Finding Respite From Mental Illness Through a Million Little Things
Learning to Manage Your Recovery
I don’t know how many of my readers have experienced the inside of a psychiatric ward or a psychiatric hospital. I would love to hear from any of you who have, and have something to say about the experience. I am happy to receive emails at viking3082000@yahoo.com if you feel you have questions or something relevant to share. But above all, what I would like the most is to hear from someone who happened across this substack after googling questions about their own mental health, and especially someone I can help. As I talked about in the previous entry, the only real way I can stay sane is to seek out ways to help others who have suffered as I did, and to offer them my wisdom on how to get through things. It is one thing to post blog entries, but a totally different thing to be a truly caring and giving human being.
So I wanted to start of today’s instalment talking about being a formal patient, being certified. Some of you may have read my book, which is free on my author website, “Alert and Oriented x3” for those of you who want a regular copy, it is reasonably priced on Amazon. In the book I have put in a bunch of handwritten poems that I wrote while a patient on a locked psychiatric ward. That was an interesting journey. Now as I look back, it seems odd that I had to be on a locked ward, but I was incredibly troubled and confused, and I was in psychosis. The whole experience of being admitted was a bit of a blur to me. A couple of people suggested that I had a run-in with a security guard and so I had to be locked up. All I remember about any security guard was being locked inside a small room while two young, skinny, geeky security guards talked about some pretty horrific stuff. It is entirely possible that all of that was a hallucination due to my paranoia and delusions, just as equally possible it was that they made up a false story just because they knew they could get away with it.
Part of what bothered me about being in the hospital was that no one believed much about me. I have dry skin on my feet and in the climate of the institutional air of the locked ward, my feet dried out and cracked so badly I could barely walk. Looking back when I think about the fact that I had diabetes, it is entirely possible to consider that my cracked feet could have become infected and would need to be amputated. What bothers me even to this day was that a doctor saw me, which was good, but he gave a nurse the order to put a dressing on my feet. She looked annoyed at the prospect of doing so much work and it never materialized. No one ever put any bandages on my feet despite that the doctor understood I was in so much pain I needed heavy tylenol just to be able to walk.
So what I want to say about all that is, being in a psychiatric ward is often a situation filled with chaos. Everything is taken away from you. You are treated like a child and the staff mostly don’t trust anything you have to say. The job of working on a locked ward seems to attract the worst people imaginable (though not always). Something I have had to accept just about every time I was a patient on a psychiatric ward was that my whole life was forfeit. If I had a job it wouldn’t be waiting for me. If I had friends they would have abandoned me. If I had any kind of positive state of mind it would be gone before I was ever released. My early hospitalizations were even worse. When I first went to a psychiatric hospital, I went from living a comfortable suburban life with a lot of friends, and a few younger people who looked up to me. In the hospital, I lost my job, my car, my status as a student. Everything. I had to just let everything fall away and take everything moment by moment, trying to get better as best I could, one hour, one minute, one second at a time.
The amazing thing about all that is that I did it. I ended up being released from the hospital. I found friends eventually who didn’t abandon me when I had a bad reaction to my medication and wound up in the hospital. I even had the huge benefit of not losing my job, though it was a while before I could return to it.
There were so many times though that hospitalization meant I would not be let out of the hospital until my psychosis was gone or my moods were improved. I had to start from rock bottom. One of my biggest regrets was going to AA meetings when at the time I didn’t have any kind of daily habit of drinking. I was misled to believe that if I just quit drinking and followed the 12 steps, that I could get my life back. There were some benefits, I did meet people, but there were some serious predators there as well. I met some of the worst people imaginable while thinking that I was doing something noble that would help me regain the respect of the people I had hurt.
In all honesty though, I did meet some wonderful people, but I should have looked for things like life skills courses or psychological counselling that really would have addressed my issues. I’ll never forget meeting a guy who caused so much damage in my life and felt like he actually owned me. He lied about his age so I would associate with him and he got me to work for him for free and one day when I said a small thing that hit a raw nerve, he assaulted me and left me in a ditch after a second assault, 20km from home. I went to the police and laid charges. Then his mother called me and convinced me to drop the charges. Not because he was sorry or because he had made a mistake, she wanted me to drop the charges because “she just didn’t want any trouble.”
What I am trying to get at is, when a person is in a hospital (as I was when I met this creep) you need to be very careful as to who you try to trust as a close friend. Looking back, I see so many occasions where I made friends while in the hospital and it only turned out badly. Having better friends is a great thing, but one needs to know some ways of doing this. I really wish I could have gone back to school sooner than I did and that I had been able to finish. I’m now 53 and I recently had to take a training course at the main University in town and it was absolutely the most incredible experience I have had in such a long time. All of the people in the class were young people who had worked very hard to be where they were, and they were welcoming and helpful. If I had known how incredible the experience would have been, not just because I would have done incredible things and felt so much better about myself, but also because I would have made some great friendships with people who were much more like the kind of person I see myself as. I value learning, I love to increase my knowledge. I love to work out and play sports, and I put a lot into my work. These are the kind of people one should seek out. It’s not to say people with mental health or addiction problems are bad people, I feel so strongly that people like this need our compassion and support in every way, I just think it would be an amazing thing to spend more of my time with people who either never had such demons or have already overcome these problems in their lives. Of course, everyone has issues of one kind or another, and everyone in the world is struggling with something. I just don’t feel I can open my life up to people who have drastically different values and motivations.
So as far as building ones’ self up after a hospitalization, as I mentioned in the title, there are a million little ways. I have really seemed to have found something special in my Toastmasters Meetings. I have learned a thousand little things from them, from things that help me communicate better and with more confidence, to how to make close friends with people and to give back to the communities I am part of. The amazing thing is that now that I know Toastmasters is out there, I never have to worry about finding a place where I can feel support and belonging.
For me, writing books was another thing that guided me onto a better path. I have some dear friends who help and support me while I try to help and support them, who I only know because I am a writer. My books have opened so many doors for me, and it only seems to get better with time.
Well, I want to apologize dear readers. I wanted to talk about the million things one needs to do to keep mentally well, and I kind of rambled on and on. I think the best thing I can do is leave it off there, and promise that I will return to the topic. I think I should stop simply blogging whatever is on my mind and start to plan and outline these entries. I appreciate all of you, and I also appreciate that now I have gotten my first paid subscriber, and hope people who can afford it and see the need for these writings can join and be a part of creating something special.
LG, viking3082000@yahoo.com