A Wild Blogger Recognition Award Appears!

Jeanette at My Life with PTSD & Bipolar: Mental Health Matters kindly nominated me for
Write a brief story about how your blog began. I’ve been running The Dissociated Press for five years now (holy cats, time flies!) and have been documenting my journey to mental health–or at least, relative stability and improved daily functioning. When I started this blog in 2013, my life was a total mess. I was in an unhappy marriage and missing a lot of work because I was freshly diagnosed with bipolar 1 and adjusting to my new medications. I ended up losing that job, which was a major low point.

There have been a lot of low points throughout my blog-writing history, but things have dramatically improved in the last couple of years. I escaped from that unhappy, unsupportive marriage, enrolled in graduate school for clinical mental health counseling at a great school, and got engaged to a lovely, wonderful man.

I still hit depressive episodes from time to time, but unlike my pre-medication, bad relationship days, I take comfort in the knowledge that my life is so much better than I ever could have imagined. I have a wonderfully supportive partner, and his family is incredibly encouraging of me sharing my journey. My classmates have expressed appreciation for my candor, and I’ve been able to help a lot of people through my disclosures.

Advice for new bloggers is something I haven’t really thought about, but my main piece of advice is to write for yourself first and foremost. TDP has evolved over time–at first, it was a place for me to get my thoughts and experiences out into the ether in hopes of finding others who were also struggling.

Also, I like to focus on and directly address my readers as a group in my posts and always try to end a post with a positive thought or insight. It prevents the blog from feeling dreary and helps promote the overall message: recovery is possible, and recovery never looks the same for everyone. Your journey matters. Your message matters. Your experiences matter.

As I’ve gotten healthier and stopped focusing so much on my illnesses (which are still a main focal point of the blog, albeit in a different way), I realized that my relatively small following was a great audience for information about the stigma surrounding mental illness.

I realized that everyone, but especially others living with my specific conditions (PTSD with depersonalization/derealization and rapid-cycling type 1 bipolar disorder) could benefit from learning about the latest news and treatment options. I’m building up quite the library of scholarly articles and studies, and if there’s enough interest, I plan to post a few quick-and-dirty rundowns of them.

Again, I can’t thank Jeanette for this nomination–it came out of nowhere and I feel very honored about the whole thing and appreciate being recognized for my work. Validation and recognition for what I’m doing always feels nice! Also, the badge image is really cute.

My Picks for Nomination:

The Global PTSD Survivor Blog

Bloomin’ Uterus (a blog about endometriosis, which I also have)

Ruth at PTSD – Accepting, Coping, Thriving

 

 

News Day Tuesday: BLOOM by Anna Schuleit

Hey readers! This week, we’re doing something a little different for News Day Tuesday.

I stumbled across Anna Schuleit’s beautiful BLOOM project from 2003 (yes, I know I’m super late to the party). Today, I want to celebrate that project.

In 2003, artist Anna Schuleit installed 28,000 (28,000! Yow!) potted flowers throughout the psychiatric ward of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center (MMHC).

Anna Schuleit’s installation project was created within the entire building of MMHC, on all floors, inviting former patients and employees, staff, students, and the general public, to re-visit the historic site once more before its closing. There was also a symposium at a nearby venue, and an open forum on the front steps of MMHC, during which the patients were invited to tell their stories. The events were dedicated to the memory of the thousands of patients of MMHC, and included as many of them as we were able to contact, as well as the doctors, nurses, support staff, researchers, students, and the general public. The project was a non-profit effort run entirely by volunteers and all of the events were free and open to all.

Source

As people living with mental illness, some of us with more than one, we know the therapeutic power of telling our stories, of having a voice when we’re so often voiceless. Mindy Schwartz Brown wrote some beautiful poetry about her experiences at MMHC, which you can read here. One poem in particular, “Asylum,” touched me deeply.

ASYLUM
(for Anna)

How did this edifice become “home” to its inhabitants-
the renowned multiply degreed,
the haplessly homeless dually diagnosed,
the walking wounded,
the worried well,
the happy go lucky who cleaned floors,
cooked lunches,
took blood pressures.

How could it contain all of the
the egos,
the disintegrated, the inflated,
occupying one space in parallel play?
MD, SPMI
Ph.D, BPD
MSW, DBT
Tell me in this soup, where does one find one’s ME?

DSM IV, Anybody going for V?
What’s the code for those who close hospitals
then open prisons for the sick?

We all feel so much better now,
knowing our brains are
faulty and we are not.
Structural errors ,
neurotransmittor deficits,
viral origins,
genomic misconfigurations.

So now can we all be friends?
Can we do lunch?
Just as we would with a diabetic?

October 3, 2003

Mindy Schwartz-Brown © 2003

The pain of not being recognized is one we know all too well. The lines “We all feel so much better now, / knowing our brains are / faulty and we are not” struck a chord with me that resonated all the way through my body and down into what some people call the soul.

We are the ones who are forgotten. We are the ones who are hiding in plain sight, not out of our own desire to be invisible, but of the desire of others to make us invisible. We make others uncomfortable, particularly when we don’t outwardly fit the mold of the “mentally ill person.” Whenever I reveal that I have bipolar I and CPTSD to someone, I am typical met with one of two reactions. The person either recoils–the discomfort in their eyes is stark and harrowing–or they tell me how “brave” I am.

