Borderline Families

The amount of information available about alternative methods for mental healthcare is mind-boggling. That is if you know where to look. If you don’t tap into the right vein, the unconventional methods – cranial-sacral treatment, vitamins and fish oil, past-life regression, music and art therapy, etc. seem marginal and somewhat sketchy. These out of the ordinary activities take place in shady back-street offices. They make claims that seem preposterous. They seem to be too earnest and at the same time not serious enough.

Like the health food pioneers who carried their backyard produce to work with them and chowed down on carrot sticks and sandwiches from home while their office mates ate Big Macs, the mental healthcare industry has “renegades” who are gaining in number. Slowly, the people who chose to eat locally produced food, organic and with less packaging, are taking over the lunch table. While the people diagnosed with life-long chronic “mental illnesses” have set aside their prescription bottles and waved goodbye to their monthly “med checks” with psychiatrists. They have sought help from a growing number of sources that did not build their foundation on the pharmaceutical industry.

All this was taking place behind my back!

I had no idea. For the years my daughter and I trekked through the mental healthcare system looking for help, she continued to do “alternative” treatments. But, we didn’t talk about them. They were not discussed during the intake interviews she did at the numerous treatment centers she lived. Maybe we considered these forays into the alternative healthcare world somewhat desperate. The attempts to contain or regulate the growing anxiety my daughter was experiencing seemed futile in the face of the quick pill. Eventually, benzodiazepines took over.

Along the way there had been Sister Dorothy, a retired nun who did kinesiology in the living room of her senior citizen residence. My daughter visualized a safe place and from there plummeted into the depths of her low self-esteem. Sister Dorothy was kind and held my daughter’s heart like a prized treasure while my daughter mined her sadness.

Maria did cranial-sacral work in the front room of her South Minneapolis home. Her kids’ toys toed the line in a jumble at the threshold. “She will need more,” Maria said as we jumped on our bikes. Later Maria said that she couldn’t find the pulse after she had spent minutes in silence holding my daughter’s ankles. “Maybe it was just weak…”

My daughter did therapy with toys when she was little. I drove the long haul up the coast from Miami where we lived then to an office building on the outskirts of Ft. Lauderdale once a week. My little sun-bleached daughter came out of the sessions and we would cross the street to a family-friendly restaurant and, with her little brother bouncing around between us, I’d watch the first exercise of compartmentalization take place as my daughter put away the previous hour and got to the business of being a five year old in a restaurant.

Therapists and vitamins. Fish oil and exercise. No drinking alcohol and curfews. No TV. Books, art and family meals.

My daughter saw pediatric neurologists and psychics. She believed in fairies and we lit candles to call good energy into our home.

We had our feet straddling both “worlds”.

But, the moment my daughter stepped onto the slippery slope of pharmaceutical medicine, she rapidly slipped away from the happy teen that she was trying so eagerly to be and fell headlong into emotional management. Paxil was the first mistake…

We spent years following the script the pharmaceutical companies have written for people like my daughter and the families who love them. NAMI and the other organizations who purport to be the kind guides into the tragic world of a mental health crisis turned out to be nothing more than puppets of psychiatrists and psychiatric drug manufacturers.

We searched the country high and low for relief. She got worse. More drugs were added to the mix. She was miserable. She wanted to live in a shack by the ocean and drink herself to death. She wanted to run away from herself and start fresh.

And, that is what she did. I was mortified. She can’t live on her own! She quit all the drugs! What is she thinking!

My daughter moved to New York City. The rhythm of the city suited her.

The years of trying various alternative methods opened one last door for my daughter.

She was struggling. She was, no doubt, in withdrawal from all the drugs she was on when she fled the last treatment center. (Against the Grain, July 21, 2010)  I was receiving daily, \terrifying phone calls from taxi cabs, from stairwells, from the fetal position wrapped in her bedclothes – my daughter was always sobbing, in pain with her mind unanchored.

A friend of mine made good on a promise she had made twenty-two years earlier to help my daughter. She introduced my daughter to Michael, a healer from Israel, with whom my friend had worked for nearly twenty years. My daughter had been in New York for almost six months by the time my friend tracked her down.

She was hurtling through life, determined but broken, the mental distress veering in too close, too often. I was worried and in an email to my friend wrote, “If only her mind would calm down and give her some peace.” My daughter agreed to the meeting and my friend picked her up in Brooklyn and for four consecutive days delivered her to Michael’s door.

My daughter is tired of talking. Michael’s method is hard work but it is not analytical. He doesn’t coax painful memories to the light of day to be dissected. Rather, by releasing pent up energy and moving it to let go of old pain, he heals. It is like interactive psychotherapy without the words. It requires my daughter to be brutally honest about herself and wide open with trust.

My daughter entered this partnership with Michael, unfolded the map that lead to his door, and they went to work.

After her second session, my daughter climbed into my friend’s car. They sat in companionable silence.

