New BBC Ouch article from me about the dilemma of Who am I? vs What is Illness, and the terrors of medication

Thanks for responses to my now-private previous post, as Aethelread appeared.  Glad you’re alright my friend.

I have two posts to post here but for now, here’s a new BBC Ouch article from me.

The original went over by four hundred words so this is highly edited, but let me know if you like it.

It’s this and here:

It’s been almost three years since I was rather rudely sectioned in a mental hospital. The room service was appalling, the towels were distinctly unfluffy, and, like many of my mentally interesting brethren whose fashion statement this season is the tinfoil hat, I didn’t believe that I belonged there.

On the fourth day, my world caved in when I was unceremoniously diagnosed with bipolar disorder type I by a psychiatrist who looked like the breed of kindly yet secretly dangerous headmaster you’d see in a John Hughes film like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. That was frightening enough … but more frightening was the fact that I was prescribed medication to control it. Medication that I would probably be taking for the rest of my life. At the age of twenty, that’s not (aha) easy to swallow.

Okay, so it was my tempestuous moods, my furious seasons and my bouts of psychosis that landed me in hospital in the first place. But that wasn’t the point. It may have been a solution but I wasn’t happy.

The episode that got me hospitalised wasn’t my first – that was some eight years earlier. I’d been living with this stuff for quite some while. There was no ‘before shot’ of me cowering in the splendid revelatory halo of the beaming after. As devastating and painful as my illness was, it was already part of me, it was all I had ever known, and being told that part of me had to change, and may cease to exist altogether, was galling.

Having never been really “well” meant that wellness to me was rather like a badly developed photograph of someone I didn’t quite recognise. And so began the war.