“How Mad Are You?” and How Mad am I? The giveaways of being a little bit mental.

My pot plant, Brian May, has bravely fought for survival these last eighteen months when faced with the most seemingly insurmountable of challenges, such my forgetting to water him for weeks at a time, the cats eating his leaves, moving house and being dropped on the floor and my watering him with Diet Coke to see what happens.

Here he was when he was a fine example of vitality.

Now his time has passed, and he is naked, will grow no more, and no longer feels the sparse sunlight.  Farewell, my dear friend.  I hope the next life for plants is full of flowers and dedicated beautiful women who visit you daily with water overflowing, and no cats.  I will always remember rescuing you from the cleaners who wanted to throw you out.

That’ll do, Brian May.  That’ll do.

Luckily, plants aren’t people and are therefore replaceable, and if the real Brian May can reinvent himself then so can my plant, who was more interesting to look at anyway.  This time I shall also buy a partner, maybe Anita Dobson, so he doesn’t face my forgetfulness alone, and so he has a companion with which who to try and reach with his stretching leaves.

Eddie Izzard was brilliant. He had to be good to restore the love I lost for him when he toured with Sexie.  He was performing at the charmingly dilapidated Lyric Theatre, and, given the surroundings, there was a lovely informality to the evening.  People were slumped over the back seats and the bar was selling Malteasers and bottles of WKD.

He didn’t recycle his old material, which has always been his biggest failing, and he finally came clean about being an atheist, whereas before he was careful to illustrate that he was an agnostic in order to avoid conflict.  He was in jeans and a shirt, which I guess is because he’s forty six now, not a young man, and he was wary of veering into Pat Butcheresque parody.  He looks brilliant, though.  His routine was dotted with many animal references, which always delights Rob, and with politics and philosophy, which always delights me. He whipped out his phone a few times to look stuff up on Wikipedia.  PORN pencils.  Ah, I love him

I don’t feel very good today.  My stomach continues its march towards my mouth, and I feel quite unclean, as if I’ve been dipped in something nasty.  None of this is helped by the fact that I’ve been subsisting on bland, nutritionally empty crap lately since I haven’t felt like cooking.

As I was out yesterday I didn’t get to watch the second part of “How Mad Are You”, in which psychiatrists fail to diagnose mental illness in five people who are stable now anyway.  I caught up today, and there weren’t many surprises. None of them suffered from schizophrenia.  Isn’t that lovely?  Schizophrenia isn’t hopeless, there are tons of recovered people out there.  And if you want to show one mental illness as being non threatening, as having people behind them, for god’s sake, do it with schizophrenia, the most underrepresented and badly perceived mental illness that there is. It affects 1% of the population who are not represented. What a disgraceful cop out.  And I also don’t agree with the psychiatrist that said that schizophrenia is the psychiatric equivalent of being diagnosed with cancer.  How is that statement helpful or hopeful?  Schizophrenia is a severe mental illness, like bipolar disorder, like depression.  I would argue that it’s no worse, and no better.  It can totally incapacitate some people and that’s true of any mental illness.  The only reason it’s “like cancer” is because people make horrifically blinkered statements like that one. It’s like cancer because people perceive it to be the worst.

I do not have schizophrenia, although at one point it was thought that I did because at that time I was suffering from paranoid psychosis.  One very brief point.  So maybe my saying this is wrong since I have no direct experience of it.  But I hate the fatalistic way people talk about schizophrenia.  In hushed tones.  Who is going to the Stephen Fry of schizophrenia?  Who is finally going to come out and talk about openly and prove that it’s not a death sentence?  The fact is that schizophrenia isn’t as media friendly as manic depression.  Whereas manic depression is largely seen as a middle class illness that strikes educated types, schizophrenia is the working class illness that strikes people who are not so educated.  What a pile of absolute bollocks.  What hateful propaganda.

So that made me very angry indeed.  In my eyes this show achieved nothing; it had ten well people.  The people who were diagnosed with mental illness had suffered and were being treated and that’s important.  But the omission of schizophrenia was disgraceful.  If the point of the programme was to show that people with mental illness are just like everyone else, then schizophrenia should have been core to that.

Obviously people with mental illness don’t all look like tramps on the bus, but I guess some people really do think that. I often worry that people can tell I have mental illness.  I have one big insurance against it, which is that I dress weirdly, in a “subculture” way.  I wear white fluffy coats and leopardprint tights and dyed hair and make up.  The cliché is that people with mental illness look unkempt.  Even when I am unkempt, with no make up on and greasy hair, I don’t look unkempt.  It looks part of my style.  Without make up on, I also look like I’m in my teens, so I’m quite non-threatening looking.  People with mental illness are scary, aren’t they?

