Borderline Families

On September 20, 2010, Craig Garner posted an article on the Huffington Post about the debilitating effect “mental illness” has on a family.

Just a few short months ago, I would have read article this nodding my head in agreement. Mr. Garner brings up guilt, embarrassment, confusion, anger, resentment, fear, and frustration.

“Assisting a friend or family member who has been diagnosed with a mental illness can be a time consuming, heartbreaking, and often thankless task,” Mr. Garner writes.

It is not that Mr. Garner hasn’t done his homework. He surely has read enough to know that what he is referring to as “mental illness” does not exist. Yet, he spouts what has been fed to him by the psychiatric community.

I blindly trusted the industry, too, that is until I did some research.

The thing that irritates me the most about Mr. Garner is he has specialized in healthcare related issues his entire professional life, as a lawyer and administrator and author of books designed to help families negotiate through the health care system in this country.

The fraud of the psychiatric industry is laid out in black and white in newspaper articles decrying the use of off-label pharmaceutical on children, in books like Robert Whitaker’s, Anatomy of an Epidemic, in Senator Grassley’s questioning of the ghost-writing of medical literature. Daily there are new allegations against Big Pharma. There is evidence of a scandal ready to erupt. But, it is too big for you, Mr. Garner, right? So, toe the line and feed the “party line” to the masses.

Prove an “illness” Mr. Garner. Then you get to write an article on how we should be dealing with our “afflicted” loved-ones.

Mr. Garner writes, “If you are dealing with a family member who has been diagnosed with a psychiatric condition, it is of utmost importance that you understand and accept the fact that your loved one’s condition is an illness, no different than if he or she had an issue with the lungs, heart, or stomach.”

There doesn’t exist such a thing as a “chemical imbalance”, Mr. Garner.

Therefore, there doesn’t exist an “illness” to point your finger at. This was hard to believe and was probably the most distressing piece of information for me to accept as I began to uncover the industry’s fraud. It meant that I had trusted doctors who had lied to me. The “chemical imbalance” was what had kept us in the game – the search for the “equalizer”.

As Robert Whitaker writes in the chapter entitled The Hunt for Chemical Imbalances in his recent book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, “From a scientific point of view, it is apparent today that the chemical imbalance hypothesis was always wobbly in kind, and many scientists who watched its rise and fall have looked back on it with a bit of embarrassment.”

The psychiatrists wanted the magic bullet that would set them up as “real” doctors. Doctors in internal medicine had their antibiotics and psychiatrists wanted to have their “anti-disease” pills, too.

With a blind eye to science and clever marketing, they succeeded.

The sanctioned drugging by the government and the over-prescribing by our trusted professionals in the field of psychiatry was also a hard pill for me to swallow. Robert Whitaker exposes the fact that the cure-all the psychiatric industry foists on the unsuspecting vulnerable in our society is in fact today’s equivalent of snake oil.

Yes, I am guilty but not for what Mr. Garner claims I should be – that I let the “situation get out of control”. No, I am guilty because I trusted the diagnoses that psychiatrists throughout the US handed down to my daughter. I am guilty because I didn’t investigate further as diagnoses were layered on and the drug treatments were established and abandoned and added to and, finally, in frustration my daughter was deemed “treatment resistant”. Like Mr. Garner, I didn’t question the authority of the psychiatric industry sooner and I am guilty that I threw my daughter into their system. (Mr. Garner, are you listening? It is NOW time to ask some questions.)

My embarrassment stems from the industry’s labeling of my daughter which we all, as a family, carried like a heavy cloak of shame. The industry’s mouth pieces – psychiatrists, therapists, NAMI taught us the language to use to describe my daughter’s “condition”. The social stigma is maintained by their use of language.

I still remember uttering the words, “My daughter is struggling with “mental illness” and my heart breaks with the same pain it did the first time I felt those words leave my mouth.

Mr. Garner, read your piece with fresh eyes- ones that don’t see “illness” and “disease” but differences. Try to shift to my perspective and listen to your damning language.

The confusion that Mr. Garner speaks of is real and pervasive in the psychiatric community. Loved ones are told to trust in the professionals and not get too wrapped up in the why’s and how’s. Just encourage the “patient” to take their meds… (NAMI’s solid contribution in this effort is to have in their literature a plea to families to ignore their loved-ones’ assertions that the drugs are not working. Encourage the “patient” to follow the doctor’s orders.)