After a couple of minutes my daughter said into the quiet, “I have never felt this before. This must be what peace feels like.”

That was almost a year ago. She continues to work with Michael. She just got back from traveling to Australia for a photo shoot. She is far from out of the woods. She is still addicted to benzodiazepines and has frightening mood swings.

But, she is in many ways just like any other twenty-five year old.

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John Breeding, PhD is a psychologist, counselor, educator, and activists. From his website:

Providing services and resources for individuals, couples, families and groups on personal growth, human transformation, parenting, working with young people, and liberation from psychiatric oppression.

Thank you, Susan, the writer of A Journey,  for sending this to me.

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I am waiting. The last time I spoke with my daughter was via text messages and she wasn’t doing well. The texts ended with “I am an awful person”. She is stuck in the black and white thinking that has plagued her for so much of her life.

I assured her that these feelings will pass. I didn’t inquired into the other distressing issues she texted about. Body weight and proportion, OCD attacks and relationship problems.

She is back in the States but she hasn’t returned to New York City.

The photo shoot in Australia went well. She felt that she did a good job and was happy to be paid.

I am proud of her. Really, I’m astonished. How did she do this?! Amazing. I know that this trip was good for her in that she overcame fears and created new experiences that confirmed her abilities. Yet, I know that it took a huge toll. Bippidee has told me, holding the mask up for any length of time is exhausting.

A comment turned up today on a post that I made on July 18, 2010, Vicious Circle.  It is from someone looking desperately for help. Thirty years old and struggling, she/he sent out a plea.

http://services.abcxue.com/can-someone-define-the-treatment-i-should-be-gettin-so-i-know-what-help-to-ask-the-mental-health-services-for.html/comment-page-1#comment-33485

I see my daughter in her shoes but my daughter doesn’t have the self-awareness to even write a post like this. She feels like a victim each time her world becomes unglued.

How do I help? Maybe by doing nothing. I just don’t know. She is holed up in a hotel room in California, unable to get dressed, probably self-medicating and hating herself. She has alienated her new boyfriend and scared herself with the recent discovery of a prolonged dissociative state when she was in her teens.

I am home in Minnesota going through the motions of my life. Many of us realize when we have friends and loved-ones who wrestle with mental health issues, that there is no point in needless worry but it is impossible not to.

My mind circles safety issues. Has the boyfriend abandoned her? I haven’t met him and can’t gage his understanding of my daughter’s behavior. How is she self-medicating? Is she inflicting self-injury? She was just paid so I know she has money, but that isn’t always a good thing.

ARGHH. Is it even possible not to care as much as I do?

I am going to play with the dogs, go for a canoe ride (yes, the three dogs will come along) and try to shine light into my daughter’s life by thinking positive thoughts and holding the image of my recovering, beloved daughter close to my heart.

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When I started writing this blog in April, I had no idea where it would lead me. At that time, I wanted to publish a book that I had just completed and it had been suggested, repeatedly, that my topic, the search for help for my “mentally ill” daughter through treatment centers, psychiatrists offices, psych hospitals and emergency rooms throughout this country, was not going to pull in many readers. It didn’t have a good ending. The drama/chaos was unrelenting. Was it believable? The most unusual admonishment came from an agent who worried that my daughter would be hurt when she “got better” (back on the psych drugs) and realized what I had done to her.

I did some research and added to my agent letter this line: The book looks at the mental healthcare industry’s practices and treatments that often fail to help the nearly 58 million people who, according to the National Institute of Mental Illness, suffer from a diagnosable disorder in a given year in the US.

I knew that whenever I mentioned my book, it opened a floodgate in nearly everyone; few people in this country are not affected in some way by “mental illness”. Either a friend or family member has been depressed or anxious and they wanted to tell me about it. “My friend has something, I am sure of it.” “My son dropped out of his freshman year of college.” Suddenly, because I was willing to talk about “it”, I was an authority.

I started writing the blog feeling like a sham. I wondered who was I to use this internet platform to gather a following. I do not have a degree or a shingle to hang at my door.  This became uncomfortably obvious when an agent asked me the following series of questions:

Do I have a blog?

Do I write a weekly column on this subject for a newspaper?

Do I appear regularly on television discussing the topic of the book?

Have I published articles for journals pertaining to the topic?

No. No. No. I eked my responses in a smaller and smaller voice. My plummeting mid-western self-esteem finally forced me to admit that I was just a mom. A housewife with some good books at my disposal and a struggling daughter. I have held many jobs, run businesses, been respected in other fields, but this was my first book. This was met with silence. I could see this agent in his high-rise NYC office building looking down on poor, pitiful, unaccomplished me with a sad, upsetting story to tell.

It wasn’t long before I realized that I do have something to say. My book is a written account by a care-taker who for twenty-five years has been in the trenches. This credentialed me more than any of the doctors who spent fifteen minutes with my daughter and with professional confidence handed down yet one more devastating diagnosis.