The way I dress isn’t intentional, I don’t dress in a way that attempts to convey anything.  I’ve always dressed like this, except I wear more colours now and a lot less make up than I used to.  But I’ve also been thinking that my dress sense protects me from another stereotype: class.  People make assumptions on what class people belong to based on how they dress.  It’s short sighted and wrong, but they do.  Jogging bottoms and track tops=working class to people.  It might be assumed on the basis of my dress sense that I’m middle class.  It’s the whole “rebellion” aspect of dressing oddly, no matter what your age.  People think that then you grew up in a sheltered middle class environment.

Nothing could be further from the truth in my case; I grew up on a council estate with two mentally ill parents.  My mother claimed benefits and we had no money. Now, if the Daily Mail are to be believed, I exist within an underclass, those who can’t work due to illness, who “contribute nothing” to society and who claim benefits.  Yet that’s not what people would think if they looked at me.  Even in Belfast, people often assumed I was middle class because I was well spoken (for West Belfast!) and intelligent.  I liked literature and politics (which I was raised to be interested in; interesting thing about West Belfast is that a lot of young people will be raised with socialist values, and their rebellion is to drift to the right), “alternative music” and old comedy.  I read textbooks for pleasure.  Seemingly “high brow” things that people don’t assume you enjoy if you’re working class.  It’s a stupid stereotype.  Had I just worn different clothes I would have been written off as a “chav”, or, if you’re from Northern Ireland, a “spiede”.  Appearances are meaningless.

But in some ways, to those who know me and those with experience of mentalism, you can sometimes tell that I have “issues”.   Because of the medium, you only know how I feel if I tell you and everything you know about me is what I have chosen to tell you.  If you were with me, you’d probably have a better grasp on how exactly my illness affects me.  If you don’t know me, I seem odd.  In a work setting, I seem very odd.  I am more well than I was, and I don’t dispute this.  This is largely due to the absence of psychosis and having insight.  So I don’t run up and down the road barking.  Literally barking.

In two years of gathering up insight into my own illness, I know too what my giveaways are. My moods are rapid cycling and I’m yet to experience any protracted period of normal mood.  So, the nature of the beast in my case is that my moods switch from one to another.   My mood swings can be relatively mild and switch from one relatively mild mood to another.  Then, although I find it difficult to get by because of the constant flux, I can be in the world undisturbed with nobody worrying about me.  Other times, they can be quite severe and switch from say, mild hypomania to quite bad depression very suddenly.  Or from mild hypomania to escalating mania.  In the past year, though, due to antipsychotics, I haven’t had a severe manic or psychotic episode, for the first time in eleven years.  (I have had a breakdown every year since I was twelve.  I did have my falling apart this year, but it was such a quiet little madness).  Mixed episodes for me are basically mania with a horrible edge of depression.

Sometimes I do feel aware that I’m a girl with mental illness drifting through an indifferent world.  I have a secret, like we all have secrets.  With everything I’ve been through it can feel almost overwhelmingly wonderful to be walking down the street.

Obviously I am charming so I don’t seem mental on first glance, indeed, on the second.  But there are giveaways.  And this might be true of a lot of people with manic depression.

The first thing to give me away is my voice.

When I’m hypomanic, (like at the moment, admittedly), I have trouble keeping my thoughts straight, so when I talk, I talk too quickly, and I start to stammer. I skip words, so my sentences sometimes don’t make sense. I also have a knack for sounding angry when I’m hypomanic, because I’m perpetually irritable. I put incredible effort into trying to keep my speech straight.

When I’ve been manic, my speech has been hard to follow, and disorganised.  People usually don’t understand what I’m saying, or I might jump back and forth, or get stuck on a word and begin repeating it or punning on it- say, “Balloons”, I’d start saying, “Baboons” and so on.  The tone of my voices changes, too, in that it drops a few octaves.  I sound, according to Rob, superior and patronising.

Similarly when I’m experiencing psychosis I have problems with my speech.  I talk very quickly and my words overlap onto each other. I can get panicky and start rambling.

When I’m depressed, my speech is the opposite.  I slow down, forget what I’m saying then don’t bother finishing the sentence.  When I am very depressed, I am nearly mute.  It’s never clear cut with me- often I suffer from agitated depression, so it’s kind of hypomanic speech patterns with a very despairing theme. When I suffer from the non crawling out of my skin flavour of depression, I am not one of those people who cries.  I never have been.  I am very flat.  My speech is flat, I sound utterly emotionless. I don’t react to people or events around me.

