxiety, waking up in the morning and stomaching a cup of coffee without the anticipation of the imagined heart attack after. Driving down the highway listening to Studio Ghibli soundtracks and feeling calm, even when I hit the parts where the speed limit was 70 mph and cars were whizzing past me in the slow lane.
By the end of my program, I was gaining stability. I’d say today I am very stable, if not still a little fragile. I hadn’t been so bad in years, but I’d been moving through the world as though I was untouchable. I’m learning this isn’t true. I’m learning that even when deep in the hole, life is still meaningful and full of small powerful moments. I’m learning that I’m not invincible, but I am still here. I am still here. That is all that matters.
