As I delve deeper into the end stages of my degree learning, I’m also delving deeper into mental illness support, diagnosis, treatment and ongoing care. As a result of my decision to learn about mental illness, I’m also forced to delve deeper into my own mind, and try to translate the madness within coherently.
It raises a never-ending question for me – am I really present?
As my coursework tells me, the way we understand and realise our consciousness is incredibly complicated, but we can use the first principal of Rene Descartes philosophy to simplify things. Cogito, ergo sum. These days we loosely translate this to…
“I think, therefore I am.”.
For many years I’ve remembered this phrase in moments of mania. I need a connection with reality and my brain is failing to find one. But I’m not fully aware of that misconnection, instead my mind is creating it’s own reality and making it difficult for me to discern the real from the unreal, the fantastic from the mundane, the paranoia from the reasonable.
I can only give accounts of the effect of this phrase from a first-person perspective, and I can think of several times it’s helped me to come back to the mundane, and calm the mania.
I can also think of several times when it hasn’t.
But in essence, training my mind to understand that I’m thinking, therefore I’m here, I’m present, I’m something, allows me to remember that my place in the universe, whatever it is, is real.
But is my mental illness stopping my presence from being worthwhile?
Understanding my place compared to others
I listened to the audio of a You Tube Ted Talk today. It was engaging and eye-opening for someone like me. I guess I feel I’ve been swimming in the mental illness pool for over a decade, but I haven’t drowned yet. Instead I’m staying afloat thanks to medication, generic support from the CMHT and my partner, who is ever-present and ever-understanding.
But I’ve flirted with the frills of hospital admission, spent prolonged time under the care of the crisis team, I’ve also been at the edge of escaping reality completely, I continue to experience the high levels of paranoia that seem unreasonable to others, and I have no physical connection with the outside world now. So when I listened to the talk from a 30-year surviving human with psychosis, I wasn’t just compelled by the words, I was afraid of the implications that I might be effected by them too. I felt sad for the experience of the presenter, wishing that her illness hadn’t eventually lead to the indignity of physical restraint without consent. It sounded horrifying.
However, as the talk drew to a close I went from sadness for her situation to jealousy that she’d managed to do something that seems unthinkable to me.
Wonderfully, she’s now a highly-respected lawyer in the USA, who remains successfully rehabilitated from psychosis. She is living animatedly, aroung her limitations, which had previously incarcerated her.
I think there are many of us, vast swathes of mental illness patients, who are now simply swimming. We’re in the pool, able to paddle around, but unsure of how to get out and constantly afraid we’ll drown, because it’s still a possibility.
What happens to us? Where does the treatment end? Or is this the existence we all have to expect now? Nothing more than swimming, or survival, until the end.
How will I know I’m surviving well, and how will I know if I ever get out? Am I aware of the changing landscape in my mind, or is my explanation of this ‘swimming’ truly the reality? Am I mending, does the medication work? Is my way of living the right way? Or is it the only way? Can I achieve more, or am I stuck with the status quo?
And as this long, almost doldrum of questions started to flood my brain this morning, I came back to that phrase once again.
Cogito, ergo sum.
There’s no question, the woman leading the TED Talk has had a more severe and more intense experience of mental illness than I. Her friends and family watched as she became incoherent and eventually someone made the decision to engage her with hospital care. Although I’ve had severe moments that I’ve been unaware of, the decision has always been to manage my case in the community. Does that make me lucky? Or does that mean I’m never going to reach a positive outcome?
Although her illness is far more severe, it seems her levels of support (both professional and social) were more robust.
Which leads me to what appears to be the most important aspect of living positively with mental illness.
Support.
No matter where you are on the scale, the support around you seems to be critical in finding, engaging and accepting professional support. Your friends and family are the people you know and trust, so when they tell you you’re unwell, you look great, you need help, you’ve lost weight – you’re more likely to listen and react. When these people are telling you that you need professional support for your mental wellbeing, you’re more likely to listen to them. Even, sometimes, over your own mind.
So, in conclusion, I’m still swimming because the level of support I have around me isn’t robust at all. It consists of one man who is learning at the same pace and time as me. We get round one corner of symptoms only to be hit with a new outlook around the next corner. Something that we could never have prepared for. We only have each other, and that makes managing my mental health almost impossible. He works to support his family, he has health and welfare needs of his own, as all humans do. He can’t dedicate his entire existence to keeping me alive, even though my own brain sometimes doesn’t agree with him.
Friends and family are gone.
Professional support seems to have given up.
Leaving home is incredibly challenging, and hasn’t happened for over a year.
Medication is keeping me afloat.
When there are no other voices to tell me where I’m heading, who I am and why I’m here, I have to repeat one phrase;
Cogito, ergo sum.
The picture
This was a heavy post to write, and I’m sure it’s a slightly confusing one to read too. But I couldn’t imagine a way of replicating it as a digital illustration.
Instead of all the weird, abstract ideas that my tired brain tried to convince me of, I chose this picture of Bingo from Bluey, who is happily floating in her own pool. It’s an image I enjoyed with my daughter as we laughed at the cartoon last weekend.
For her at least, I am more than my thoughts.
Thanks for reading. 💜
Creative Steph 