Child Abuse Survivor

Over the weekend, while we were taking a bit of a break to celebrate our anniversary, one of the stops Angela wanted to make was to The Ridges, in Athens, Ohio. It’s the site of a former insane asylum, most of which is now part of Ohio University. There is one building that is still completely abandoned, parts of the main asylum building that are in some disrepair, and, of course, the cemetery.

In preparation for the trip, I did a little reading on the history of the place, which, of course also read like a history of mental health treatment. On the cemetary page, naturally, we learn why most of the gravestones bear only a number and no name. The vast majority of the patients were simply brought here by their families, and left to die. Only the graves of those patients whose families claimed them, and bore the cost of the headstone, have names.

The lack of names on the tombstones here bears witness to how little mental illness has been understood, and how poorly it has been treated in our past.

Tags: MentalIllness, Asylum, The Ridges, AthensOhio, Cemetery

A friend sent me a link to the YouTube versions of a UK documentary named Stephen Fry’s Secret Life Of The Manic Depressive. I’ve gotten through part 4 thus far and it’s quite good. If you have an interest in learning about Manic Depression, or Bi-Polarity this would be an interesting series to watch.

The link takes you to part 1, the other parts are in the related list along the side.

Tags: ManicDepression, Bi-Polar, StephenFry

I had made a note last week to write about this, and am finally getting around to it. The wife and I were watching an episode of House, where a kid was brought in with the usual bizarre symptoms that the show specializes in. He was also violent, and anti-social. His mother was hopeful that the sickness he had, whatever it was, was the reason for his behavior.

At the end of the show, however, when they figure out what was wrong with him, House lets the Mother know that, unfortunately, the illness wasn’t causing his behavior. He tells her, in so many words, that her son is just a jerk. That’s why he behaves that way.

It got me thinking about depression, because depression is an illness that can, and usually does, have a deep impact on how you behave toward other people. But it doesn’t define everything you do. As much as I tend to give anyone the benefit of the doubt when they are dealing with depression, I’ve learned that sometimes, that doesn’t explain all their poor behavior.

Sometimes, people are just annoying, self-centered and/or mean. Suffering from depression or healing from depression doesn’t really change that.

If you’re currently undergoing treatment for depression, that doesn’t give you carte blanche to be self-centered and annoying either. Most people will give you the benefit of the doubt, but not for too long.

OK first off, let me just say that if you haven’t seen, and are planning on going to see, Reign over Me, the new Adam Sandler/Don Cheadle movie, you might want to skip this post. I’ll be providing some details about the movie that you might not want to know going in. No, not the ending or anything like that, but still…..

OK, now if you are still reading, I assume you are ok with knowing this so here it goes.

There’s a scene in the movie that really rang true to me, because I’ve been there. Shortly after Charlie tries to commit “suicide by cop”, he goes from being released from jail to a 3 day stay at Roosevelt Island for a psych evaluation. During this time, he doesn’t really say anything, he just has the look of a defeated man, while everyone else talks around him about what to do with him. He has no input, nor does he offer any.

I recognized the feeling. There was a time, after a dissociative episode followed by a failed suicide attempt, when I was in a similar situation. I really didn’t have anything to say, I was defeated. To my mind, I couldn’t even kill myself correctly, I had nothing to offer in terms of how to take care of myself, it was up to other people to figure that out. I was resigned to the fact that these other people would decide what to do with me, all I could do was sit there. Just like Adam Sandler did in those scenes.

I don’t know how accurate his overall portrayal of a widower who lost his entire family on 9/11 is, and I don’t know if everyone will find it believable, but given the one part that I do have some experience with, I found it pretty true to life.

The rest of the movie is emotional, sad, touching, etc. Everything you’d expect given the plot. It’s pretty good, but probably a bit heavy for some people.

I was reminded of something rather important today. You see, I had made plans to meet up with a friend of mine for lunch Friday, her birthday had recently passed, and I took the opportunity to offer to buy her lunch and get to spend some time catching up.

Now, that’s not anything earth-shattering, but it was an hour of spending time with a friend, having a few laughs, and just generally enjoying ourselves. I was reminded that all too often in our lives, especially in the midst of a long healing journey, we forget to take a break. We go from work to home, some of us to school, some of us to our kid’s activities, some to therapy, some to volunteer work, that takes up more and more of our time, forgetting that sometimes the best healing is done in those times when you’re not focused on it.

