Introductions- Revisited

Well, hello there.

Firstly, hello. This is a blog about manic depression. I’m a manic depressive, and I don’t mind. If you’ve found me, you probably already know what Manic Depression is. It’s also known as Bipolar Disorder.

In the wonderful words of the Manic Depressive Fellowship: Bipolar Disorder is a serious mental health problem involving extreme swings of mood (highs and lows). Both men and women of any age from adolescence onwards and from any social or ethnic background can develop Bipolar Disorder.

Aaaand, that’s it, really. It’s a mental illness characterised by extremes of mood. It’s thought to be biological in nature, caused by a mixture of genetics, chemical imbalance and stressful life events. I’ve started this blog to spread a bit of word about Your Average Manic Depressive. We’re not rock stars, or authors, or dashing, plummy comedians. We are people lumbering through our lives, weighed under by medications and never really knowing if we’ll get better or not. If reading this, you recognise anything in yourself that’s a bit worrying, or anything in someone else that’s a bit worrying, get help.

If you want to know it, here’s my story.

My name is Seaneen. I am 4ft 11″ tall with changing hair colour. This is me:

I live in Highbury Park, a nice area in North London.

Durrrrrrrrrr. I spend most of my time writing. When I’m not writing, I like to read and take photographs and kick ass at Mortal Kombat.

I have good friends. I smoke. I buy all my clothes at charity shops. My favourite bands are the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, The Divine Comedy, Manic Street Preachers, PJ Harvey, Kenickie, The Smiths, Pulp, Suede et al. I love comedy, especially Monty Python, A Bit of Fry and Laurie, The Young Ones, Family Guy and Ripping Yarns.

Aaaand I love literature. In my “To read” pile is J.P Donleavy, Flann O’ Brien, Sylvia Plath, Oscar Wilde and Albert Camus.

No, Seaneen is not an English name.

I’m originally from West Belfast in Northern Ireland. It’s a Republican, working class area, staunchly political, poor and always exciting. I lived with my mum, my dad and my four brothers and sisters.  My dad died in 2006 from alcoholic liver failure.

I’ve struggled with the symptoms of manic depression for years.  I’ve had massive episodes of mania followed by long stretches of depression.  It’s messed up a lot in my life; relationships, jobs, the general ability to function.
This is the story of how I came to be diagnosed with manic depression.

Sometime during October 2006, I found myself sitting on a hard plastic chair stationed at the top of a dimly lit corridor in a North London mental hospital. Rob drained a cup of tea that had been made for us by a patient while we waited for the nurse. I fidgeted and stared straight ahead, too afraid to make eye contact with any of these crazy people. I had no idea why I was there and how it had come to this.

A few hours beforehand, I was at home, curled up on the sofa while blood poured from my neck and arms. My fingers were pressed in my ear as I fought the rising tide of garbed voices and fractured thoughts that were ricocheting through my exhausted brain. I could barely sit still. I was agitated and wild, slashing at myself in order to relieve some of the pressure building up inside me. For the past few months, since my father’s untimely death of alcoholism, I had been alternating between starburst euphoria and suffocating despair. I had spent nights talking to hallucinations and every time I left the house, I tried to bring someone back with me. And now, I was a peculiar mix of ferocious energy, joyous ambition and paranoid, dreadful depression. I had lost a lot of weight, stopped sleeping and stopped washing.

I was a smelly, exhausted wreck whose hands would not stop shaking. And I knew, in some way, that the game I had been playing since I was twelve years old was up.

Rob returned from work and decided to take action. We took a lonely, silent taxi journey to the local Emergency Reception Centre for mental health. I had been there a month before. This time was different. I was asked to stay and wait for the psychiatrist and a team of social workers. I agreed and waited outside, jumping from foot to foot, chain smoking and talking constantly, confusedly to Rob.

When I was summoned, it was to a room where I was faced with a stream of gentle questioning.

I answered the shakily. I have just turned twenty one. I started feeling this way when I was twelve. I’d been self-harming since I was thirteen. I’d recently lost my father. I moved to London when I was seventeen. No, it was more of a whim, really. I used to live in West Belfast. Yes, my life there was pretty horrible. I had a job until a few months ago.

