Sadness at McLean

 I had a sobering experience. My DBSA (Depression Bipolar Support Alliance) office key has been dodgy for years. Last week it finally wouldn’t work at all. Our office is located in the cafeteria of McLean Hospital, a world-renown psychiatric hospital that was founded in 1811.

I decided to call my husband, Jim, to see if he had any suggestions. The reception in the cafeteria was poor, so I walked outside towards the parking lot to talk.

A woman came walking by with a companion who was obviously a McLean staff member. I recognized the woman: an acquaintance from long ago at DBSA. She always had a ready smile.

The change in her was striking. She walked very slowly. When I called out her name, she stopped and looked at me. I wasn’t sure she recognized me, so I reminded her of our connection. I rattled on about how DBSA has been on Zoom for three and a half years and how we missed being in person.

She looked at me intently but never said a word. Then I said I had to go (because I had run out of things to say) and she continued her slow walk.

It was tough. I know nothing of her history the past several years. I know nothing of what brought her to McLean this time. She acts so differently from the friendly person I knew way back when.

It made me realize anew what a serious condition mental illness is. I have been blessed: the medications, for all my love-hate relationship with them, have allowed me to have a full life. They are far from perfect. Sometimes I feel like we are in the era that general medicine was in before antibiotics and chemotherapy drugs. Like chemotherapy, psychiatric meds are a blunt instrument with serious side effects. Although researchers continue to learn more about mechanisms, many of the drugs are decades old. I think there are many kinds and causes of mental illness which makes it very difficult to find effective medications that target the specific cause.

Whatever the reason, psychiatric drugs are, in the words of David Anderson, TEDxCaltech presenter, Your Brain is More Than a Bag of Chemicals (January 2013), like trying to change your car’s oil by pouring oil all over the engine hoping some of it reaches the right place.

My encounter at McLean reminds me that mental illness is a terrible illness with huge costs to those who aren’t’ treated successfully. My heart goes out to all who still suffer.

Mount Shasta

 In 1995, I took a 10-week road trip around the country with my kids in a pop-up tent trailer. In California, my sister and I travelled from Orange County (near L.A.) to Seattle. In far northern California I discovered Mt. Shasta and fell hopelessly in love.

Mount Shasta is a majestic peak in the Cascade Range, which includes Mt. Hood in Oregon and Mount St. Helen’s and Mount Rainier in Washington State. It rises 14,179 ft in elevation and is home to several glaciers. So why had I never heard of it?

If Mt. Shasta were in Germany or Italy or France, it would be as famous as the Matterhorn. But it is only the fifth highest mountain in California and ‘only’ 11th in prominence in the United States (how high the summit rises above its surroundings).

We camped within sight of the mountain and I reluctantly left it the next morning.

As I write this, my husband and I are on a West Coast road trip. I originally planned it for 2020, but we know what happened that year. This year, we flew into Seattle and rented a car to drive through Oregon and into California to see the Pacific Northwest and visit friends and family. High on my list of ‘can’t be missed’ destinations was Mt. Shasta. I have a framed photo on my office wall and gaze at it daily. I’ve told countless people of my 1995 discovery (including you now).

When we arrived in Seattle, smoke from wildfires diminished visibility. Seattle and Portland, Oregon, were ranked first and second globally for the poorest air quality. As we entered northern California, I wondered if I would even see my beloved Mt. Shasta. Finally, I rounded a bend on Interstate 5 and there it was, looming as majestic as ever, though grey with atmospheric smoke.

A doctor friend once told me that if you take the time to get to know someone, anyone, you are likely to discover great sorrow in their life. Most of us experience sorrow, disappointment, and even tragedy. Sometimes it can feel like life has greyed us out.

Mt. Shasta offers hope. Although the smoke dimmed its visibility, it still rises triumphant from the ground, firm and steadfast, unchanged by the air around it.

The wildfires will subside and the air quality recover. Fresh snow will fall and Mt. Shasta’s glory will be fully visible to all who visit. But Mt. Shasta didn’t change. The smoke could never diminish its true nature, only hide it temporarily from our eyes.

My subconscious is my friend!

 I woke up Tuesday thinking, 'my subconscious is my friend.' Actually, I woke up remembering that I’d had a fitful night of sleep, waking several times during the night and realizing each time that I had been dreaming of editing DBSA Boston board meeting minutes. I didn’t remember details of the dreams, just the impression of spending all night puzzling out how to organize the minutes from the raw notes I had typed during the meeting as I struggled to keep up with the lively discussion.

But instead of adding the fact of my dreams to my stress level, I considered them in a different light. All night my subconscious was working on the minutes in many ways: multitasking in a way I could literally only dream of.

My minute-editing career had come to a crisis the week before. Through a series of events, 95% of which were of my own creating, I had to send a 4-month backlog of minutes to the board a few days prior to Monday’s monthly meeting.