I can remember, quite a few years ago, when after spending almost a year unemployed, in debt and still on anti-depressants, I was trying my darndest to piece together my life. I spent about $50 signing up to play in a roller hockey league. Now, many people saw me spending this money so soon after I started working again as sort of wasteful, and maybe in a financial sense it was, but the extra $50 put toward paying off debt wasn’t really going to change much of anything. On the other hand, knowing that one night during the week I was going to get some exercise, which was good for me, as well as do something that was a fun break from the intensity of dealing with everything else, helped me tremendously. When it came time to go to work, or do any of the million other little things I was dealing with at the time, I could do it with a fresh perspective because I was getting to take a break.

This week has been an especially intense one. There are a great many things weighing on my mind, some I’ve talked about here, some I’m not at liberty to talk about here yet, some I never will be able to. I can’t tell you how much better I feel about those things because I get to take a break every now and again. Sharing a few laughs with a friend as I did today, or my wife, which I get to do frequently, is a great way to let those things go for a little while and fight off mild depression.

Some heavy reading for tonight, courtesy of Psych Central. Newsweek put out a six page article about Men and Depression in which they suggest that the rate of depression in men is vastly under reported because of the weakness it suggests:

“Our definition of a successful man in this culture does not include being depressed, down or sad,” says Michael Addis, chair of psychology at Clark University in Massachusetts. “In many ways it’s the exact opposite. A successful man is always up, positive, in charge and in control of his emotions.”

There’s much more in the full article. I highly suggest reading it.

The other night I had what I can only describe as a semi-dream. I’m fairly sure I was asleep, and dreaming, but everything in my dream actually happened. It was like having one long, vivid, memory. It was a memory of the night I tried to commit suicide, more than 10 years ago.

Nothing earth-shattering in remembering that. Obviously, my feeble attempt at slicing my wrists didn’t get anywhere near deep enough, and the other options available to me mostly involved jumping or driving off a cliff along the Pacific Coast Highway, but I was very much afraid of failing in that and ending up paralyzed or something. One the other hand, I woke up with a real sense of fright. Not fright of making another attempt, but fright of what might have been. I can look back now and see that I was not solving anything, and the attempt was a huge mistake that I’ve since overcome. If I had been successful, I wouldn’t have what I have now, there would be no looking back.

That night would have been the end of my journey. How many journeys ended the same way, and how many people never got to look back? I was close to being one of them. I’m glad I wasn’t.

When I looked at this article on-line today I thought, wow, there are some really good ideas here for folks struggling with self-esteem issues, which is pretty much every one isn’t it? Let alone survivors!

Anyway, here are 22 tips for maintaining high self-esteem. Do you have any other tips?

Seen via a link on Dumb Little Man.

Saw this interesting article called Are you Fighting Yourself? today via a link on Lifehacker. I found it interesting on two levels personally. One, when I was in the midst of depression, I saw this in myself all the time. I seemed to almost take pride in my misery, and not do anything to get out of it. I really had to learn how to be more positive and forward-thinking in order to get out of that.

The other reason it’s interesting is that I’ve begun to see this sort of behavior in a couple of close friends, and it has me somewhat disturbed. Since I now spend all day coming at problems from a tech support perspective, I actually had a conversation the other day with someone who was making these sorts of complaints where I said “If what you’re doing now isn’t working, it’s time to do something different.” Technically, that’s very easy to see. If you’re trying to do something with a PC, and it’s not doing what you think it should be doing, you don’t sit there and keep pressing the mouse button in the hopes that this time it will. You try something different, you call in help, etc.

That seems so simple, and in truth it really is, but it can be a very difficult truth to see when you don’t believe in yourself, and when you don’t have hope for your life. So if you’re having trouble doing something different because you have this fear of change, take some time and start to believe in yourself, and your future. Making changes will be easier when you do.

One of the causes of depression can be a either an unhealthy amount of, or an inability to cope with, stress. So, naturally when I spotted a post on LifeHacker about reducing stress, I had to click over through to the full article on 52 ways to reduce stress. There are some very good ideas here to help reduce stress, which is the best way to learn to cope with it!