The next most noticeable thing about me when I’m hypomanic is that I physically shake.  I vibrate.   I shrink away from being touched as all sensation on my skin feels like cold fire.  It is almost painful. I don’t care about being touched when I’m depressed, but usually sit stock still when someone does touch me.

Then there’s behaviour.

Even with your standard cheerful hypomanias, I am very irritable.  I snap, I take things personally and I tend to perceive things as being insulting to me, so get annoyed.  I can come across as being quite uncaring and distant, even arrogant, which is distressing for anyone around me as usually I’m a fluffy bunny type of girl. I become compulsive, particularly with  hypomania and psychosis.  I have to keep checking things and I repeat myself.  When I’m psychotic or very manic, often I am very paranoid, too, so I will only eat certain things, only want to see certain people and I start barricading things, getting panicked by the door lock, determined to move house.  When I’m hypomanic, although I have a lot of energy, I’m so distractible and I start counting up the things I have to do as a list, then go back to the start and eventually become paralysed by it.

Depression wise, I nearly always have an edge of restlessness to me.  I think that might just be inherent in my personality, as it’s almost a constant in my life, I am incredibly restless.  So I don’t lie in bed.  I get up, but don’t do the simple things.  When I’m depressed, or hypomanic, or manic, I utterly neglect myself.  I am nearly always like that, so most of my life is a cycle of self neglect, being prompted to do things. It doesn’t really show, which is good, but those close to me know about it.

When I’m depressed I am self critical, when I’m hypomanic, I’m critical of everyone else, which can be very hurtful, I know.

I am much more impulsive when I’m hypomanic or manic, and I have “issues” with overstepping boundaries and discretion. I am almost dog-like in my friendliness and loyalty, but my friendliness has gotten me into trouble, and especially does so when I’m hypomanic.  And I nearly get knocked over just about daily.

Like most other people with psychosis, I rarely have any insight into it at the time.  It’s different when I’m depressed.  With hallucinations, I tend to get that they’re not real but it’s terrifying.  It’s not really the case with delusions, when I’ve been like that, Rob (for it’s only been Rob, no one else has ever known I was will, so were just puzzled or scared by me) has talked to me about why such and such is not true.  With depression too because I am usually alone, most people don’t know what’s going on with me, so it’s also lonely. And I tend to keep a lot to myself when I’m depressed.  With manic or mixed episode psychosis, there is not a hope in hell of me understanding that I’m psychotic and I think that would even be true now if it happened.  I have been psychotic often and there is quite a lot I don’t recall and some actual things that have happened that I am not sure if they happened or not.  Distressing, yes it is.  The general rule is if I’m talking what seems to be rambling, untrue bollocks, start becoming extremely paranoid, start talking about or to something you can’t see or start believing what seems to be odd things, I am not very well.  With depression, if I’m slipping into badness, I will be unwilling to go to bed because often in depressive psychosis I have had hallucinations of people and insects in my bedroom.  A recurring theme.  I stop wanting to leave the house out of paranoia, as well.

With hypomania or mania, I will tend to hit the drink.

I also have those rubbish cognitive problems that some people with mental illness have.  I have problems with logic, I think quite abstractly therefore can utterly miss the point of something.  Although I’m clever, I often have to be shown how to do something over and over again.  (This has always really panicked me in jobs.  I am good at mostly useless things like writing and art, and the odd technical thing. I can pick up some things quickly but others make me break into a cold sweat, and I hate asking for help because it makes me look as though I’m stupid).  I struggle to read novels these days, which is bad, they were my greatest joy.  I have an appalling, really, really awful memory and as a result I remember little of half of my life, and day to day I will forget what I have done, or said, and have to be reminded to do things over and over again. If I read e-mail or text, my brain fills in the cracks and assumes I’ve replied to it, until a pissed off email from someone I have seemingly ignored pops into my inbox. I almost never remember the conversations I have, and have had, which is upsetting, I don’t remember things like the first time someone told me they loved me, and  I don’t remember those fantastic 4am heart to hearts.  It’s largely why some of my friendships are not as close as they probably could be.  My memory is the bane of my life.   I’m also incredibly clumsy and become more so when I’m depressed because I’m not all there.  I have broken things worth £allyourmoney.

My sleep is always screwed up at both ends of the spectrum and it’s always insomnia.  It just depends on feeling tired or nothing.  I always seem to gain weight when I’m depressed despite not eating, which is odd.  I think my body has a Burger King inside it that I don’t know about.

So, isn’t that fascinating?