Documenting my journey through the mental health system

Some days, the PTSD is strong. My mind perseverates on trauma, memories, pain. Pain I’ve worked really hard to work through, to come to terms with. But sometimes it hurts all over again.

Maybe it’s because I saw the psych nurse practitioner who manages my meds. I told him I can’t even miss a day, or I have problems – worsening depression, anxiety, invasive thoughts. But I also told him that as long as I take my meds, I’m more stable now than I’ve ever been.

It’s a new, uncharted world. I’m navigating a post crisis breakdown, and I think I’ve come a long way. PTSD symptoms have a mind of their own. The invasive thoughts are probably the hardest part. They can be triggered so easily, especially at the SH job downtown. I was a psych patient here long before I would get the job here.

For example, I have a 30-year-old patient withdrawing off alcohol. She was so out of it they had to restrain her and get her past the hard part of withdrawal. Now she is talking a little bit more and a little more awake. But just knowing what happened was enough for me to feel triggering memories of my own time as a patient. I hate remembering.

Dr Black says it isn’t good to try to suppress the memories, they manifest anyway. I have to try to embrace them and the pain they cause. I haven’t been hearing any voices in a while. When that happens, I stay home. I can’t function.

I want this grad program to be over. I’m nearly finished with the first of two Spring quarters. Next quarter I have one class because there’s simply no more to take outside my practicum and portfolio classes. I’m attempting to arrange a project with the drag queens and Marry, the show’s producer. It would be unconventional, which is the goal. Taking public health into unconventional spaces is the overall project goal. I have no idea what I will do yet. But when it’s all over by Halloween, I think I will leave Sacred Heart. Sometimes I think I’ll never get past a lot of the pain I carry around but I know a lot of it is just work triggers. I see some pretty horrible things here. Things are a lot tamer at the VA because I don’t work medsurg there. I can’t seem to stop myself from feeling everything certain patients feel, especially the ones most like me.

I also really like it here because it’s not the VA. There are far more interesting things here compared to the VA rehab and hospice units. Transplants, wounds, random surgeries, stuff like that. But people are changing. More and more mental cases, more and more drug abuse and dementia. Especially dementia. Sometimes I have half a hallway of dementia patients and it’s getting harder and harder to place them. The boomers are also not like the generations who came before them – too many were born at one time which causes lopsided demographics. Society can’t absorb a generation that is larger than previous ones. And now they are old, demented, often violent.

I don’t know what I will do. I know I can’t work two jobs forever. But I also know work is one of my coping skills, for better or for worse. I can dive into it and get away from my own mind. I really like the money. I know it isn’t good for me. It’s a little bit toxic to say I have to keep working a mentally devastating job because it’s my primary coping mechanism and then wondering why I have all these triggers and roadblocks toward coping.

After grad school, and after this job…then what? What will life look like outside of work? How am I supposed to keep going?