I am not brave. I simply live. What choice do I have? I do not want to die, though there are plenty of people who view living with a mental illness as a fate worse than death–and I find that more disturbing than anything going on in my attic. There have been countless times when the hauntings have gotten so noisy that I feel as though my mind may literally split in two. Still, I live. Our lives have worth. We have worth.

I’d like to end by including a few photos of Schuleit’s installation. I spent a great deal of time yesterday perusing the photos and reflecting–not on my own experiences, as I have never been inpatient, but on what others’ experiences might have been like as they lived out their day-to-day at MMHC.

All images above copyright Anna Schuleit.

Tell me your stories, readers. It’s important.

News Day Tuesday: BiAffect App Links Keystrokes with Bipolar Episodes

Greetings, readers!

It was a bit of a challenge to find an article for this week, but I finally stumbled upon something that could make a huge difference in how we track our moods. There’s a new app called BiAffect that uses your keystrokes, frequency of texting, and social media app patterns to track manic and depressive episodes.

To find out whether a user might be experiencing a manic or depressive episode, the app tracks typing speed, how hard keys are pressed and the frequency of the use of backspace and spellcheck.

–chicagotribune.com

I know there are a lot of people who dislike the idea of being tracked in any sense, which is totally fine. However, I feel a bit more comfortable with it knowing that it comes directly from a research group. It’s only available for iPhone, which is kind of a bummer because I’m a die-hard Android user.

I wish something like this had been around in 2013, when I was deep in the throes of exhausting rapid-cycling episodes. I was newly diagnosed, but the challenge of finding the right combination and doses of medication, the loss of my job (probably due to my cycling), and the overall disintegration of my marriage had more or less temporarily erased any benefits or relief I found from my diagnosis.

One of my long-time friends mentioned that he noticed I was posting a lot more on Facebook when I was manic than when I was depressed. Like, a lot. Even now that I’m stable and successfully medicated, I still pay close attention to what and how often I post. When I’m more energetic and feel like interacting with others, I find myself wondering if it’s because I’m manic, hypomanic, or just…not depressed.

When you’re living with bipolar disorder, it’s a constant question of Column A, Column B, Column C, or a bit of each. You learn to analyze your moods and energy levels, and this tracking can quickly become obsessional.

I see this app as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it would save those of us who pay attention to our moods a ton of work. On the other, those of us who are prone to preoccupation and overall obsessional thinking could end up checking in a lot more often than usual.

If BiAffect is released for Android, I’m for sure going to jump on it, at least for a trial run. It seems like it could be a useful tool for mental health care providers and patients alike–rather than having to drag in pages and pages of mood diaries, we could pop open an app and have the data right there at our fingertips (literally). And, at least in theory, it seems like any sort of self-report bias would be removed, or at least mitigated. I know I’ve been guilty of fibbing a bit in my mood diaries due to the shame that comes from realizing just how sick I am.

What do you think, readers? Would you give something like this a spin, or do you find it intrusive? Let me know! I’ll be keeping an eye on this one.

Until next time, stay safe and remember to be excellent to yourself.

News Day Tuesday: Mental Illness and Prison

Good afternoon, readers! First of all, I want to share some big news of my own–on Thanksgiving, on the rooftop of a family friend’s townhouse, my fella proposed to me! His parents and sister were there, which made it so special. I could not have asked for a more perfect guy or a more beautiful memory.

Now, on to the meat of today’s post–the treatment of the mentally ill in the United States penal system. I found a wonderful piece of investigative journalism (courtesy of the Boston Globe) that follows one inmate, Nick Lynch, through his release from prison and his adjustment to life on the outside.

Lynch, twenty-six years old and diagnosed with bipolar disorder, had been incarcerated for eight years at the time of his release. His father had made plans for the two of them–going back to college was a huge goal, undergraduate for Nick and graduate school for his father. However, as Russell and Cramer note, “But Nick was sicker now than when he’d gone to prison.”

In prison, Lynch received little in the way of mental health care, and his illness was exacerbated by being segregated. Near the end of his sentence, he attempted suicide, which was the final push needed to secure better mental health care for him. This is deplorable and only serves as one more tragic event in the ever-mounting heap of stories of how the very systems designed to protect us–people with mental illness–fail, often with tragic consequences.

While prison officials defended the course of action taken at the facility, Lynch’s father tells a different story, stating that he was the one who had to push to secure appropriate treatment for his son.

The article is lengthy, but it follows Nick’s saga of treatment, the overall difficulties navigating the mental healthcare system, and his return to prison. I strongly encourage you to read the entire piece here–it is a wonderful example of the type of exposé we need to start making a difference in the lives of those who need it most.

This brings me to my next point–I’ve been meaning to do a series of sorts about deinstitutionalization in the United States, which I’m hoping to get started in the coming weeks. In the meantime, let me know if there are any specific topics you’d like me to go more in-depth on.

And, as always, stay safe and lovely, readers. I’ll see you next time.

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