My husband and I were sitting in a frigid gymnasium at the Menniger Clinic a couple of years ago. This is what I wrote (BEFORE I BECAME AN ANTI-PSYCHIATRY ADVOCATE!):

The inability of The Menninger Clinic to explain their philosophy for treatment was dumbfounding. It was as if they created this layered confused recital so that we thought that they were so damn intelligent that we would defer without question. Did they want us to believe that their program was so developed and intricate that the layperson was unable to grasp the concepts?

For two days staff members stood before us wringing their hands commiserating over our difficult situations. Then each commenced on a well rehearsed speech describing various aspects of their treatment philosophy. The specialized language and convoluted blather left most couples writing notes to one another or sitting on the edge of the plastic seats, trying to stay warm and attentive. I wondered whether their techniques were so cutting edge that it was hard to nail down the complexities or was it simply that the thesis had been lost in psychobabble. I think that the reputation of The Menninger Clinic was a towering house of cards. If we all exhaled at the same time, it would have crumbled.

Mr. Garner believes that parents of loved ones who are “shunning responsibilities or looking for attention” should be angry and that it is a “common” reaction to believe that “he or she is not really sick”. The industry shackled my daughter with labels and presuppositions on how she should act. Now, Mr. Garner establishes that people suffering with mental distress are “sick” and should therefore be cut some slack.

No, I say, treat the person dealing with mental health issues as you would anyone else. Walking on eggshells perpetuates the myth that they are “sick” and cannot handle life.

Mr. Garner also missed the mark when he wrote that the family experiences fear after a loved one is diagnosed with “mental illness”. He guesses that this is because they are wondering if they are susceptible to the “illness” as well. The thought, “Where is it going to strike again?!” NEVER crossed my mind. My fear was for my daughter as I watched her get worse and worse on the drugs that every doctor we came into contact with claimed would make her better.

Mr. Garner supports the psychiatric industry with articles like this. He creates the chronic aspect of “illness” that the industry fosters and with that, the future unfolds with endless years tethered to the “patient”. Disguised as a self-help, sympathetic guide to sorting out the rough terrain of “mental illness”, Mr. Garner encourages the loved ones of people with mental health issues to bow down in the face of “illness”.

Our daughter lost years of her life before we realized that the industry is a sham.

The people I have met since turning my back on psychiatry lost their faith in the system long before us and are healing at a rate that would blow the socks off any of the industry’s “scientific” studies.

How are people once deemed “mentally ill” healing themselves? Diet, exercise, and a healthy dose of relief at having shed the labels and stigma of the “disease” they were once told would be with them for life.

Mr. Garner, I assume that you know about this fiction you have put the seal of approval on because of your reputation and education. Any good journalist has heard whispers of this fraud but few have the guts to scratch the surface. So you, in your capacity as a healthcare provider, are just one of many who perpetuate the hoax of the psychiatric industry. Is it the money?  Job security?

I warn you; you are doing harm by not exposing the facts.

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The University of Minnesota is offering the following course in their Continuing Education Program:

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I wrote a book with the language that the psychiatric industry fed to me. All familiar words, it’s just the configuration was special to the industry. I learned how how the “professionals” strung them together to deliver the punch they needed to convey “illness”.

“Liable, depressed, manic, dysregulated, etc.” – I used these words in anger and fear. As in, “Now they say she is so “dysregulated” that they might not be able to keep her.”  Other times, I whispered them in confidence, “My daughter is “mentally ill”.  These words were so heavy on my tongue that they barely made it out of my throat.

Every single time that I uttered these words, my heart took a hit.

Now when I read them or hear them, it stops me dead in my tracks.

Yesterday while I was walking the dogs, I was listening to Jonathan Franzen’s new book, Freedom. One of the characters was in a disgustingly filthy apartment in Chicago which the author described as “smelling like mental illness”.

“What!?” I shrieked and stopped short, startling the dogs.

This from someone who Time Magazine calls a Great American Novelist.

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I blocked my daughter from my life last January and didn’t speak to her until May.

After a particularly difficult experience with my daughter in the first week of January, (Hitting the Wall, May 18, 2010) I decided that I could no longer be the linchpin. I believed that I continued to see a spark of life that was too bright to extinguish; she would be okay with out me. I stepped away. My husband, her step-father, took over the day-to-day communication.

