Crazy.

This isn’t the post that I intended to write – but it’s what’s sitting on the top of my brain and transmitting through my fingers and, thus, you’re stuck with it for the moment.

Earlier today, on returning home from Coffee’s immigration proceedings, I cracked open the book Crazy: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness by Peter Earley. I had read a review on Salon, I believe, and had added it to my library request list in the hopes of reading it sometime this summer. I started it this morning, as I said, but I finished it this afternoon. I couldn’t put it down.

Mental illness is something that preoccupies my mind on the best of days. It began when I was a child and my mother made a mysterious reference to my “crazy uncle Benny” – a man I had never met, nor seen, and had never heard of before. I asked more about him and with reluctance, she said, “There’s a fine line between genius and madness”. That was shortly after I was identifed as being “gifted” and the idea of that fine line wore heavily on my mind for a number of years. To this day, I still don’t know what was ‘wrong’ with Benny, only that he died in a halfway house. He was my father’s great-uncle.

In university, after flipping majors a few times, I chose Psychology. I liked the idea of understand people’s motivations, and the concept of abnormal psych intrigued me greatly. Brain disorders and the effects of medications, psychology experiments and BF Skinner.. it was fascinating. It’s ironic, at best, that I was kicked out of my psychology major when my mother died and I became too depressed to go to class.

Later, I worked for an office full of therapists and psychiatrists (around 1996) and saw that the vast majority of people who entered the office looked as ‘normal’ as anyone else. The idea that ‘crazy people’ weren’t all locked up and wearing straight jackets was hammered home to me. The stories I heard and the notes I transcribed were difficult for me to read, but I assumed there was more to the story than I was being told. People don’t just.. go crazy, right?

My interest continued when I was diagnosed with situational depression and later when I was given the SAD label. Toss in some bulimia and, for fun, mix in a dash of anxiety disorder and.. well, here I am. A well-managed mental patient.

In the grand scheme of mental illnesses depression, the kind I’ve got, isn’t much of a blip on the radar screen. The media says it’s overdiagnosed, anyway, and the prescriptions being written are doubling in frequency with each passing moment. We’re a society that likes relief in a pill. But, for people like me who dutifully swallow our Celexa/Prozac/Zoloft/whatever, the pill allows us to continue on our merry way without much in the way of complications. A decreased libido, perhaps, or a bit of weight gained, and the dark clouds lift and.. life goes on. Even my anxiety disorder, as much as it caused havoc in November of last year, was easily (comparitively, I mean) managed with the right combination of meds.

During the time of my serious anxiety, I regularly feared that I was losing my mind and I regularly worried about how to stop it. I suspect that didn’t help eradicate the anxiety, really. I wasn’t hearing voices and I wasn’t hallucinating, but I was unable to sleep for days, unable to eat anything other than oatmeal, unable to go anywhere or do anything beyond pace and cry and shake. I was terrified of absolutely nothing and everything all at once. I knew on a rational level that there was nothing to fear but I couldn’t stop my brain from releasing chemicals that spoke to the contrary. I’d chant, over and over, “Everything is okay. Everything is okay.” and then the fear would wash over me as certain as if I were facing a firing squad. I’m intelligent enough to know that it was a misfiring in my brain – I read the web sites, I read the books (I wasn’t sleeping; I needed something to do) and I still couldn’t stop it. For a control freak like myself, it was the worst feeling in the world.

I started to question everything. What had I eaten? Was I sleeping badly? Coffee was as perplexed as I was, perhaps more so. I couldn’t explain to him how bad it felt. I couldn’t express that I was terrified – completely and utterly terrified – 24 hours a day for almost a month. I looked online to try and find a treatment centre – a place where I could be loaded up with any drug they wanted to fill me up with. A place where I would be safe. Late at night, after Coffee had fallen asleep, I would lie on the sofa alternating between cold sweat and tremors, telling myself that if it got any worse I would just kill myself. I was starting to feel as though it were my only option.

Once I was on the antidepressants/antianxiety meds I felt a thousand times better. The Clonazepam and the Celexa teamed up to reign in my hysteria, I began to sleep and eat again, and other than a few panic attacks over the past few months (literally 2 or 3 of them) I’ve been fine. No problem. All good. Like I said, my “mental problems” are minor. If you hadn’t read it here, and if I didn’t tell you, there’d be no way to know. I haven’t taken any Clonazepam in a very long time, but I keep them around for ‘safety’.

And I still question my sanity on a regular basis. I don’t trust my brain to always work in my favour anymore. How can I?

In Crazy, the author’s son is diagnosed with schizophrenia after some bizarre behaviours in his personal life. As things escalate he becomes paranoid and delusional and refuses to accept treatment. His father, a journalist, tries to obtain help – and fails. There are laws in place that don’t permit his son to be hospitalized against his will – and his son, convinced the world is conspiring against him, won’t sign any papers. The author decides to investigate the mental health system in America in order to help his son and, possibly, to help others.

There are a lot of interviews in the book with patients, parents, medical professionals, government agencies and police. There are a lot of statistics. But the personal stories are what got me – as usual. The interviews with patients who had been living normal lives – productive, professional, happy lives – before they were literally struck down made me cringe repeatedly. I empathized with both sides of the debate. If Coffee were behaving in a way that I knew wasn’t ‘him’, I would want to do everything in my power to make him healthy again. The flip side, of course, is that I’m also not positive I can accept the idea of medicating and treating people against their will. But if they can’t make a rational decision, is it okay to let them go? If they truly aren’t harming others or themselves, is it alright to allow their quality of life to degrade? So many of the patients commented that they were grateful for forced interventions – that they hated being locked inside their heads with hallucinations and messages from God. They were pleased with the increased quality of life that came with consistent care.

But they also talked about the side effects – the lethargy, the dull flat affect, the weight gain. They talked about a loss of control. The relapse rate is extraordinarily high with mental illness as a result of those unwanted effects. And since it’s often a gradual slide back into insanity, they would stop taking the pills and feel great for a short period. Once the illness had taken hold again, though, they were unable to remember the light and the struggle would begin again.

A big portion of the book revolves around the criminal justice system and how it deals with mentally ill individuals. Many people commit small crimes while ill – doing things they wouldn’t normally do (from shouting profanity on street corners to breaking into a home in order to ‘save’ a non-existent baby that God told them was in trouble). The justice system can’t force them to seek treatment, for the most part, and the jails are not equipped to handle them appropriately. Halfway houses aren’t run effectively and don’t permit appropriate supervision. There is no one to insist the patient take medications. Just reading these sections filled me with a sense of futility and despair.

One of the biggest messages in the book, if one were to look for a big picture lesson, is that our society frequently turns their collective back on the things we fear most – and that’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. We try to rationalize mental illness by saying that it’s a result of drug abuse (not true) or genetics (sometimes true). We look for ways to say, “That won’t be me, because..” and then we quickly turn our backs. We don’t want to be educated on the subject – we want to pretend it doesn’t exist. It’s easier to make a twirly-finger near our ear than it is to acknowledge someone’s personal hell and the fact that they did nothing to bring it on themselves. It’s like winning a really bad lottery.

At any rate, I really would recommend the book. It’s a very worthwhile read even if you already know a good deal about mental illness – and it’s even more worthwhile if you’re the sort of person who prefers not to think about these things. Approach it from a clinical perspective, a statistical perspective, a health-care perspective or a legal perspective – whatever works for you. You won’t be the same when you’re finished, and that’s not a bad thing.