Documenting my journey through the mental health system

In the summer of 2014, I was 28, nearly 29. I had lost everything – my grad school program and friends therein, my self-respect, my hope for any kind of future. I nearly lost tangible things like my job and apartment as I quit my meds and descended deeper into a manic depression.

The social work program seemed so smart at the time, like such a good idea. I already had a Bachelor of science in psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in Women and Gender Studies. I was the first man to get such a degree from my university, and graduated 2011.

I didn’t want to be a counselor or a therapist. I wanted something much larger – not just to have the masters, but the background needed to engage in much more macro level work. I don’t want to help an individual or even many of them. I wanted to study and understand them. At the time, it seemed like a non-traditional approach to the study of people and how systems move and operate but I never fully understood what a social work program is like before I started. I didn’t understand social workers are mostly dealing with individuals in crisis or at least helping those who help individuals in crisis or who need community resources. I learned, harshly and quickly, that I am not meant to be a helper in this regard. I have been helped by social workers in the past and that was not what I wanted for myself. I did not want that job.

At the time though, all of this was not what I was thinking. I lost myself, lost all my footing on planet earth and reality in general. I was completely unmoored and adrift in an ocean of uncertainty, where everything I thought I knew about myself and what I wanted to do with myself was called into question.

When I got moved to the general psychiatric unit after a week in acute care losing my mind and subsequently being doped up to oblivion, I was thinking HARD. I finally had a little thinking capacity again. I was nowhere close to being ready to turn my back on the whole thing. It would be a couple years before I could finally face it – that I’m not supposed to be a social worker. Instead I was trying to plan my next move. Like the nurse at my assessment said, just having any future orientation at all was a huge deal for me, after a few months of mania and suicidal behavior. I wanted out.

“I’m sick of being sick,” I told the doctor when he visited me one morning. “I’ve been dealing with behavior issues a long time. My brain is chopped up into black and white bits, there’s no grey, no in-between.”

“That’s a hallmark of borderline,” the doctor nodded. “Black and white thinking.”

“I didn’t mean for things to happen the way they did,” I lamented.

“You’re human. And things don’t always go according to plan, but that doesn’t mean you failed. Doesn’t mean you’re a failure.”

Heather, my social worker and therapist at the VA at that time, would say something very similar, careful to call attention to my competitive, cutthroat approach to a program that required softness, vulnerability, and even love, and not to the idea that maybe this wasn’t the right fit for me at all. I had to come to that on my own. I am not capable of vulnerability and I hate appearing soft. The seeds of doubt were there, but nothing would grow for some time.

I drifted through the next few days in the hospital, mostly thinking to myself. I did not participate heavily in groups but I did show up. I ate my meals and drank the fattening shakes, gaining a couple more pounds and avoiding the doctor’s feeding tube. I took my meds as the doctor made small adjustments, dialing them in for discharge. I still took a lot of trazodone and zyprexa for the voices, but now they were only at night and I was not so sedated during the day. I even took showers every day in that second week. When I am functioning, I prefer a shower every day. When I was brought to the general unit, I re-engaged in this habit, using a morning shower to help myself wake up before coffee at breakfast.

“I have to do something. I have to get out of here.” I thought to myself a lot. But what was I supposed to do? Heather and the doctor said to focus on recovery and better behavioral health but I felt like a crucial part of that was a plan, it felt like there was something I had to do but I didn’t know what.

I was trying to come to grips with my world shattering and all my plans going up in smoke and 20,000 dollars gone and a year wasted. I felt I was out of control.

In psychology circles, we talk about an external versus an internal locus of control. Those with an internal locus of control feel they are in charge of their own life, that their decisions and choices affect their life more than external variables. Those with an external locus of control feel the environment and all its variables has so much more to do with how our lives turn out than any individual decisions we make. I went from having a modestly strong sense of an internal locus of control to the complete opposite almost overnight – it felt like nothing I did mattered, fate would always intervene. I didn’t believe in esoteric concepts like fate or predestination and I still mostly don’t but at a time in my life when everything is supposed to come together, everything came apart in the worst possible way. Ever since then, I have struggled to find a sense of power, to feel that things are under my control. But I don’t know if I – or anyone – really have any control at all.

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly. It’s not the shattering itself that breaks you – it’s the silence that follows, the quiet space where you realize there’s nothing left to salvage. And in that moment, you know that you’ll never be the same again. You’ll build something new, perhaps, but it will never be what you lost. -F. Scott Fitzgerald, Of Love and Loneliness