I did this for two reasons. First, I felt like I was dying of emotional exhaustion. I was broken into too many pieces to successfully be glue back together. I had to heal by re-growing, by re-establishing the me inside. It was very hard and hurt very much.

The second reason that I refused to have any contact with my daughter was because I truly believed that it would be better for her. I thought that the spark of self-determination that she needed to mature was constantly getting put out by me swooping in to help.

I never came to her unbidden. Sobbing into the phone while walking across the bridge back to Manhattan, keys to her apartment lost, hungover and scared – I didn’t come. I came after the the quiet calls. The ones where her voice was barely audible and sadness seeped into the phone lines making it almost unbearable to hold the phone to my ear. Still, I always waited for her to ask for help.

What I didn’t know then, was that my daughter was suffering with withdrawal from the psych drugs that she abruptly went off of seven-eight-nine months before. I thought at that time that she was experiencing an overflow of “mental illness”. She had headaches so severe that she cried out in pain, dizziness, and mood swings that knocked her out of any social gathering she tried to attend. She had insomnia but when she drank enough to sleep, she was plagued with horrendous nightmares. Her stomach was in an uproar; nothing she ate stayed put. She couldn’t concentrate and lost time in dissociated states.

During those months last fall, I got too many quiet calls. Her world seemed to be crumbling and I went scrambling to save her.

No parent should have to discuss suicide with their child. (Where is God?, July 5th, 2010) But, I told her on these visits that I understood. I did. The pain was just too much. Months of it. Endless rage and sorrow.

All the while I kept searching for help.

After I bowed out in January, my daughter would go for long stretches without calling my husband (she calls him “Dad”). There would be a flurry of calls concerning money once or twice a month. But, the emotional crises seemed to tapered off.

If you do go back and read these old posts, you will see that they are written in a language which I have abandoned – the labels and descriptions presented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, devised by the psychiatric industry. The posts were written when I was firmly entrenched in the psychiatry-driven mental healthcare model. I believed that the professionals were going to deliver a cure. During all those crises, I still believed that my daughter would find relief by taking some combination of psych drugs and finding a sympathetic psychiatrist who would set her on the “right” path.

At the end of May, I was reading Susan Smith blog, A Journey, Gianna Kali’s Beyond Meds and had just bought Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic.  My world was about to change significantly.

My daughter called on May 23rd and needed to talk with me. Only me. She was not okay and she needed me. And, there I was, back in it her life in a blink of an eye. On the flight to New York I wrote a post, In Flight to New York, May 25, 2010.

What unfolded was tragic but she and I were different this time. I had been reading about the concept of the neuroplasticity of the brain. I was able to see the benefits of months without me being involved in her life. She had definitely built a life with friends. She had had occasional work as a model or art director and despite being too jangled to answer it, her phone (once we replaced it) rang and rang.

So, what happened? Was all that hard work at making a life dashed by a fit of uncontrollable anger and anxiety? I want to believe that she can build on what what she has worked so hard to achieve. But, like in May, it seems so dire. It looks hopeless.

Cutting off contact works until it doesn’t. Then what?

There is the subconscious understanding that my daughter is not autonomous. We support her. All expenditures above a certain limit have to be discussed. She doesn’t handle bill paying or grocery shopping. We pay for everything, including the food she orders in or eats out. She is an adult with limitations. But, she is intelligent and capable on so many other fronts. How do you reconcile who she is on paper to whom you might meet in the street?

I have food shopped with her hundreds of times. She says she can’t do it on her own because she feels scrutinized (People passing her are wondering why she has yogurt in her cart? Doesn’t she know it causes cellulite? Really? I eat it all the time and I don’t have much. My daughter rolled her eyes when we had this exchange.) She says that she is unable to think of combinations of food and ends up buying mac and cheese in a box. She and I have budgeted and attempted to work on money issues. It never works.

My daughter has a roundtrip ticket. She is supposed to return to Minnesota in a couple of weeks. I told her she could stay in New York if she finds an apartment or come back at anytime during the next two weeks if she needs to.

McKenzie’s theory of separating the person from the triggers makes some sense. For a couple of months at the beginning of the year, I would have bought his approach completely. Except what do you do when the person doesn’t want the separation anymore?  What do you do when they seek attention? Beg for help?

The triggering aspects of my daughter’s room seemed to go away after I painted it and we rearranged the furniture. Maybe I am only a trigger sometimes?

