Once upon a time my mental health was so bad I found myself trapped in a hospital facility. I say trapped because I was not allowed to leave when I wanted to despite being completely aware and in control of my emotional state.
Life was not good for me. I’d been diagnosed with a degenerative neurological disease (which would later turn out to be incorrect). My marriage was in a bad way, worse than usual, but not the worst it would get. Financially I had been put in a position where I had to become dependent on my husband (who later left me for a younger more naive woman and divorced me). I felt as though I no longer had control of my life. As many of us may feel from time to time.
It was distressing to say the least, but there I was still putting on a brave face for the sake of everyone else in my life. I already felt a burden to my family, my husband, two young sons, and to my sister in law and niece living with us. I didn’t want to place further burden on them by sharing the dark thoughts in my mind with them. So instead I turned to people I believed were friends.
For the most they probably wanted to be my friend. They just weren’t expecting the fall out of my well hidden mental health issues, and they weren’t equipped to deal with it.
I’m not going to deny I was a problem. My behaviour was problematic. I was unaware at the time of much of what I was doing.
Some of it was due to the cognitive dissonance formed from the traumas of my past, some of it due to a neurological dysfunction. Mostly though it was caused by medication used to treat a condition I did not have, that I should never have been on. I still don’t blame the doctors. They did what they thought was best and in all fairness, seeking desperately to keep the uncontrollable symptoms under control.
The medication I was using was causing serious side effects of risk taking and reckless behaviour, compulsion disorder and even hypersexuality. I was secretly taking part in behaviour that could not only destroy my reputation, it was also incredibly dangerous.
I didn’t know how to stop it. It was as previously described, a compulsion. I wasn’t aware at the time, until I was much later educated, that it was feeding the dopamine response in my brain like alcohol or drugs do to addicts. It wasn’t until I was found out that I began down the path of getting it back under control.
By the time I was mentally well enough to function again, probably better than I ever had been, the damage was done. Relationships were destroyed. My friends were long gone.
For many years I would find myself dwelling on the fact that they left me. I blamed them for not listening. I was angry they didn’t understand me. I blocked them from every aspect of my life both online and off. I never wanted to hear their names again. It’s not easy in smaller online circles when you’re connected by people who weren’t involved as deeply as they were in my life.
Now that I look back so many years ago at those dreadful events, while I can still feel the emotions, the wretched helplessness, the sorrow, the desperation, I look back I know they were right to leave me. They had to for their own sakes as well as mine.
I’d have never understood how destructive my behaviour was to others as well as to myself if they’d have stuck by me and just made excuses for it. I probably wouldn’t have stopped it. It would have snowballed. It was already a big enough monster out of control. Feeding my need for attention that fed that dopamine response would have been like giving a junky a hit and saying they couldn’t help it. At the time without the understanding of my condition that I have now, I couldn’t help it. Others could though and that’s a protective factor.
It wasn’t my time in the mental health unit at the hospital that lead me to recovery. It was the therapy and self searching throughout my divorce that made me understand what I had done. The mental health facility were part of the problem. They treated me badly. I was abused, threatened, misdiagnosed and at no point was I given any actual treatment to help me get better. I was so traumatised by the way staff treated me I would never seek help there again. I have even made a submission to the Disability Royal Commission about the abuse. Not because I expect any type of compensation, I don’t even expect an apology. I told my story because the way I was treated in there has not stopped. I’ve assisted others who I’ve first hand observed being treated in the same way. Some worse. People need to know what is going on when mentally unwell people seek help to understand why the system is not working. Without knowing the problem, how can anyone ever seek to fix it?
It’s taken many years to accept that walking out of my life was the right thing for those people to do. I’m happy for it to stay that way. I’m not looking to make amends either. I understand the stress that supporting someone who was as mentally unwell as I was puts on a person because I’ve been the support person as well as the unwell person.
I’ve just accepted that it was something I had to discover myself and nothing they said or did at the time was helping me. It was better for them to leave rather than continue exacerbating the situation. I didn’t have the capacity to listen, they didn’t have the capacity to help.
I restarted a new life this year. I’ve felt almost revolutionary doing it. I have brought very little of my past life with me. My kids of course. They’re part of me and I’m ever grateful for their enduring understanding and tolerance of my incapability to parent at times. My cat, who will probably outlast my marriage. She’s not that far off. A box of old photos and documents that after 44 years I have culled and know I can still do more to reduce. Of material possessions from my old life, I could fit them in a shoebox. There is very little I’ve brought with me.
Of people, there are few who were around 5 years ago who are still around today. I’m fine with that. I’ve made new connections, new friends. They know who I am now, not who I was when I, well, wasn’t the real me. I don’t keep it a secret. Discussions of mental health have come up countless times and I freely admit my past behaviours and how I came to be who I am now. They admire me for my honesty. The ones who stayed, they understand. I wasn’t crazy. I was just a little unwell.
Those who walked away, they were right to do so. It was never going to end well if they persevered with trying to save me. I didn’t need to be saved. I needed to be loved. By myself.
