As seen by many of my angry Facebook followers, I have my Christmas tree up. On November 3rd. On a 70 degree day. And I'm listening to Christmas music. Further confession - I've been listening to Christmas music since July.
Why?! What would drive a man to such depths months before Christmas day?! Clearly, there must be something psychologically skewed in this man!
Yes, there is!
I love the holidays, truly. The lights, the smells, the music. All of it puts a smile on my face. Even when I'm upset, it's hard to Hulk out with Winter Wonderland playing. And I still get that special feeling in my gut when I see presents under a Christmas tree. I mean, wrapped and unknown presents... I don't care what's in them! I just like wrapped boxes!
But for one reason or another, I haven't had a good stretch of luck over the last decade. The holidays, which should be about 'peace on earth' and 'goodwill to man', have turned into a season of anxiety and depression. Anniversaries, break-ups, divorce, firings, relocations... the end of the year brings a lot of negative association.
Add on top of that seasonal changes, which will bring anyone with or without mental illness to their knees. The energy is nice in the morning, but the evenings are killers. Up and down, all day, every day. Your head feels like a vortex of spinning thoughts and emotions that just... won't... stop.
In 2005 (a decade ago), things started to get really shitty around this time. I was finally diagnosed with a "mood disorder", though no one could specify which. Every time I was given medication, I got worse. The darkness just crushed me. I remember plugging through it, though, not really knowing what was going on. My first hospital stints began.
2008 was a treasure, though, and I will always cherish it. I hate to call it an anomaly, but...
Things went south quicker than I could have imagined. Since '08, I have been in hospitals and psych wards more than I can count. Except for 2013, I don't remember being around for an entire holiday season. I could be wrong. I think I've missed one of the big 4 each of those years (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year). What a mess. Take last year - I celebrated Christmas on another behavioral health ward. I cried that day... partially because I was without my family, but also due to the kindness of the staff. They gave us gift bags. They thought of their patients. How incredible is that?
I won't go too dark. It's been hard work disassociating the 'REAL bad thoughts' from the holidays. So, there's that, too.
I've been well and healthy the past few months... going through another medication change in my regimen, but I think it's helping. Halloween, believe it or not, is the toughest holiday (the start of my usual spiral) and I came out of that with flying colors. I allowed myself a pat on the back!
Why lose that momentum? I know a lot of people are shaking their heads knowing I have a tree up at the beginning of November, but it's distracting me from the typical chaos swirling in my head. Lights make me happy. Music makes me happy. Smiling... smiling's my favorite.
It's almost as if diving into the thick of the season with lights and music makes me feel as though we're already in December. I'm warping time in a way to say, "You've made it to Christmas! You're almost through!" I know, logically, that's not true... but it FEELS true.
Finally, I also think it gives me a type of ownership that I haven't had in a long time. I've never put up a tree for *myself*. I usually skip it, with the thought I'd be around decorations enough during the season... or that I'd be in the hospital, so why bother? But this year - I OWN it. This is MY holiday season and, frankly, I can do whatever the hell I want with it. MINE!
This wasn't a gem of a post, but I wanted people to understand that there might be good reasons for jumping the gun. It's not about Black Friday and shopping and figuring out who should be on your naughty or nice list. It's about that warm feeling you get in your heart and wanting to keep that for as long as possible.
Thursday, November 5, 2015
Friday, June 19, 2015
The Blame Game (Also, Damn You, Dylann Roof)
(In response to Charleston shooter Dylann Roof...)
A white man enters a historically black church. He pulls out a gun and kills nine people. We discover that he was on the drug suboxone (not at the time of the shooting, however). We also know that, based on his confession to police, he was an absolute racist son of a bitch.
Suboxone is a drug used to help opioid users manage addiction. Much like methadone, it's used as replacement therapy by substituting heroin or other opioids with something a) legal and b) that can be controlled by doctors. For example, give an opioid abuser suboxone to replace heroin (without withdrawal symptoms) and then eventually take the abuser off suboxone. It's helped countless people with their addictions. Like almost any drug, it can have side effects.
Back to the shooter, his roommate claims that he was strongly pro-segregation. He told a survivor of his shooting that he had to do it because, "you've raped our women and are taking over the country." His clothing suggested that he was anti-apartheid. Oh... he also wanted to start a race war.
So, what's to blame? Was it the suboxone, which the shooter had stopped taking, or was it the fact that the shooter was simply a racist bastard who wanted to kill? If you're to believe some of the news stories right now, it's due to the suboxone. Rather than a possible correlation, the news has stamped this with causality.
They're also implying that suboxone was being used to treat mental illness. Suboxone is NOT an antidepressant - of any kind, including the category SSRI. Unfortunately, the news is lumping these together, pulling 'information' from SSRI forums and implying that the shooter was on such drugs that would cause the attack. And, man, this pisses me off.
I'm not saying that he was or wasn't mentally ill (we don't know that). In fact, I'm a fairly big proponent of the belief that you're probably mentally ill if you're willing to walk into a church with the intention to kill. Even if you were raised to be racist, most folks have an on/off switch that will tell them that murder isn't a good idea. And, if the person doesn't have that on/off switch, there are therapies that will help correct it... including antidepressants or anti-psychotics. And those drugs can have side effects that include, in rare cases, irritability and aggression... maybe even to the point of being homicidal.
But he wasn't on those. He was on suboxone.
Fantastic. As if there wasn't enough stigma plastered on those suffering mental illness, there's another shooter in our midst.
