A Recovery Blog

This blog is about my continuing recovery from severe mental illness and addiction. I celebrate this recovery by continuing to write, by sharing my music and artwork and by exploring Buddhist and 12 Step ideas and concepts. I claim that the yin/yang symbol is representative of all of us because I have found that even in the midst of acute psychosis there is still sense, method and even a kind of balance. We are more resilient than we think. We can cross beyond the edge of the sane world and return to tell the tale. A deeper kind of balance takes hold when we get honest, when we reach out for help, when we tell our stories.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Working Through Symptoms, Bonding With Friends

Coffee has been a partial antidote to my depression lately, but I have to be careful to stop drinking it sometime in the afternoon or else I stay up all night. Occasionally that's okay, but as a habit it invites psychosis back into the forefront, which is not something I'm willing to do. Before I became psychotic, I didn't realize how important sleep was to maintaining mental health. So if any of you are having psychological problems, be sure to focus on getting your sleep. That's why I take the generic Risperdal before bed, even though it also increases my appetite (hence I stay fat) and decreases my sex drive (hence I stay celibate). I have learned to compromise. Because I am middle-aged and have lived alone for so long, I can bear with the compromise, in a way a younger person might not be able to do so readily. Ultimately, for those with psychotic disorders, you have to choose between sanity and insanity. I chose sanity because insanity threatened to swallow me whole. But within my sanity, or relative sanity, because I still hear voices and still believe that they come from outside of me, I struggle with the negative symptoms of schizophrenia.

Except for the voices, my positive symptoms, such as hallucinations, delusions and paranoia, have all almost completely diminished. The most resistant of the three has been paranoia, but even that rarely bothers me for long. My negative symptoms, which for me are social isolation, apathy towards cleaning my house and other self-care issues have combined with healthy doses of depression and anxiety, perhaps as a result of the negative symptoms. Lately I have been trying to treat my depression and especially my anxiety by returning to meditation. But after doing a google search on negative symptoms of schizophrenia I learned that the medications I take are mainly for treating positive symptoms and not for treating negative symptoms. There is no effective medication yet for negative symptoms and so many people are turning to cognitive behavioral therapy and talk therapy.

I don't know much about cognitive behavioral therapy, though my therapist says she uses some of the techniques with me, but I do know about talk therapy. I see my therapist once every two weeks and the rest of the time I talk into my tape recorder several times a day and listen back to my recordings. I take short notes that I write on the tape sleeve that fits into the case, so that I have some idea of what's on the tape if I want to listen to it at a later date. At some point I might transcribe sections of the tape to use with my other writing, especially for my memoir.

What I've found is that talking into the tape recorder helps to ease my sense of social isolation, which is one of my negative symptoms. I equate social isolation sometimes with depression and anxiety, so talking and listening help to treat all of it. Unfortunately, it appears to do little towards helping me to clean my house, wash my clothes and brush my teeth. I wish there was a pill for that and for shedding the weight I've put on in the last 10 years. But I will take what I can get, though I am considering asking my psychiatrist for an anti-anxiety pill. I did some research on that and found most of the potent anti-anxiety pills are addictive, plain and simple, and not really worth taking, unless you have severe panic attacks, and then only temporarily. I did discover that I might be suffering from something called General Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and that there is a relatively harmless drug called Buspirone or Buspar that has been helpful for others. It is mildly sedating, has no serious drug interactions and is basically non addictive. I'm going to talk about it with my therapist and then with my psychiatrist.

In order to tackle my self-isolation I discovered a new approach this week. I asked an old friend if I could send her a tape of me talking to her. Technically I should be able to pick up the phone and give her and other friends a call, but I've developed some phone phobia. She said yes and even offered to send me a tape of herself. So I sent the tape to her, she got it on Friday and is working on a tape to send me this week. I am excited to be doing this. I have thought of doing it before with another friend, but I chickened out and never sent the tape. Now I feel ready, especially after conducting my self-talk experiment for over three years now. And I am so glad that it is this particular old friend that I'm communicating with. I worried that I got a little too personal with her on the 2nd side of the tape, but she said it just made her feel as if I really cared about her, and I do! It is special to have this connection with someone from my childhood and youth, someone from my old neighborhood. I'm blessed that she's responded to me. I am even more fortunate to have a circle of online friends who have been so good to me. Last night I picked out a bunch of small presents to give to two other friends. I will send the packages off tomorrow. And Nancy has promised to mail me an old fashioned letter very soon.

