Sometimes when I was younger I desperately wanted to return to being three. Looking back, it seems obvious why I felt that way. I had no worries at three, no question of whether my parents loved me or if they loved each other. Some time around perhaps when I was 5, I started to show signs and symptoms of mental illness.
I had some indications that could have been recognized as signs of mental illness by my parents. I have to state again and again that the earlier you can recognize such problems, the better the outcome. In elementary school, I was almost always in a deep depression. I sometimes saw or heard things (rarely but memorable times when they happened). I suffered from severe insomnia and I would spend long hours by myself, reading or listening to classical music. My dad was aware of my mental health situation, and he did care and try to help, but he was from the Old Country-Europe (Denmark). He didn’t fully understand the need for childhood intervention. Perhaps he thought he could deal with my problems himself. There was no question he was a loving father, even in his final years. Before he passed, him and I became closer than ever, going for walks together, going out for meals and coffee, and supporting each other after the loss of his wife/my mother.
When I look back at my early childhood development, I can only think of the unfathomable love I had for my family, but perhaps my dad especially. I recall being my happiest when we wore shirts that matched and did things like go to his work sites together to to a car wash. Life couldn’t have been better. Then I had to grow up fast when school started.
But then somewhere, and I don’t really know where it came from, depression crept in. My mom had suffered from depression since she was 16 but I was under 10 and there didn’t seem to be many ways to find help or counselling for anything like that. One of the hardest things I saw my dad go through was when he forked out much hard-earned money for us to attend a family counselling session and all of us pointed the finger of blame at him. It must have been devastating, but there really were many things, including corporal punishment that made us feel that way. We were trapped in a horrible situation.
Over the years, my diagnosis changed from depression to schizoaffective disorder with anxiety. I now take medications for schizophrenia, bipolar, an anti-depressant, along with medications for diabetes and cholesterol. There are many side effects from all of these, which include shaking hands, constant thirst, dizziness, weight gain, and on and on. But I have gotten to the point where I wouldn’t trade my best day in psychosis for my worst day on medication. Psychosis, a part of schizophrenia, is devastating, terrifying, and even extremely dangerous.
I was first hospitalized for a mental health reason at 14 and it made me lose any trust or faith in my family members. Those were strange times, my parents were on the verge of divorce, my sister was living with an egotistical control freak and my brother was deep into drug culture. I still loved all of them, and I want to emphasize that I was causing my share of problems to the family unit.
Perhaps the most perplexing part of all this is how I always saw myself as my mother saw me, as she viewed me through her eyes. My mom told me I was kind, intelligent, athletic, helpful and loving. To most other people, including family members, I was a psycho, a thief, a pyromaniac, a disruption in school and voted most likely to go to prison.
There was just so much going on. In junior high I had this horrible bully. I started out being friends with him, then he kind of just started to find pleasure in badly injuring people, which included both my brother and I. I was being told my dad hit me because he loved me and that discipline was good, but I was being hit and abused at school because I refused to conform to what the crowd did. I don’t know if anyone could have endured the stress and difficulties I had encountered and not develop a mental illness.
What I would most like to say in a podcast not just about my first hospitalization and how I reacted to it and tried to move on from there, is that it is so important to get to know your adolescent. Make sure that they understand things like what mental illness is, what a psychiatrist does, how medications can be helpful, and that they can always reach out for help. The earlier you can get a loved one to treatment, the better possible outcome will result. And stay tuned.
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