Each month for several now I’ve promised myself to edit the minutes within two days of the meeting, while the discussions are fresh in my mind. With my current memory abilities, recall becomes much tougher as time passes.

And each month for several I’ve procrastinated and sent the minutes days before the next meeting rather than days after the previous.

Arising Tuesday morning with the new thought, that my subconscious is my friend, freed me to work on the edits of the Monday meeting with energy and confidence. My subconscious had attended that meeting and was hard at work processing it, not only the actual notes and memories but the emotional baggage and stress I've chosen to carry: all the resistances I have to sitting down and doing the task.

By Tuesday night I had emailed the draft of the minutes to my board members. And now I have 25 days to relax and enjoy and savor the experience of having a dreaded task completely, entirely, and utterly done. (And hope no one sends back any edits, I chuckle to myself.)

Who I am

 I’m going to be controversial here. I don’t mean to speak for anyone else, but I will speak my mind.

A common discussion at my support group, DBSA Boston, over the years is the difference between being bipolar and having bipolar. In introducing myself as a facilitator at the newcomers’ meeting, I soften it even further, saying, I have bipolar disorder.

Most people reject the idea that they 'are' bipolar and opt for 'having' bipolar. But about eight years ago a young woman I know declared, "No, I am bipolar." I puzzled over it, wondering which felt truer to me. At the time I wasn't prepared to embrace her statement. I felt it was limiting.

As research for my memoir,, I just finished is it me or my meds? The author David Karp (whom I know through DBSA Boston) describes a support group meeting:

The meeting began with brief introductions during which nearly everyone said something like, “My name is Joe and I’m a depressive." After all the introductions, a young woman suggested that it would be far better if people said, “Hello, my name is so and so and I suffer from depression.”

A woman David Karp interviewed said:

Every time we take the medication it keeps constructing your identity as bipolar, or as whatever diagnosis, but you know, that is not who I am….It’s not, in any way, the whole of me. It’s a part of me. I am a teacher. I am a writer. I am a lover. I am a woman. [Mental illness] is just [something that] gets in the way a lot.

I have no intention of constructing anyone else’s identity, but lately I’ve been thinking that I am bipolar. (I actually hate that term, but for different reasons than the usual. Manic depression is so descriptive in a way that bipolar is not. I’m not a toy magnet, I don’t consist of two poles. I experience mania and I experience depression. However, I don’t particularly like the term ‘manic depressive.’ That does seem reductionist, as if I am totally in the thrall of those two states. I haven’t come up with a better noun (please suggest some), so for now I’ll use bipolar.

I checked out Word Hippo and found 273 (yes, I counted them: slow-news day here) adjectives for "vacillating between two extremes" and 49 "involving or having two extremes." Nouns are bipolarism, bipolarization, and bipolarity. I suppose it was too much to ask to web-search to satisfy me. (Give it a try, Matt. I so loved wrenmimic!)

Certainly when I’m psychotic or in a debilitating depression, there is something wrong. My life would be better, I could be more productive, better at relationships, if that didn’t happen. But the tendency to mood swings, the highs and lows (the 7-out of-10s and the 3-out-of-10s) seem to be ingrained deeply into the fiber of my being. The woman David Karp interviewed identifies herself as a teacher, writer, lover, woman. None of those identities is the whole of her but they are deep parts of her. They are parts of her identity. My manic depression isn’t the whole me, but it goes deep, very deep.

For the curious, Word Hippo suggests:

volatile, mercurial, oscillating, vacillating, capricious, spasmodic, undulating, two-faced, variable, unpredictable, changeable, unstable, erratic, inconstant, fickle, impulsive, tempermental, flighty, fluctuating, inconsistent, whimsical, mutable, fluid, unsteady, irregular, changeful, uncertain, unsettled, skittish, wayward, flickery, flakey, quicksilver, flaky, blowing hot and cold, irrepressible, wavering, excitable, protean, kaleidoscopic, moody, giddy, labile, active, movable, elastic, up in the air, unreliable, up and down, ever-changing, mobile, yo-yo, up-and-down, undependable, fitful, arbitrary, changing, random, varying, jerky, desultory, quirky, freakish, faddish, ungovernable, wild, haphazard, chance, vagarious, crotchety, constantly changing, ephemeral, shifting, transitory, frivolous, momentary, fleeting, peaky, short-lived, transient, impermanent, full of ups and downs, uneven, fluctuant, aimless, hit-or-miss, indiscriminate, unmethodical, casual, intermittent, chameleonic, sporadic, turbulent, along with waffling, fluky, directionless, orderless, blind, lost, reckless, offhand, iffy, sketchy, unsupported, off-and-on, objectless, quick-tempered, unreasoned, pointless, and more.

Not quite on the mark.