Category Archives: Mental Health

Identity, Living, Mental Health, Mental Illness

Quirking

Marking the distance yet to cover when your arrival time has elapsed. How close can I get?
Noting how many more steps yet to complete a recipe before your spouse returns. How far can I get?
Washing clothes and putting them back in drawers before it’s been a week since you first took them out. How anal retentive can I get?

Perhaps we all have such markers, paces we put ourselves through – though we might never know because not many would admit them. For fear of – sounding crazy? Mental? OCD?

I actually asked my therapist once if I was OCD. She said there are such things as OCD tendencies or even an OCD personality without an actual OCD diagnosis. One way to tell, she said, if whether such routines disrupt our way of life. If they stop us from all the other bits of living we could be getting to because they take up too much time – or if we cannot even begin living if we don’t first complete them.

So I may not have full blown OCD, but I have my quirks.

Not being fully free of a dinner party until the platters, teacups, tablecloths are all clean and back in their original homes.
Reading library books in the order they were taken out of the library.
Impelled to leave pieces of projects out, where they will taunt me, until I’ve completed them.

My mind works in weird ways. Segmented. Compartmentalized. Whatever part of it that is responsible for my control freak tendencies has trained me to believe that physical limits lead to overarching control. What a quirky rule of thumb. And I fall for it mind, heart, and fingers.

Standard
Living, Mental Health, Poetry

Memory Loss

We must leave the house at 3:45

No, wait, the bus arrives at 3:45

Aah, rinse the soap out of my hair and showering is done

Wait, did I wash my feet?

 

When there is a bullet of fog

lodged

in your brain,

it’s very easy for thoughts to get lost in translation.

 

The tricky part is remembering what the hell they meant in the first place.

Standard
Mental Health, Mental Illness

Quizzical

 

Which character on Downton Abbey are you most like? What color represents your personality? What does your favorite fruit say about you?

Every time one logs onto his or her social media venue of choice, there is an endless supply of such quizzes. I admit, a few have piqued my interest. Perhaps it’s the ever present quest to find ‘my dream job’ that almost lured me into taking that one. But I never wanted to waste precious spare moments on such an endeavor and certainly didn’t want to link up my personal details with some outside entity. One quiz in particular that scrolled across my screen, however, hit me in a personal way even without relinquishing my information.

What mental disorder do you kind of have?

First of all, the qualifier ‘kind of’ is a slap in the face. Those who ‘full on’ have a mental disorder know there’s nothing ‘kind of’ about it. The questions dilute the struggles and pain of common side effects of these conditions, such as a misplaced pattern in a range of tiles. In a list of adjectives to describe oneself, the choices range from sad to crazy. One choice for the question ‘Are you an active person?’ is ‘No, I’m super lazy’. Is that how pop culture would describe the malaise brought on by clinical depression? I don’t think that’s how one suffering from it would. In a range of pictoral representations of one’s demeanor at a party, there are gross caricatures of stereotypical mental states. In terms of treatment, one question asks whether one would choose talking to a trusted individual or taking pills. Is that an either/or question? Is one any less noble than the other?

house party

After completing the quiz, here was my diagnosis:

 

OCD, or obsessive–compulsive disorder, is an anxiety disorder characterized by intrusive thoughts that produce uneasiness, apprehension, fear, or worry. You, while being completely healthy, know your fair share of disturbing and worrying thoughts. Don’t you worry, you’re perfectly fine. Just stop thinking.

Yeah, cuz it’s just that easy. Never mind that fact that I’ve never actually received such a clinical diagnosis, but to dilute overcoming OCD to simply ‘stop thinking’?

I get that I’m taking a silly quiz much more seriously than it was ever meant to be taken. I see the other quizzes in the side bar that invite me to find the decade I was born in or the quote that best describes my life. But forgive me for taking a possibly egregious offense to putting a real life daily-lifelong struggle alongside such drivel. Is this what we’re up against? The stigma surrounding mental illness will never be shattered with online memes like this. I’m all for humor, but this is the kind that pokes fun like a bully on the bus. This is not the release valve, instructive humor that is healthy.

Sorry if I’m ‘kind of’ offended.

 

 

Standard
Depression, Maternal Health Month, Maternal Health Month 2014, Mental Health, postpartum depression

Advanced Screenings

 

They didn’t ask me to fill out the maternal mood questionnaire when I arrived for my annual physical today. I guess I’m no longer in the danger zone of postpartum. I no longer have a baby. My children are older. I’m more experienced. Everything should be easy-peasy at this point.

Or maybe they didn’t ask because my doctor knows. My chart already says ‘depressive disorder’. She just refilled my script for a low-dose of antidepressant. There’s no point in screening because we’re post-diagnosis.

She asked how I was feeling, how I was faring. A shrug of the shoulders. An approximation of one on my lips. Hunky-dory, doc. Some days are worse than others. I’m not cured, if that’s what you mean. I don’t want to run screaming from the house with my hair on fire – and haven’t for a while – but I still tend toward blah.

Maybe I’m expecting too much. I mentioned that I still have down days, but perhaps that’s the normal up and down of life. Yes, she said, you shouldn’t feel numb; you’ll have high points and low points. The lows seem so miserable, though. I know everyone has days when they don’t want to get off the couch, but my reasons seem so much more melancholy. A hollow near my heart, scooped out of the space where my joy once was. It’s not non-existent, but I haven’t noticed yet a day when the balloon inflates fully to fill that space.

