#1 Mental health week 14th may
Posted: Wed May 09, 2018 10:09 am
This year I thought I'd start a thread on this as I think it is important.
My wife has recently been admitted to hospital as a direct result of an undiagnosed mental health issue.
She has now been diagnosed as having bipolar disorder. She has had the condition all her life, and with hindsight being the wonderful thing that it is, this now seems obvious.
It used to be called manic depression, this is now not politically correct but is in my view a more apt description of the condition.
Periods of intense high mood which last for a few months, a period of relative though unstable calm, and then intense low mood that again last a few months.
The intense high mood is just as potentially dangerous as the intense low, there can be a loss of control, of grip on reality, which I have seen repeatedly over the Last 15 years. The intense low can be very dangerous indeed.
I dont need to say why.
For the past 10 months since she finally admitted to me that she had a serious problem and let me in, have been horrendous. For her and me.
She had built up coping mechanisms over the years which helped her to dismiss the impulses, channel the intense high moods into something productive, and combat the intense low moods by throwing herself into something with such focus that literally everything else in the world was blocked out. Another coping mechanism is music. 24/7 music. Loud, soft, any music at all. When she can't have music she will have an ipod and headphones. Same again, hyper focus on the music blocks out the world. Certain artists such as placebo and florence and the machine which fairly explicitly are catharsis for their own experiences remind her she is not alone when i cant get through. This used to frustrate me as neither her nor me knew exactly why she did this.
Periods of stress, upset, and even events of high happiness could trigger an episode where she would need to fall back on these coping mechanisms.
So she has coped to a degree from being a child with these strategies.
10 months ago social media and various other factors took one away. She has had animals since being a kid, and anyone who knows us knows the focus she has had on them. We bred dogs, we had marine fish. We had fancy rats, we had seahorses, and the big one was her breeding and showing Guinea pigs.
Rules were altered within the show circuit, people were clearly cheating and getting away with it, there was bias in judging, and due to her knowledge she was being leaned on for help from all over the place. All the back biting and infighting caused alot of people to give up, and it was all too much.
The coping mechanism became the trigger for a massive episode.
My daughter also went to comprehensive school, and my wife had a terrible time during that period of school. Bullying, violence, peer pressure, you name it, she got it all with a vengeance because she was a little different at that age.
She was terrified that any of the things she went through would happen to our daughter..
In July last year a combination of massive stress and the sudden loss of her ability to cope resulted in a massive breakdown.
Paramedics were summoned due to events, and I finally found out the extent of the problem. She wouldn't see a specialist, categorically refused. So we did loads of research, tried every strategy you could think of and though things started to settle around February, it was waiting, crouched just out of sight waiting to spring out again.
And it did.
About 6 weeks ago it broke through all the shaky barriers she had erected and I had helped to reinforce, and struck with a vengeance.
I will never forget or come to terms with what happened next until the day I die. But I will prevent it from ever happening again, whatever it takes.
This time she was taken to hospital and seen by the crisis team. She had gone right over the edge to a place I can never go, and a wonderful lady who saw her and assessed her immediately arranged for help.
There was a psychiatrist out to see her within 2 days who arranged initial medication which she was issued with the next day.
There have been people from the team here every day for fhe first two weeks, every 2 since then and they have brought her medication to us, assessing her state and tweaking the meds.
They have referred her forward to the next stage to a specialist team who can help with therapy aimed at conditions of the type she has.
The team of people who have helped us are absolute angels, and I genuinely believe that without them and their help she would have gone down a path I could not follow. She followed that path, and managed to walk back to me, how I don't know. Device intervention, call it what you will, I don't know how she made it back and neither does she.
A lady came to see me to do a 'carers assesment', to help me with strategies to help her, and said something very important.
She said that we all have mental health. And we do. Our mood affects those around us, and theirs affects us. We are all inextricably linked, as we all affect each other in ways that we don't always realise.
Things for me are extremely tough at the moment. I have to deal with the things that she can't aswell as my things. I have to be sympathetic and caring and patient, and to be honest, I am not any of those things. But if i am not, then I could trigger something in her that I don't want to.
My cold logical problem solving personality is not enough right now, she is a person, not a problem to be solved and I have to change to mee the challenge.
But my struggles with this are nothing compared to hers.
Its a sobering thought that these issues were under my nose all these years and I never put the pieces of the jigsaw together. But that's just my own self inflicted guilt talking.
I keep telling her over and over like groundhog day that there is new light at the end of the tunnel, and hope for the future now that there is help being given, medication and theraputic, and that she doesn't have to be beholden to the condition.
It is very early days.
So please talk to the people who are down, please keep an eye on those who you know who every now and again do 'wierd things'. Dont judge, provide an ear or a shoulder. That could be the turning point for someone.
Mental health Is everyone's issue.
