With my blog being featured over at The Experience Project I think this is a good time to reintroduce myself. Many of the major areas of my life have been detailed to a certain degree throughout the brief history of this blog but I will use this post as a way to summarize my journey so far.

I have been dealing with depression for as long as I can remember. My family history has mental illness on both sides going back for generations. Chances are I was depressed the day I came out of the womb and have been unable to get rid of this silent monster since.

Self harm started when I was seven or eight with the intention of punishing myself so I would be a “good” child and maybe people in my life would finally leave me alone. Needless to say this did not work. When I was twelve or so I tried to end my life and somewhere in the process I realized that as the blood left my body a sort of cleansing occurred which seemed to make me feel better. What I did not realize is this new monster would stick around for the next two decades.

To be honest I have no idea why I am still alive and there are pieces of my past that are a complete blur. Sometime in my mid twenties I seemed to have found the ambition to get my life back on track. I enrolled in college in Social Service Worker program with the intent of not only figuring out my own mind but also to be in a position to help those in need. The material of the course came very easy to me and I seemed to be flying through the program. In the last semester of college my father passed away and I did what I have always done which is completely ignore the emotional turmoil by throwing myself into another aspect of my life.

I graduated from college in May near the top of the class, in June I started to work at a group home for troubled teens and in July I married my long term girlfriend. For a while I thought my life was finally on track and everything seemed to be perfect. About a year and a half after we were married we were blessed with a beautiful baby boy.

Then things started to go wrong. I was constantly sick and had a lot of problems getting to sleep at night then when I did get to sleep the nightmares made Freddy Kruger look like Big Bird. When my son was about a year and a half I booked an appointment with my family doctor for at this point I knew I was in trouble and was very quickly losing control over all aspects of my life. After a brief meeting with the doctor I admitted that on the way there I was tempted to pull in front of every eighteen wheeler that passed on the opposite side of the road and the suicidal ideations were becoming a normal part of my life. The doctor immediately pulled me off of work, prescribed an antidepressant and made a referral to a mental health doctor. I honestly thought at this point that the med would kick in and I would be back to work in a matter of months but that was not the case.

I met with the mental health doctor a couple of months later and was diagnosed with severe Major Depression Disorder with psychotic features. He switched my medication and so began the experimentation of mental drugs that I have been on over the last few years. A couple of months later Paxil was tried and it effected me in a negative and dangerous way. Within a week of being on this med my self harm behavior went through the roof and it was impossible to tell which mood state I would be in from one moment to the next. With my wife basically threatening to leave if I did not enter a hospital setting plus the push from the doctor I agreed to be admitted into the hospital.

For the next two months I went through talk therapy numerous times per week, a variety of medication was tried and I went through five sessions of ECT. ECT is Electro Convulsive Therapy or what use to be known as shock therapy. After the fifth session it was stopped as I was taking a very long time for me to regain consciousness plus there did not appear to be any real positive changes. At the end of the two months I convinced a floater doctor that I was perfectly healthy and he signed my release papers which pissed off both my doctor and my wife.

A few months after the hospitalization all of the negative behavior had reappeared and the medication that I left the hospital on was beginning to lose its effectiveness. My wife took our child and left as my behavior was to unpredictable. My now ex wife did not make this decision hastily and in a lot of ways I basically pushed her out the door (thats another post).

I went through a number of mental health “professionals” in this period with the first one being arranged by the therapist in the hospital. This is going to sound terrible but it is the way it was and is, I admitted in the third appointment that during a rough period I resorted to self harm to get through the situation. Once I told the therapist this she basically ended the session as she felt I was not stable enough to treat. The next few therapists would reach the same conclusion and stopped treating me.

Fast forward a couple of years and another bad self harm session that through the doctors eyes looked like I tried to take my life again. So back on the psych ward I went but this time it was located in the city’s main hospital that did not have a full time therapist on duty because of budget cuts and it makes too much sense. Some time during this admission I decided to tell my mental health doctor absolutely everything that I have been though during the course of my life. The first version was basically just the facts with little to no detail and due to his positive reaction stating he learned more about me in those few pages then he had in the two and a half years prior. I wrote out the second edition which gave details to the facts but still not disclosing everything. Again the doctor encouraged me to keep writing so I started the final version. This last version was pretty intense to say the least and an example would be I talked about my grandfather which is one of the best relationships in my life and a couple of pages took hours to write for every single detail I tried to include in the section. Each day I would submit a new section to my doctor who would read it carefully then gave his take on it. When I finally finished this last book on my life he advised me to give it to every mental health professional that was trying to help me so they would be able to treat me more effectively.

So I figured that no one knew my brain like I do I decided to create a treatment plan that would lead to recovery. I wrote out all of my issues and what would be the best way of treating them. I handed the paper over to my doctor who completely agreed about my plan but then stated that this city’s mental health system would be unable to provide the specialized help that I needed. Another part of the treatment plan was to list out the diagnosis that I felt fit me and to this day I wonder if this was a mistake for everything was about to change.

The diagnosis that I listed were Severe Major Depressive Disorder with Psychotic features which had already been diagnosed a couple of years earlier. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder which was rather obvious if you look at the amount of abuse I have been through plus the flashbacks and nightmares. Generalized Anxiety disorder which tends to go with PTSD . The last diagnosis I listed was Borderline Personality Disorder and the second my doctor saw it his face lit up like a light bulb and declared it a perfect fit.

Due to the hospital not being able to provide the type of treatment that I needed I decided I would be better off back at home and seeking more specialized help in the community which my doctor agreed to. After a month of trying to contact every therapist around plus using a variety of mental health agencies for assistance I returned to my doctors office very frustrated. I told him about my problems finding help and he replied “Your too Borderline for treatment to be effective”. Over the next couple of months he would add “Your going to have good periods, then your going to have bad periods which will cause you to crash and a hospitalization will be needed to stabilize you and then the cycle will repeat”. Basically the goal is not to “cure my problems” but to avoid the hospital as long as possible. In my doctors eyes I am untreatable.

Do I believe the “untreatable” label? It really depends on the day. Over the last six months I have worked through various aspects of my life and I do see a light at the end of the tunnel but at the same time there are times when all of the movement I make seems to be backwards.

This blog was created so I would have a place to empty out my brain instead of trying to swallow the emotions/turmoil, a place where I can write everything down so I could analyze and try to correct any faulty thinking patterns. This blog is my therapy and for whatever the reason a lot of people seem to relate to it so at the very least I know the last three years has not been a complete failure.

Sorry for all the jumping around and like I mentioned earlier most of the above has been broken down in other posts that I have written. Any comments or questions do not hesitate to ask and I wish you all the best in your own journey. Take care

Related posts:

1. Mental Health Stigma Equals Body Counts
2. A Mental Health Check Up
3. February Mental Health Report
4. June Mental Health Report
5. September Mental Health Report
6. The Making Of A Mental Health Professional
7. Mental Health Diagnosis
8. Where I Am Mental Health Report
9. January Mental Health Report
10. Mental Health Report August