Other than this, I have hit my two month mark for writing and reading each day. Tomorrow I will celebrate, I will get a new gadget in the mail; it's called a Kindle. The Kindle is a computer the size of a paperback made for downloading and reading books, listening to audiobooks and listening to music. It also has an experimental program for surfing the internet. Books published before 1923 are mostly free to download and many others are $10 or less. I decided to buy it based on that and the portable internet connection. It can hold up to 3,500 books. I'm hoping it will reduce the pile of books around my couch. Luckily, I had an extra couple of hundred dollars this month, though normally I try not to spend too much. What this means is that I can have an entire library at my fingertips in time. I can browse through so many books and even highlight and take notes on specific pages. I can also have access to the internet wherever I travel. The Kindle is made by Amazon and Amazon pays for the internet connection through AT&T (I think). I am very excited to get it and try it out. I'll let you know if it works out well.

2 comments:

Karen May Sorensen said...

Funny thing is Kate, sometimes I don't feel like a proper sick person because I don't have positive symptoms, all mine are negative. The negative ones are so hard to describe! I don't know why, after being creative for two to three hours my mind suddenly shuts off, or why afterwords I have to suffer by feeling thin skinned, empty brained, and full of anxiety. I don't know why I have to withdraw from social situations after two hours, I simply can't be with people much longer than this or else I suffer as I do after being creative; I become a shadow of a human being. What do they call feeling like a shadow symptom? It has to be a negative symptom. I know my brain isn't working properly in these cases. I'm glad you are making yourself better by reaching out to people - you are putting a layer or a wall between the disease and your sense of self. The self as healthy has friends and sends them tapes, this wins over the disease symptoms that the self sometimes experiences. And by the way, I had the same side effect on Risperdal as you have. I remember coming home from the hospital and having incredibly painful sex with my boyfriend. That relationship did not last long. You are very brave for your choices, and mature. Some people would choose the disease, believe it or not. I recently read that people started on anti-psychotics, 80% stop them. Astonishing. When they are re-hospitalized they get another chance to take them again I guess. I know that after my first hospitalization I stopped my anti-psychotics.

Take care,
Karen

nancy said...

Dear Kate and Karen,

Kate you know that I suffered many debilitating clinical depressions in my life...yet they were always kept hidden from others...in college...my absence was explained as a hospitalization for a bleeding ulcer...other times specific operations...my poor dad always had to come up for reasons why flowers could not be sent to me and when I'd go back to work there were so many questions to answer...I had been so humiliated by my condition and unable to let others know that I suffered depressions for fear of their judgment of me...But, finally I had to come out of the closet about my depressions and though difficult it has been a great healing.

Karen - You speak about being thin-skinned...I thought I had to become more thick-skinned but now I have realized for me to choose my inner circle of friends wisely and to share only what I am ready to share. I learned from therapists and friends and experiences. I check the waters and take risks, but I am more careful.

I was married, have two grown children and a job I love...yet when I was ill all I could imagine was living in a mental hospital the rest of my life or becoming a bag lady. The mind is so powerful. I am saying all this because I empathize with anyone who suffers from a mental illness. In my case the depressions were episodic and I had to take medication only when I failed to cope better. I have reflected so much on what has happened in my life and have found great relief. I find that my friends who suffer from mental illnesses are also quite intelligent and highly creative. We seem to be blessed to have thin skins...sensitivity. When it is positive it brings great joy.

I haven't had a clinical depression since 2006 and hope I never do again. Perhaps that is similar to not having a psychotic break...I realize schizophrenia is different...yet I think therapy and contact within the world as well as respites from it are the human condition. What is normal anyway? The more I have been open and shared with friends I trust, the more I have found many take medication for low-grade depressions.

Anyway...I could go on and on.
Kate - I hope you got my snail mail by now. Miss our writing back and forth and chatting online. Hope to hear from you soon!

Karen - All the best. I visit your site sometimes and find it to be so interesting. If you would like to see a site on facebook where I share about the arts and a project ELATION that my friend, Meesh and I are working on... go to my blog: http://dpressedorgettingthere.blogspot.com and there is a link to elationartscollective. All the Best, Nancy lookelationartscollective