I felt cheated somehow in not being ‘screened’. That it doesn’t matter since I’m beyond the threat of postpartum? That I’ve been given my happy pill so I should just shut up and take it? That I’ve been asked the same questions before and still don’t have any definitive answers?

But I suppose the screening isn’t perfect anyhow. A mother I know posted this status update after one of her trips to the doctor’s office.

At my physical I had to answer depression screening questions. One question was: “Do you feel like you’re failing your family or letting them down?” I laughed! Instead of circling the sometimes, often, or usually, I wrote in “Of course I do – I’m a working mother!”

No one questionnaire is going to get at the heart of each and every mother’s difficulties. I suppose it’s a step in the right direction that someone, anyone is asking – even if it’s a sheet of paper on a clipboard. But it should only be a beginning. Precisely because that question was laughable to that mom in its ironic understatement, we need to illustrate and represent all facets of a mother’s struggle – and give her the tools to do so – in order to help her when she needs it.

Image links to an online screening tool via Kent University (not specific to maternal mood disorders)

Click for an online screening tool via Kent State University (not specific to maternal mood disorders)

 

Standard
Maternal Health Month, Maternal Health Month 2014, Mental Health, Mental Illness, motherhood

May is Maternal Health Month

 

May is actually Mental Health Month. If you were hanging around these parts at this time last year, you’d know that all too well. Every day of May, I posted something germane to that topic: reflecting on my own struggles and successes, reviewing symptoms and warning signs, offering hopefully helpful resources. While I got increasingly more depressed the more posts about my own depression I logged, it was a valuable exercise. So much so, that I’ve decided to do a similar one this year.

Since the plot line of my mentally-ill life spiked with the birth of my third daughter, I decided to tighten my focus onto maternal mental health. In no way am I discounting any of the other myriad aspects of mental illness and/or health, but those surrounding mothering and the female hormonal system are an animal in and of themselves – a big, nasty, brutish, spiky-haired one, may I add.

Colloquialism has us turning into fierce mama bears when our children are threatened, but what of the threats that come from inside us?

This month, I hope to explore that and perhaps lay some of that hair back down.

Join the pack.

There are so many of us out there, even if it feels each of us is trapped in a dark cave all alone.

A general banner for Mental Health Month, but I chose the image of this woman alone on the beach because very often, our family is fine, we're the one (feeling like we're) struggling all alone; that there is something we must fix within ourselves before we can connect with the family.

A general banner for Mental Health Month, but I chose the image of this woman alone on the beach because very often, our family is fine; we’re the ones (feeling like we’re) struggling all alone; that there is something we must fix within ourselves before we can connect with the family.

 

Standard
Mental Health, Mental Illness

Stand Up For Mental Health: Crazy Good Comic Big Daddy Tazz | Crazy Good Parent

Big thanks to Crazy Good Parent for sharing this clip from Big Daddy Tazz – and the entire ‘Stand Up for Mental Health’ initiative. Get ready to laugh! (Beware – some language)

Stand Up For Mental Health: Crazy Good Comic Big Daddy Tazz | Crazy Good Parent.

Standard
anxiety, Identity, Living, Mental Health

Damn the Weather, Man

That’s a very precariously placed comma.

I don’t wish eternal damnation upon all meteorologists, nor do I have the authority. However, as an anxiety-sufferer who already has enough on her plate, weather reports add another element of doom and gloom.

Perhaps if I didn’t live in New England at the ever-encroaching tail-end of winter . . .

from realbodywork.com

Perhaps if the cold clime didn’t make my already shriveled trapezius muscles jerk ever upward . . .

Perhaps if I woke up in the morning, looked at the thermometer and decided on my wardrobe at that moment on current conditions . . .

Perhaps if I could notice the gentle unfolding of the season with my own eyes rather than through the lens of radar screens and predetermined dates on the calendar . . .

Maybe, then, I wouldn’t be psychologically distraught at the impending snow storm we’re about to get.

I wouldn’t be worried about the fresh shoots that I’d unearthed beneath their layer of winter leaves. I wouldn’t bemoan the loss of soft earth between my fingers that I’d felt just this weekend. I wouldn’t begrudgingly look at the lightweight fleece jacket hanging forlornly on the doorknob.

I wouldn’t feel trapped. I wouldn’t feel like I was experiencing a relapse into unforgiving ways. I wouldn’t be nervously anticipating the loss of something I’d only barely gotten a grip on.

Driving home and noticing shutters pulled tight against the windows of a historical building that I swear I’d never noticed shut before, I actually thought of banishing all weather reports from my existence. If I didn’t know I was supposed to be battening down the hatches, I might delight in the snow. At the very least, I’d adjust accordingly when I woke up that morning by pulling on my knee socks and down coat. I wouldn’t obsess. I wouldn’t worry. I might actually live in the moment.

And that, dear people, is really what this is all about, isn’t it? It never really was about weather reports. That’s my irrational psyche’s way of pulling attention away from what is really at the heart of the matter. If I can blame the weather man for my obsessive tendencies, then I don’t have to take the onus on myself. That I can’t live in the moment. That I can’t still the whirling dervish in my mind and so must look to external forces, such as a lovely spring day, to calm me. Or, in their absence, to name as the reason for my failures.

If only the sun were shining, my heart would be light.

If only spring had truly sprung, my mood would refresh.

If only I had no prior knowledge, I wouldn’t obsess and worry.

If only it were that easy.

(Though weather reports and the attendant technology do pull us out of synch with the natural rhythms of the earth and our surroundings. 😉 )
 

Standard