Over the years I have acquired an insider’s knowledge of the grim world of the “mentally ill” but I have an outsider’s mind. I have been in lockstep with my daughter using trial and error and an unfathomable amount of endurance to try to find her some peace.

And I know. I know what the inside of a psych ward looks like and I know how the nurses size up their patients. I know how an emergency room doctor disdains a drunk young woman with a self-inflicted injury. I know how the staff of a renown psychiatric hospital deals with a vulnerable young adult and I would like to slap them down. I wrote the book fueled by this knowledge.

And, what I know now, that I didn’t when I started writing, is that the system that I had entrusted my daughter to is broken and was built on faulty information. It is a money-grubbing, high-stakes gambler with too many innocent peoples’ lives on the line.

So, I am happy that I didn’t find a sympathetic agent at the beginning of the year. I kept thinking all that needed to happen was that my manuscript land on the “right desk” of someone willing to admit publicly that my book’s topic was worth sticking one’s neck out for.

I used to think that the failure that I ended the book on was entirely my daughter’s. We were told enough times that she was treatment resistant, I started to believe it.

The book ended on a sad note. I realized that I could only save myself. I prepared for more sadness.

I started blogging a few months after finishing the book and a remarkable story began to unfold. I discovered tales of survival and recovery – without  drugs and, more importantly, without the support of the medical model I had come to believe it. A dam broke when I read Robert Whitaker’s book.

I now put parenthesis around the words “mentally ill” because I am convinced that that language encourages the stigma that is attached to people suffering with mental problems. It is very different to have an illness than to have a problem. I am revising my descriptions of what my daughter experiences.

The best part of this story is that I realized that my daughter, too, had intuitively saved her life by rejecting the system. She stepped away and I slowly followed.

In my last post, I praised the work of Gianna Kali at Beyond Meds and I should mention that there have been many more bloggers who have helped me unlock the mystery that hung over the original manuscript. Susan at A Journey, Darlene at Emerging from Broken, Stephany at Soulful Sepulcher, to  name just a few. I have also learned from the people dealing daily with mental issues who take the time to answer my questions and show me how they negotiate their lives – Bippidee, Sandy, Karen, Amanda, and Susan among others. And the mothers and fathers who share their stories – Barbara, Anna, Renee, Rossa, Heather’s mom, Victoria, Sallyo, Kris, Bristolvol, Rose. My blogroll is full of heart-wrenching tragedies and unbridled triumphant successes. Thank you ALL for sharing your stories.

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I am with Rossa Forbes at Holistic Recovery from Schizophrenia! A standing ovation for  Gianna Kali the writer of Beyond Meds who feeds me my daily dose of vital heath news from around the world. I admire her for her hard work because it is comprehensive and quirky, right on the money and out there enough to get me thinking. All the while she feeding our curiosity, she is recovering from benzodiazepine withdrawal. This part of her story is astonishing.

I have been looking more closely at how difficult it is to withdraw from benzodiazepines because my daughter is thinking about doing it. My daughter was prescribed her first Klonopin about five years ago and the addiction was in full swing within a month. These are nasty drugs that hook you quickly because they work immediately. I have seen my daughter take handfuls at a time. Her tolerance has been so high, it frightens me.

The following symptoms may emerge during gradual dosage reduction but can usually be reduced in intensity or eliminated altogether by reducing the rate of reduction:

Anxiety, terror and panic attacks, agitation  -  the reasons she was put on benzodiazepines in the first place.

Impaired concentration, nightmares, insomnia  - she uses benzos to get to sleep.

Aches and pains, flu-like symptoms, chest pain – already constants in her life.

Hot and cold flashes and headaches, stiffness, fatigue and weakness, paranoia, hallucinations, depression, suicidal ideation, depersonalization, stiffness, loss of appetite or weight gain, OCD, mood swings, indecision…

This list goes on and on.

Beyond Meds is beyond belief and Gainna you are amazing. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and proving to your readers that perseverance pays off. I know that you are in the middle of this difficult battle to clear your system of the benzodiazepines and I thank you, thank you, thank you for getting up each day and cracking the doors on this very confusing world of corrupt pharmaceutical companies, compassionate spiritual leaders, alternative recovery and healing, writers like Robert Whitaker, the connection between Big Pharma and Government, how to twitter, etc..

Check out the search box on the right side of Beyond Meds blog. I have been thinking about the genetics question. What role do genetics play in the diagnosis of a mental illness? I ran across Jay Joseph and sure enough, Beyond Meds has his book The Gene Illusion featured on May 26th if this year.

Clinical psychologist Jay Joseph details medical science’s 30-year failed quest to find any link between genetics and diagnoses of mental disorders, and debunks widely held beliefs in the psychiatric profession, including the idea of ‘genetic predispositions’ for mental illness. Jay Joseph is the auhor of The Missing Gene: Psychiatry, Heredity, and the Fruitless Search for Genes and The Gene Illusion: Genetic Research in Psychiatry and Psychology Under the Microscope.

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