mentality

I'm very blase about being deeply emotionally and mentally unstable, to the point where I usually give off an impression of being much better adjusted than I am and coping with my problems way more effectively than I actually do. In fact they're as much a handicap to me as any physical disability. People compare mental illness to physical illness all the time as a way of describing how it's caused by chemical imbalances and bad experiences over which the sufferer has no control and must simply deal with the fallout. Not entirely a fair comparison since pneumonia or the flu and even cancer can go away, whereas there is no cure for mental illness just as there's no cure for, say, multiple sclerosis or amputation. Medication doesn't 'cure' depression or schizophrenia or anything else any more than it can 'cure' a debilitating permanent illness. You do with your mental illnesses what you do with a physical handicap: you get therapy, you take what medications best mitigate the worst of your symptoms, and you learn to accommodate a problem that isn't going to go away. Living life with any disability is more about compromising in your day-to-day life than it is about making it go away entirely. A prosthetic limb doesn't make an amputation go away, it simply allows a person to live a normal life and not be immediately apparent in a crowd as someone suffering a serious handicap--and such is the case for the medications and therapies associated with any kind of mental illness.

I think part of my problem--one part of a much more complicated big picture that comprises my psychiatric health--is that I'm less ill than I am damaged. The results are still the same. I still have severe anxiety and depression, but I've noticed my diagnoses tend to change as the 'fad' mental illnesses of the day change. It's hard to describe but essentially I have good reasons to think that my problems are only partially caused by those pesky neurochemical imbalances or a predisposition for the genetic components of mental illness. (My mom used to adamantly insist--and would still if I hadn't insisted on no longer discussing the subject--that I was bipolar because my paternal grandmother is bipolar. Not only have I not heard this story substantiated by anyone else, a single grandparent suffering even a strongly genetic mental illness like schizophrenia--which has a whopping 90% occurrence between identical twins, meaning that if one twin has schizophrenia then the other is 90% likely to also be diagnosed with it, suggesting a major genetic factor considering twins share identical genes--doesn't dramatically increase your risk of being diagnosed. The likelihood of family members both being diagnosed with bipolar disorder dramatically decrease the further they are from the sufferer; monozygotic twins have the highest rate at 85%, followed by 60% if the sufferer is a parent and down to just 10% with a grandparent. With no family history, by the way, bipolar has a 2% occurrence in the general population.)

I'm not saying my brain is completely normal. It isn't. I just don't think the problems are entirely due to it. Admittedly I base this on the fact that more or less consistent symptoms have been diagnosed at various points in my live as different flavours of anxiety, childhood bipolar mania, regular depression, and attention deficit depending on what was most commonly in the public consciousness at the time of the diagnosis. In the early and mid 90s, it was attention deficit; five years later it was clinical depression. Not that I'm denying actually suffering from anything with which I was diagnosed--except maybe attention deficit, since I'm able to focus my attention unusually well on anything I don't find completely eyeball-numbing boring and I defy anyone not to let their mind wander when they don't have any interest in the subject before them. All I'm saying is I don't think it was the only cause and missed a big part of the picture.

Most of my problems are mental instabilities and emotional disturbances and behaviour problems commonly found among abused children and the survivors of any kind of abuse. I only recently began to think of my treatment as abuse, in small part because of a blog called Pervocracy (to which I was linked for its hilarious 'Cosmocking' segments), in which the writer laid down a simple fact that I'd never considered before: abuse needn't have been extreme in order to have been abuse. People who chain their children up in the garage are abusers, but so are people who keep their children on an invisible chain by the use of brutal intimidation and calculating cold manipulation. Children who suffer even very slight abuses often grow up emotionally stunted, prone to violent mood swings, develop explosive violent tempers, and have great difficulty making and maintaining relationships of any kind with others. Worst of all, they're known to become abusers themselves and exhibit the same bad behaviour as the people who hurt them. People who are hit are more likely to hit others; people who are sexually assaulted are more likely to sexually assault others.

Anyway, a lot of factors go into the development of and successful coping with mental illnesses. There is always the genetic factor but if that were all there was to it then every mental illness would have a 100% occurrence rate in identical twins (same DNA, remember?), and none do. It could well be that I have that genetic predisposition but lots of people have stronger genetic links that never display psychological issues of any kind because they never experienced the kind of bad experiences that set off that chain reaction.

In the end, like I said, I think I'm damaged more than imbalanced and it results in me exhibiting psychological instabilities with a range of symptoms--difficulty with relationships, trust issues, mood swings, poor self-esteem, and a lack of motivation--that are sufficiently common and vague to be present in just about every psychiatric diagnosis in the book. As well as just being things that even otherwise totally neurotypical people experience from time to time. It's easy to misdiagnose such problems.

Had I been born more recently, I would probably be put squarely into today's common mental illness somewhere at the light end of the autism spectrum. Admittedly I do have a few characteristic tendencies like social awkwardness and weirdly vast knowledge of very specific subjects, but the major ones don't apply to me. I'm not socially awkward because I have difficulty with the nonverbal aspect of human interaction--to the contrary, I'm exceedingly good at reading people and adjusting my tactics accordingly--and any learning disability not easily explained by my being of very limited intelligence.

There does happen to be one autistic trait I have that's actually kind of weird. Temple Grandin invented a light compression machine as a teenager to help her cope when she found herself overwhelmed by the day-to-day social interactions she didn't understand. The pressure helped calm her down. Some autistic people, children especially, are surprisingly easily soothed often by being slightly squished. It just happens that I share this trait. I don't like being confined in any way, but weight and pressure are very comfortable on me. When I sleep I'm usually more comfortable literally folding as much of myself under the bulk of my weight as I can. During the boything's visit, he kept rolling onto me in his sleep and I actually preferred being slept on because I found it extremely comforting even though he weighs well over 200 pounds. Most people would feel suffocated. I just fall asleep.

Still, you can't make a whole diagnosis based on one weirdly specific symptom even though I can't adequately explain why I have it at all.