Borderline Families

During the month of May, Susan the blogger who writes A Journey, wrote about the stigma attached to the diagnosis of mental illness. I began to think about how a “normal” family like ours was totally hijacked by an illness that is so far outside the margins of acceptability in our society. Running into the stigma against the mentally ill was very surprising and very upsetting for our family.

The diagnosis of mental illness of family member feels like being ambushed. No matter how long symptoms have been present, the family feels like they are the victims of a surprise attack coming out of nowhere. Once handed down, it is not unusual for the diagnosis to be disregarded, as if the person has been wrongly identified. Close the door and point up the street. Not us, this has to be a case of mistaken identity. The verdict of mental illness is almost impossible to take in at face value. You need time to wrap your mind around it. You need time to figure out what exactly it means.

When my daughter was first diagnosed, thoughts of how severe it might be began to take over. We read books in vain attempts to verify just how sick our daughter was, or more hopefully, wasn’t. I held my daughter up against all the examples given in the books and deemed her highly functioning, except when she wasn’t. And, when she wasn’t doing well, for a long time I attributed her helplessness to a rough day a school – all kids have those. Or, I commiserated about peer pressure and deemed my daughter to be more evolved (!) and in touch with her sweet, sensitive side. Everyone else was a bully.

We ignored flagrant signs for years. Our daughter was gifted. She was unique. She was special. All of this was true, but she was also struggling to maintain a semblance of normalcy and right up until the lid blew off, we thought she was going to “work it out”.

I have said this before: undiagnosed mental illness looks like bad behavior. The person appears to be spoiled, self-indulgent, obsessive, unappreciative, angry, and demanding. We accused our daughter of all these things and more. And, of course, we feel shame now for not understanding what was going on when she was struggling the hardest. We would shake our heads and wonder if she was doing it on purpose.  All the fights and constant tension in our house was sickening.

The conflict and chaos pitted our daughter against us for years.

The stigma of mental illness is so profound, it is not like any other diagnosis. If cancer, diabetes, or heart disease is discovered, you discuss it with friends and family, compare notes and weigh treatment options with other survivors. There is no discussion of mental illness with the neighbors. Sometimes, even families do not want to talk about it. Mental illness becomes a closely guarded family secret. I wrote a book about my daughter’s search for relief through the mental healthcare industry in this country which my parents would prefer was left under my bed, or better yet, burned.

It takes awhile to get used to carrying around the label of mental illness. If someone in your family is mentally ill, everyone is affected. At first we concealed it, fabricated stories and finally, years into it, probably when we realized that it wasn’t going to miraculously go away, we accepted it. Our daughter’s story is part of the fabric of our daily life. We cannot turn a blind eye to it, nor do we want to. In fact, now we want to tell everyone about the horrific condition we discovered the US mental healthcare industry is in.

What we did to survive was educate ourselves. Know your enemy. It is a steep and difficult learning curve. Much of the information is ugly and frightening. Even grasping the symptoms of borderline and bipolar took years and I am still stunned by some behaviors. Her diagnoses varied as she sought treatment from place to place, adding and subtracting and adding again:  ADHD, bipolar, borderline personality disorder, body dysmorphia, addiction, anxiety, mild autism, depression and PTSD. There are a lot of symptoms to remember.

The care of the mentally ill in this country is far from the easy perfection the pharmaceutical companies would like you to believe. Rarely does one drug work as well as the pharmaceutical companies portray in television and magazine advertising. It is usually a delicate adjustment of a number of drugs that the psychiatrists are after. It can take a very long time to get each med to a therapeutic dose. It is often a painful journey.

Our family learned the names of drugs most commonly prescribed for the various illnesses that my daughter was diagnosed with and what to expect from side effects. We learned about various therapies: psychodynamic, interpersonal, cognitive and behavioral. We encouraged our daughter to attend DBT classes, do EMDR.  We searched for reputable doctors. We made a multitude of mistakes along the way. But, as I am documenting in the blog, we try very hard to help her.

Kris Bipolar/BPD Behavioral Therapy, Cognitive Therapy, DBT, EMDR, Interpersonal Therapy, Pharmaceutical companies, Psychodynamic Therapy, Stigma of Mental Illness