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Confession
thejanechord
Diaryland
notifylist.com
2002-07-11
1:08 p.m.
Just once in my life, I'd like to see someone write a book about depression, bipolar disorder, or any other kind of mood disorder without turning it into some sappy, ridiculous, altogether too egotistically happy and religiously based success story. Why? The moment you give a story of mood disorders a happy ending is the moment it loses its reality, its grasp on the severity of the illness, its ability to describe without putting a politically-correct twist on it for the benefit of the normal people.
These illnesses don't go away.
How many times do I have to say this? How many times do I have to remind the world that anyone suffering from a serious mood disorder is not going to recover? Recovery does not exist in the world of these illnesses. Recovery is something the normal people in the world made up to make them feel better about the diseases. It's something everyone tries to believe will cure them, their friends, or their relatives, should any of them ever be diagnosed as mentally ill.
I feel like I'm on drugs. Oh wait -- I am on drugs. I'm always on drugs because drugs are part of the continuous treatment process from which I can never stray for the duration of my life.
The moment I start to get just the slightest bit pissed off about this whole situation, my vision goes blurry and everything feels tingly, and the whole world loses its sharp edges and bloody razors that jump from the air to attack my brain like the scythe of the Grim Reaper finally here to greet me time and time and time again. I can't breathe. I can't see. I can't realistically think about the outside world because the outside world is in its little bottle where I need to put it occasionally, so that I can manage to continue living.
The outside world is gone.
And then -- with the world gone and the mood disorder that's hell-bent on ruining my life coming back into its own blurred variety of focus -- then, my brain begins to swirl with angry messages concerning those pathetic attempts to tell the world that mental disorders are going to actually, somehow, probably go away with treatment, and all I can do is sit back and let my head haphazardly float back and forth on air above the rest of my utterly confused body. The swirling, angered thoughts bounce against the sides of my skull in physically painful bursts of horror, and some people out there -- MOST people out there -- really believe that this CAN GO AWAY.
It makes me so angry.
Books without happy endings won't get published, though. Publishers have to watch out for the prestigious reputations of their companies. They can't get mixed up with some stupid girl fussing about how she doesn't know if she's going to make it through life from day to day with a mood disorder that's permanently miserable, that's barely bearable, that shades every aspect of her life like it's being lived behind a screen. If they did, they'd jeopardize the reliability of their publishing company. The general public would begin to question the moral stance of a publishing company that appears to be promoting ideas of negligent mental health professionals, recurring suicidal manias, hopelessly damned souls.
We already know we've been damned to a life of misery. A book isn't going to worsen our previously conceived notions of hopelessness.
Ow, my head, my head...it HURTS because I'm so angry with the stupidity and the overwhelming sequaciousness of the ordinary people.
Publish a book about mental disorders that has a happy ending, and you're publishing nothing more than lies. Either that, or you're publishing a book written by someone who hasn't seen the deep end of the misery pool, someone who hasn't spent enough time on the verge of drowning, someone who hasn't the ability to realize that their experience isn't or WASN'T as serious as many others. Serious cases of mental disorders have developed over long periods of time, and once they've set in, they've set in for good. If someone says they have fully recovered from depression, they weren't a sufferer of depression from the beginning. People who say they've recovered from depression were sufferering from one or more depressive EPISODES.
Episodes go away; major depressive disorders do not.
Apologies if my story doesn't have a happy ending. That's just the way it is. It's cold, hard fact. It's painful and horrifying to read, but trust me - it's even worse for the person who must experience it on a daily basis. Read some of my work, and you'll see a clearer, more deliberate, more realistic experience than the watered-down, reader-friendly stories in most books on depression. If you find yourself feeling sick to the stomach like you just stumbled across a bloody corpse when you've finished reading, then you're on the right track to discovering the reality of a serious mood disorder. If you find yourself thanking the heavens for granting someone the ability to recover from a mood disorder, you've just been fed a melodramatically arranged pile of shit.
This comes up today because my sister sent me a link to a site for a book about bipolar disorder. I'm sure my sister meant well, and I'm rather glad she sent me the link, but what a tremendous load of happy-go-lucky crap it is. It makes me sick to my stomach not because of the horror unleashed from the author's mind into "literary" form, but because of the atrocity of purely distilled, highly detailed, unwittingly published bullshit that's being peddled in this world as truth.
I'm very happy for anyone out there who might want to believe his or her mental illness can be cured. I'm happy for them like I'm happy for people who feel comforted by believing in an unrealistically delineated god. Plenty of books have been published for the people who want to be opportunistic optimists, though. For those who want to know the truth, I can't think of a single one.
Those who want to learn how to live with their disease must plod through the muck independent of any self-help books. The right books simply are not available. Those smart enough to know they need to understand their disease before they can learn to manage it must rely not on first-person accounts of other people struggling alongside them but on psychiatric textbooks that treat mental patients as science experiments. We're not just science; we're human, too. And we need a little more than a pat on the back and a half-heartedly muttered, "You'll be fine."
The only comfort we have is in knowing we're not alone in our misery.
