Documenting my journey through the mental health system

I got decent sleep today, with medication I slept seven hours and only woke up twice. I had a terrible dream despite the prazosin medication I take for nightmares. This wasn’t so much a nightmare as it was a memory. I dreamed I woke up tied to a bed in the hospital, and subsequently fighting to get away, screaming.

I will probably never not have these flashbacks and bad dreams. The PTSD is complex, with multiple traumas both related and unrelated to the mental health system. I feel heavy and weighed down with so many traumas in my past, going back to childhood which was a rough upbringing. I am jumpy and easily startled and mostly hypervigilant. I get stuck in the past in my head, ruminating and growing more anxious as I relive trauma.

It’s hard to talk about. Trauma is a word tossed around with too much ease. So are a lot of other terms in psychology. Suddenly everyone is ADHD now, or anxious, or traumatized. So it’s hard to bring it up even to doctors, I worry they’ll take me less seriously. Even more terrifying to admit hearing voices. Now no one will take me seriously. Worse, I’ll be declared incompetent. But I AM of sound mind! I swear!

It’s hard to trust the mental health system, at least outside the VA. The VA is like a bubble, independent and removed from the rest of the system, at least in my mind. I’ve been strapped down, drugged, and incarcerated by the civilian mental health system, all in the interest of keeping me alive. But look at the cost. Look at the price I have paid just to stay alive. Now I have to carry around these memories and it is terrifying to think that no matter how hard I work at therapy and mood momentum and coping and everything – it could happen again. I know I bring this up a lot, and I probably always will.

The mind is an environment in which we don’t get much control. We can change how we think about things, we can maintain a better mood by doing the things that were making us feel better, we can practice all the coping mechanisms in the world but at the end of it all, our wiring and chemical balances are such that mental illness is also physical illness. My brain, after all, looks different than a typical brain on an MRI. I have bipolar brain. I’m frustrated and tired of carrying it around, carrying around these memories and fears for the future.

The past informs the future. I tell myself I’m doing everything I can, I’m changing for the better, I’m stable. I have to tell myself this every day to keep going.

I’m still hearing voices, despite the abilify I take. But according to the doctor, it’s an anti-psychotic that functions to bolster a primary anti-psychotic like risperidone or zyprexa. The seroquel is a PRN and I take it when it gets too loud in my head. It’s a low dose anti-psychotic and usually helps quiet things down and it also slows me down. I have been running pretty high energy lately with little sleep or food. I am trying very hard to take care of myself within those limits. When I do eat, it’s vegetables and something fresh. I take the PRNs to force myself asleep at least for a few hours. I need to use my PRNs more. I have the anti-psychotic PRNs, multiple PRNs for sleep, and benztropine PRN for twitching and other EP symptoms like RLS and itching. I have multiple anxiety medications like vistaril and ativan. It’s sometimes an overwhelming load, all these medications. But I know I really need them.