Worse, there are also sites compiling some of the most violent acts of our lifetime and implying that, again, their causes were due to the drugs that the offenders were on (or not on). It's the drug's fault. We're over-medicating people. Their therapists should have known better.
Please know, I believe that we are over-medicating people - in some cases. It absolutely can be the drug's fault - in some cases. But that isn't the case here. This isn't an easy "cause and effect" situation. Right now, we just know that the shooter was a damned prick who wanted to kill.
I'm furious at the media. I have to be on mood stabilizers. They've been a godsend in leveling mania and depression. I've also been on straight-up antidepressants and I have experienced first-hand some of the worst side effects. Mental illness isn't cookie cutter. Most of us will go through a long and arduous process of trial-and-error until we've found the right drugs to help. Also, the 'right' drugs won't always help every day. In the case of bipolar disorder, mood stabilizers will help some of the time... not all of the time. There will be days (or hours) when the disorder will explode through the best drugs. The same goes for clinical depression. The best antidepressants won't help during the worst of lows. To make matters more difficult, one drug won't help every patient. An SSRI might work for one patient, while an SNRI might work for another. That's why there are so many different drugs on the market. One more time - mental illness isn't cookie cutter.
I understand that in horrific times, we want someone or something to blame. It's easier for us to point fingers and say, "Ah ha! It was the drug's fault!" By having a scapegoat, we can wrap our minds around an awful event that took place. But it's not that easy and, by pointing fingers at drugs the shooter was not on, you're making worse the stigmas already riddling mental illness and its treatment.
Get the facts and stop the media subterfuge. If you can prove to me that this person was on an antidepressant and it caused this terrible act of violence, then I will submit. I leave that door open! For now, I will continue to believe that the shooter is, quite simply, a horrible, racist dirtbag that deserves a long, long life in jail.
A white man enters a historically black church. He pulls out a gun and kills nine people. We discover that he was on the drug suboxone (not at the time of the shooting, however). We also know that, based on his confession to police, he was an absolute racist son of a bitch.
Suboxone is a drug used to help opioid users manage addiction. Much like methadone, it's used as replacement therapy by substituting heroin or other opioids with something a) legal and b) that can be controlled by doctors. For example, give an opioid abuser suboxone to replace heroin (without withdrawal symptoms) and then eventually take the abuser off suboxone. It's helped countless people with their addictions. Like almost any drug, it can have side effects.
Back to the shooter, his roommate claims that he was strongly pro-segregation. He told a survivor of his shooting that he had to do it because, "you've raped our women and are taking over the country." His clothing suggested that he was anti-apartheid. Oh... he also wanted to start a race war.
So, what's to blame? Was it the suboxone, which the shooter had stopped taking, or was it the fact that the shooter was simply a racist bastard who wanted to kill? If you're to believe some of the news stories right now, it's due to the suboxone. Rather than a possible correlation, the news has stamped this with causality.
They're also implying that suboxone was being used to treat mental illness. Suboxone is NOT an antidepressant - of any kind, including the category SSRI. Unfortunately, the news is lumping these together, pulling 'information' from SSRI forums and implying that the shooter was on such drugs that would cause the attack. And, man, this pisses me off.
I'm not saying that he was or wasn't mentally ill (we don't know that). In fact, I'm a fairly big proponent of the belief that you're probably mentally ill if you're willing to walk into a church with the intention to kill. Even if you were raised to be racist, most folks have an on/off switch that will tell them that murder isn't a good idea. And, if the person doesn't have that on/off switch, there are therapies that will help correct it... including antidepressants or anti-psychotics. And those drugs can have side effects that include, in rare cases, irritability and aggression... maybe even to the point of being homicidal.
But he wasn't on those. He was on suboxone.
Fantastic. As if there wasn't enough stigma plastered on those suffering mental illness, there's another shooter in our midst.
Worse, there are also sites compiling some of the most violent acts of our lifetime and implying that, again, their causes were due to the drugs that the offenders were on (or not on). It's the drug's fault. We're over-medicating people. Their therapists should have known better.
Please know, I believe that we are over-medicating people - in some cases. It absolutely can be the drug's fault - in some cases. But that isn't the case here. This isn't an easy "cause and effect" situation. Right now, we just know that the shooter was a damned prick who wanted to kill.
I'm furious at the media. I have to be on mood stabilizers. They've been a godsend in leveling mania and depression. I've also been on straight-up antidepressants and I have experienced first-hand some of the worst side effects. Mental illness isn't cookie cutter. Most of us will go through a long and arduous process of trial-and-error until we've found the right drugs to help. Also, the 'right' drugs won't always help every day. In the case of bipolar disorder, mood stabilizers will help some of the time... not all of the time. There will be days (or hours) when the disorder will explode through the best drugs. The same goes for clinical depression. The best antidepressants won't help during the worst of lows. To make matters more difficult, one drug won't help every patient. An SSRI might work for one patient, while an SNRI might work for another. That's why there are so many different drugs on the market. One more time - mental illness isn't cookie cutter.
I understand that in horrific times, we want someone or something to blame. It's easier for us to point fingers and say, "Ah ha! It was the drug's fault!" By having a scapegoat, we can wrap our minds around an awful event that took place. But it's not that easy and, by pointing fingers at drugs the shooter was not on, you're making worse the stigmas already riddling mental illness and its treatment.
Get the facts and stop the media subterfuge. If you can prove to me that this person was on an antidepressant and it caused this terrible act of violence, then I will submit. I leave that door open! For now, I will continue to believe that the shooter is, quite simply, a horrible, racist dirtbag that deserves a long, long life in jail.
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