Documenting my journey through the mental health system

I fucked up.

I had an appointment with my psych doctor, who prescribes my meds. I set my alarm and didn’t think I would actually sleep; I have not been sleeping much lately. But I did sleep…for three hours. Not much, but I slept right through my alarm and missed my appointment. Now I have to call and try to get back in. I am hard to pin down. My night shift schedule demands my nocturnal nature. That’s another thing my doctor doesn’t really like – my propensity toward night shift work and even staying up all night when I am not at work. It’s not good for bipolar and Dr Black, my psychologist, has made me keep a sleep journal. Maybe it’s time I should again before I get more manic than I already am. My sleep directly coincides with my symptoms.

I’m not delusional. I have feelings of grandiosity and energy though. There is a weird sense of inflation of self. I think it’s completely justified though. I make this look good.

My next quarter of grad school looms before me like an imposing monolith. Public Health…while my country enters a public health dark age. The CDC director is out and turmoil at the agency is crippling its mission. Washington, Oregon, and California are making plans to put together some kind of “tri-state health alliance” to make up for the loss of an effective CDC. The HHS has gone completely rogue, with a conspiracy-minded director making it as difficult as possible to get vaccines and other pertinent health information. The NIH is just trying to stay out of the limelight.

During normal times, studying these agencies in my first quarter of grad school might have been boring if it weren’t for the devastating context – the cult of anti-intellectualism runs strong in this country, and autocrats especially hate the educated. They love the poorly educated, as Trump once so readily agreed. And our health institutions, as old as the nation itself, have never been under more serious threat. Science is under threat. Education is under threat. All of the things that made us a once cohesive country is crumbling – facts used to be facts. Vaccines work. The moon landing happened. There are no such things as ghosts. Maybe not that last one, but you get the idea. (And to reiterate, ghosts are not real).

So why am I doing this if my country is sliding into third world autocracy and the places that might have employed me are drying up before my eyes? I don’t know, I just wanted a master’s degree. A potentially useful one.

That’s a lot of it, but I went for public health because health is measured by our response to our environment – in a way, public health is planetary health. The health of our planet will be directly reflected in us. It all goes back to the same thing, all these issues – shitty food, shitty education, lack of higher education, shitty polluted environment, shitty access to healthcare – BAM, shitty health.

So yeah, the context to all this is heating up in its intensity. The educated classes are under attack. Bans and threats on international students cast a chill over scientific endeavors. Everyone seems to want to quit their jobs over at the CDC. After all, what is their job now? The new America doesn’t even want its polio vaccines anymore. The lunatics are running the asylum. And I know a thing or two about asylums.