Maybe this is a dance we just have to perform. We’ll provide aid while keeping our attention on her off-center.  We’ll keep the money flowing discretely until.. We will be there and not there all at the same time. We’ll show less emotion but not too little to rouse anger. We’ll do what we are doing but with even more awareness.

I remember when I first got pregnant and was given Dr. Benjamin Spock‘s book The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. All the answers were right there at my finger tips. I just had to know what the question was.

Now I have a million questions and no book of answers.

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I am too destroyed to respond to any comments, but I am pleased that McKenzie’s ideas are being given some attention.

Sometimes I think pieces of approaches might work. Other times, I think nothing will. Absolutely nothing.

McKenzie’s Low Expressed Emotion gets me into trouble. When I dial down my emotions, my daughter’s ratchet up. Things get broken. She says that she doesn’t understand when people go quiet in the face of her chaos. She says her boyfriend does the same thing. I said it intuitively feels like if you give less emotion, you will receive less back. She thinks it makes her look “crazier” than she is.

A couple of days ago she asked why people want to leave the room when she is “like this”. Why don’t they stay and talk with her? I told her that I don’t want to feed into her already anxious mood and that I am afraid of saying the wrong thing, which I invariably do and set off another cascade of anger. I ducked when she threw something at me and then I left the room. She was screaming at me to get out, so I did. “Right, leave me. Like everyone. Thanks mom.”

I am worn-out by absorbing the emotional upheaval around here. My daughter’s improvement since returning home at the beginning of August dwindled to nothing and into negative territory during the last couple of days.

I was away overnight on Sunday and Monday and she fell apart.

She insists it is my fault.

I abandoned her. Other things came into play. Lost phone, smashed computer, the surgery. But, basically, she became unhinged. I am not so naive to actually believe that I am the cause. Too many episodes exactly like the one we went through during the last couple of days have taught me that this is her way of coping. Blame someone else for whatever goes wrong. This way, the hatred she has for herself is mitigated. She demolishes her computer because I left her. Somehow this makes sense to her.

We got back late Monday night, arriving home on pins and needles after numerous threatening calls declaring what she was going to do to the house and herself. She insisted that she had to get out of Minneapolis.

NOW! NOW! NOW!

“YES! YES! YES!” I said and got her a flight, a throw-away phone and, like I do when I go to New York, I held up the edges of her world while she tried to pull herself together.

For three years, I traveled the country with my daughter looking for help. I’d drop her off at a residential treatment facility or hospital and try to get out of town the same day. But, it rarely worked and I’d end up having to stay in a low-budget motel, relying on my cell phone to wake me up in the dark early morning hours in order to get the first flight home.

When my cell went off this morning at 4 AM in my safe bedroom, I felt the same desperateness that the twang-y ring of the alarm always sends through me. The thought enters my mind that I have to change the ring tone. It reminds me of a terrible time in my life. But then, I get up and on with it, forgetting to change it until the next time it goes off and rings in another day. Hopeless and sad.

Today, the sound of the alarm felt like a warning.

I woke up my daughter. Everything went downhill from there.

Amazingly, she did make the plane. I paid for curbside check-in and got her a wheelchair escort. We barely made eye contact as she grabbed her carry-on from me and settled her air-cast onto the footrest. The previous two hours had been so bad, no one could possible understand. No one. I am sure.

I am exhausted. I am mad at myself for not being able to rise above the mess and guide my daughter. This morning was just too much.

I sobbed in the car on the way home. Open-mouthed wailing. Tears streaming down my face so that I nearly rear-ended a car on the rain-slicked road in front of me. I don’t know what I cried for. All the loss. All the sadness. All the pain. All the undoing of good and the flooding in again of bad. If only I could take away her fear and anxiety. As she stood beating on herself this morning, I just wanted to gather her up and absorb the rage.

I used to cry for the things that couldn’t be. For the hopes that every mom has for her daughter. The mental healthcare professionals dashed those hopes early on by telling me that she would be medicate and have to live in a residential facility for the rest of her life. But, then, she broke free and started to build something. Maybe I harbored too much hope? Expected too much? I don’t know; I realize my daughter’s future is undefined in my mind.

I can’t really do anything for my her. She is on her own.

I am sitting in my very quiet house surrounded by my dogs and I think I know that she will be okay. Not just because I want her to be, but because she has risen up out of the ashes so many other times. I trust she will again this time.

Yesterday my daughter said that the only time she is ever “happy” is when she is drunk and pretending to be.

I don’t know what to do with this information.

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