And God bless the professionals who are there for people, yoy really do have to care for people's well being to do what they do.
They saved her life.
My wife has recently been admitted to hospital as a direct result of an undiagnosed mental health issue.
She has now been diagnosed as having bipolar disorder. She has had the condition all her life, and with hindsight being the wonderful thing that it is, this now seems obvious.
It used to be called manic depression, this is now not politically correct but is in my view a more apt description of the condition.
Periods of intense high mood which last for a few months, a period of relative though unstable calm, and then intense low mood that again last a few months.
The intense high mood is just as potentially dangerous as the intense low, there can be a loss of control, of grip on reality, which I have seen repeatedly over the Last 15 years. The intense low can be very dangerous indeed.
I dont need to say why.
For the past 10 months since she finally admitted to me that she had a serious problem and let me in, have been horrendous. For her and me.
She had built up coping mechanisms over the years which helped her to dismiss the impulses, channel the intense high moods into something productive, and combat the intense low moods by throwing herself into something with such focus that literally everything else in the world was blocked out. Another coping mechanism is music. 24/7 music. Loud, soft, any music at all. When she can't have music she will have an ipod and headphones. Same again, hyper focus on the music blocks out the world. Certain artists such as placebo and florence and the machine which fairly explicitly are catharsis for their own experiences remind her she is not alone when i cant get through. This used to frustrate me as neither her nor me knew exactly why she did this.
Periods of stress, upset, and even events of high happiness could trigger an episode where she would need to fall back on these coping mechanisms.
So she has coped to a degree from being a child with these strategies.
10 months ago social media and various other factors took one away. She has had animals since being a kid, and anyone who knows us knows the focus she has had on them. We bred dogs, we had marine fish. We had fancy rats, we had seahorses, and the big one was her breeding and showing Guinea pigs.
Rules were altered within the show circuit, people were clearly cheating and getting away with it, there was bias in judging, and due to her knowledge she was being leaned on for help from all over the place. All the back biting and infighting caused alot of people to give up, and it was all too much.
The coping mechanism became the trigger for a massive episode.
My daughter also went to comprehensive school, and my wife had a terrible time during that period of school. Bullying, violence, peer pressure, you name it, she got it all with a vengeance because she was a little different at that age.
She was terrified that any of the things she went through would happen to our daughter..
In July last year a combination of massive stress and the sudden loss of her ability to cope resulted in a massive breakdown.
Paramedics were summoned due to events, and I finally found out the extent of the problem. She wouldn't see a specialist, categorically refused. So we did loads of research, tried every strategy you could think of and though things started to settle around February, it was waiting, crouched just out of sight waiting to spring out again.
And it did.
About 6 weeks ago it broke through all the shaky barriers she had erected and I had helped to reinforce, and struck with a vengeance.
I will never forget or come to terms with what happened next until the day I die. But I will prevent it from ever happening again, whatever it takes.
This time she was taken to hospital and seen by the crisis team. She had gone right over the edge to a place I can never go, and a wonderful lady who saw her and assessed her immediately arranged for help.
There was a psychiatrist out to see her within 2 days who arranged initial medication which she was issued with the next day.
There have been people from the team here every day for fhe first two weeks, every 2 since then and they have brought her medication to us, assessing her state and tweaking the meds.
They have referred her forward to the next stage to a specialist team who can help with therapy aimed at conditions of the type she has.
The team of people who have helped us are absolute angels, and I genuinely believe that without them and their help she would have gone down a path I could not follow. She followed that path, and managed to walk back to me, how I don't know. Device intervention, call it what you will, I don't know how she made it back and neither does she.
A lady came to see me to do a 'carers assesment', to help me with strategies to help her, and said something very important.
She said that we all have mental health. And we do. Our mood affects those around us, and theirs affects us. We are all inextricably linked, as we all affect each other in ways that we don't always realise.
Things for me are extremely tough at the moment. I have to deal with the things that she can't aswell as my things. I have to be sympathetic and caring and patient, and to be honest, I am not any of those things. But if i am not, then I could trigger something in her that I don't want to.
My cold logical problem solving personality is not enough right now, she is a person, not a problem to be solved and I have to change to mee the challenge.
But my struggles with this are nothing compared to hers.
Its a sobering thought that these issues were under my nose all these years and I never put the pieces of the jigsaw together. But that's just my own self inflicted guilt talking.
I keep telling her over and over like groundhog day that there is new light at the end of the tunnel, and hope for the future now that there is help being given, medication and theraputic, and that she doesn't have to be beholden to the condition.
It is very early days.
So please talk to the people who are down, please keep an eye on those who you know who every now and again do 'wierd things'. Dont judge, provide an ear or a shoulder. That could be the turning point for someone.
Mental health Is everyone's issue.
And God bless the professionals who are there for people, yoy really do have to care for people's well being to do what they do.
They saved her life.