And then a series of questions that faintly echoed ones I had been asked many years before.

“Has there ever been a time when you have been more active than usual?”
“Has there ever been a time when you have slept less and found you didn’t really need to sleep?”
“Has there ever been a time when you have felt more creative or productive than usual?”
“Has there ever been a time where you have seen or heard things that weren’t there?”
“Has there ever been a time when you have found that you are talking much more than usual?”

After answering “yes” to every question, I was admitted an as inpatient to the hospital and walked through the moonlight wards to where I would be spending an indefinite amount of time.

And we’re back to waiting for the nurse. It was late, about one a.m and I was afraid. I was taken to a room and given a pale blue patient’s gown to sleep in. The nurse offered me two pills- Haloperidol and Lorazepam, which rushed me into the first sleep I’d had for a long time.

I spent four days in hospital. On the night before my discharge, I had tried to sleep for eighteen hours. A friend had appeared in the wards like a bright sun, bringing flowers. I took them, thanked her and resumed trying to sleep. However, my brain would not stop raising. I was inbued with an unshakable energy that I had to somehow burn off. However, I couldn’t concentrate. Fragments of books and plays spun through my mind. I lay on the bed, speaking aloud to myself, attempting to play number games, word games, anything to coax my thoughts into ceasing their marathon. At about five in the morning, I had shut the bathroom door and was doing star jumps, shouting my own name over and over again. The aptitude for sports that had eluded me in my teenage years had somehow instilled me with an electric shock of physical endurance.

On my final day, the fifth month anniversary of my father’s death, I was introduced to a psychiatrist and two men from the local Crisis Team. There I was very quickly and efficiently diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder I. I knew only one thing about bipolar disorder: it was the clinical name for manic depression. My doctor explained that bipolar disorder 1 was the variant of manic depression that encompassed episodes of mania as well as depression. I had qualified as being manic by experiencing episodes of “psychosis”- the many periods in my life when I was a terrified captor to hallucinations. Suddenly, all the times in my life I had half-recalled telling people that I was famous and touched by God made sense. I had batted them out of my memory, dismissing them, as many others had done, as teenage silliness. A lot of the time, I became depressed and extremely ashamed and guilty of my erratic behaviour. I could hardly bear to think of it- nights scaling a multistory car park and laughing, breaking into someone’s house just to try and sleep and failing, as I usually did.

The episode that had me hospitalised was a “mixed episode”- an episode which encompassed both mania and depression simutaneously. When I left hospital, I was suffering from mania, not for the first time, and not for the last.

I returned home and began the process of accepting and managing my illness. Armed with Lithium, I believed a whole, new and healthy life would be blossoming before me.

I later found out it wasn’t that easy.

Since my diagnosis, other things have been tagged on rather haphazardly: rapid-cycling, meaning there are few gaps between my episodes of mania and depression, problems with panic and a whoel slew of psychiatric medications, to stop me going too low, to stop me going too high, in the quest for that magical equilibrium that the world calls, “Normal”.

I take a crazy cocktail of four medications: Depakote 1000mg, Seroquel 400mg, Paroxetine 20mg and Lithium 1000mg.

I couldn’t have got through the dreadful experience of hospital and the difficult months before and after if not for the love and patience of Rob, my friends and my family.

I had long since held the theory that manic depression was purely an idiosyncracy bestowed upon the middle classes. I never knew that it was a serious mental illness and never thought it would strike down a young girl from a rough council estate in West Belfast. For the past decade, I had been a secret manic depressive. I couldn’t understand why, I was a fairly normal girl. I loved to read, write and was a religious fan of The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. I was obsessed with comedy and could quote Monty Python and Peter Cook in that irritatingly student parrot fashion.

In February 2007, I decided to start an online blog detailing the true day to day life of a manic depressive and the challenges I faced, including getting the help I needed, dealing with medication, coming to terms with my diagnosis and dealing with discrimination.

I owe my life to the kindness and love of Rob Britton and to my family and friends.

So here is my guide to being a Mentally Interesting Girl Navigating the Labyrinth of the NHS Mental Health Services. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and probably do both at once if you’re a manic depressive like me.