Identity

A rambling entry for you!

More on the invalidity of psychiatry from the Times.

In the madosphere, I am one of the more pro-psychiatry voices.  It leads to an inbox I sometimes can’t bear to check, in which I am assailed from all corners berating me for promoting a myth and for allowing myself to be a psychiatric victim.  I am not entirely pro-psychiatry.  I don’t, for example, believe in antidepressants as a first line treatment for depression.  I don’t believe in forced medication unless someone is a danger to someone else, and I think that everybody has the right to take their own life, and to refuse treatment.  I think people should be monitored closely and made aware of their medicated side effects, to be allowed to choose not to take them, and I think therapies should be more widely available.  I do think as an industry, psychiatry is deeply flawed, but not as a practice.  But in short, I support the idea that mental illness is not just a sociological label for perceived deviancy, and that medication is not just mindless drugging.

On a personal level, I’ve always referred to what I go through as an illness.  I call it manic depression rather than the dispassionate bipolar disorder, as manic depression as a term is more expressive than bipolar disorder (often shortened to bipolar, which means approximately nothing).  Manic depression succinctly sums it up.

I refer to it as an illness because that’s how I think of it.  And in my own experience, it feels like an illness.  To me, it feels as physical as a descending flu.  Its complete disconnection of my actual life (rarely am I “triggered” and often am I depressed in circumstances that don’t call for it, and vice versa) has meant that I think of myself as someone fighting an outside force.  I have been aware- some may say too aware- of the likelihood that I might die doing so, and that I find it terrifying.

Because of this, some people would argue that it is a case of me not taking responsibility for myself.  Surely if I think of it as an illness outside myself, then I won’t do all those, “lifestyle changes” and I’ll get into the victim role?  Well, all long term illnesses require you to live a certain way.  In terms of my illness, I do live in a different way that other people my age.  More carefully.  And I think if I didn’t think of this as an illness I could fight and treat, I would go mad. This growing, shivering jellyfish of a thing is unbearable in itself, and neatening it helps me.   I wasn’t always of this opinion.  In the past, I was scornful of the idea that people should take medication.  Hence the lateness of me getting treatment.

In terms of my stance and the pro-psychiatry stance, there’s a bit of confirmation bias going on on both sides here.  In my experience of anti-psychiatry, many have cleanly ignored all studies that point to the idea that some mental illness may have a basis in biological, claiming bias in the studies due to the Big Pharma and leapt upon anything vaguely critical.  Likewise, people like me who believe that some (and I do mean some.  I think quite a lot of mental illnesses and disorders are caused by life, such as PTSD) mental illnesses are biological may turn a bit of a blind eye to the psychological studies.  In my case, it’s part exhaustion and wariness at feeling constantly as though I have to prove that it’s okay for me to take medication.  Because I do have that imaginary “illness”, the fight is personal.

While writing this blog I have had to justify not only my belief that I am “ill” many times but also my very existence as a person on sickness benefits and a person who takes medication.  None of you can see me and although I try to describe my day to day, I fail, because I don’t write my day to day when I am feeling less than able to.  I only write when I feel up to it, and recently, for example, I haven’t.

As with anything, the more you must assert something, the more you believe it.  A small issue becomes a big one.  Take, for example, the fact that I grew up in Northern Ireland where I existed in the strange hinterland of having to fight for a national identity.  I identified as Irish because I was raised in, well, Ireland, amongst Irish culture, into a Republican family.  But Northern Ireland is in Britain, so I am technically British, even though I grew up in a place with bilingual street signs and learning Irish. I have found myself in so many arguments where I have been told over and over again that I have no “right” call myself Irish. And even though I find nationalism deeply repugnant, I protest more, and the more I protest, the more it means to me.

Manic depression also has an undeniable cultural image which puts one on the mindbogglingly strange position of being prejudged for an illness that they have (aside from mental illness, the only thing I can think of that has a similar thing are sexually transmitted diseases, by which I mean being ill and being judged in some way personally or morally for it).  But hey, it’s better than having schizophrenia (as some of you do, according to my poll).  At least with MY illness I am a creative waify wastrel and not a murderer.

So, with all these factors at play, as well as the fact that it’s engrained in my life and personality because I became ill when I was very young, manic depression is a part of my identity.

Recently I’ve been questioning whether this is good or bad.  The crux is that it is unavoidable but I don’t think there is an interesting character trait that can’t be explained away by pathologies.  I shy away from describing myself as, “manic depressive” but sometimes- psychiatric diagnosis aside- it really is the most accurate way of describing my personality, which is mercurial in the extreme.  I can’t say if I’d be the same if I didn’t have manic depression because I have no “before” photo cowering in the beaming splendor of the after.  But I do understand now, finally, after years of agonising, that as a person I am just a bit moody too.

There is also the fact that I have made a tiny name for myself in writing about it.  That cements an image of, “Manic depressive writer Seaneen Molloy”.  On one hand, I am so proud of this image.  I hope the things I say and do help, and it helps me because I feel as though I’m doing something productive with my time off work attempting some sort of recovery, and with the pain of living with it.  On the other, I get a bit paralysed these days publicly writing about anything else, because although my main motivation is to express myself, it is also to help, or make people laugh about something that is in some ways taboo.

With mental illness, I think a period of over-identification with it is natural.  As much as it irks me (and I’m sorry if any of you are reading this), people writing or saying things like, “Oh my god, what I did was just SO bipolar/borderline etc” is understandable for a little while.  After my initial RAGE (and it was rage, boiling, blistering rage) and terror at my diagnosis, I felt an overwhelming relief. So that’s why my behaviour was like that.  That’s why I feel this way.  Thank god.  I thought I was going mad.  Okay, so I was, but this madness has a name.

But I think I’m moving after from defining myself by it.  I have been, in recent times, forcibly pulling my life back from the role of being mentally ill.  It doesn’t mean I’m not mentally ill, I am, but to think of yourself totally in those terms is shooting yourself in the foot.  I have been trying to look after myself and attempting, with trouble, to think of my life in the long term (making lists and so on) rather than the short term, because I had pretty much assumed I was going to die anyway.    What also helped was that, although it took me ages, I now (sometimes) believe Rob’s constant assertions that I am not a bad person.  That I didn’t ask for this.  That it isn’t fair but it isn’t my fault, either.

Whereas the illness itself still looms large, I am beginning to think of the treatment in less dramatic terms.  So what if I have to take medication and see a CPN?  Lots of people do.  It’s not that big a deal.  I resent it, yes, but I guess everyone does to a point.  The unexamined life is not worth living but analysing to the point that I do just keeps me in a stasis.

And I am trying to think in my own rational terms.  ”Illness”.  There it is.  It’s a shame.  But there it is.

(This could be by 10 times more articulate but fuck it)