“Alex, you have to tell somebody at work, you need to get
some support because we’re not going to be able to do this alone…” Angie held
her husband’s trembling hands. They have been talking about his recent
diagnosis with BiPolar Disorder and a recent PTSD episode that landed Alex
Gilbert in the hospital for almost a week. He has been home for two weeks,
still recovering but it was time to get back to work. Angie was trying to build
his confidence, she was doing her best, “Alex, just talk to Jerry, you know he
will understand, he will help you, I know he will! Remember how he helped
Walter, when he had cancer?”
“That was cancer, that’s different.” Alex let his tears drip
slowly and hung his head, “Angie, this is a mental illness, this is crazy man,
the lunatic who goes nuts with an Ooze at lunch on Thursday!”
“No, you’re not like that, you have a legitimate condition,
you has a post traumatic episode baby…that was hard, harder than most people
can fathom! Alex, you lost your child, your 17 year old girl…that’s the worst
kind of pain, baby.”
“I get six weeks, that’s all the law allows…” Alex was
talking about The Family Medical Leave Act, but his real fear was for the
future, “I’m not ready, I’ll fall apart I’ll flip out…no, I don’t know…” Alex
buried his face into a rushing pool of tears, “I’m just useless, I’m
worthless!”
“No, baby, no…” the
loving wife comforts her crippled husband until the medications he’s taking
lull him to sleep again. This is the story of Alex Gilbert, he is at very least
the one of every two adult Americans who will suffer a serious struggle with an
episode of mental illness according to a recent report by The Center for
Disease Control. If Alex is lucky his episode will pass, he will have a full
recovery and his life will resume a reasonable and normal reality. However, for
Alex and too many other Americans, it’s not so fortune because in that same CDC
report (July, 2013), it’s stated that one in every four adult Americans suffer
from a chronic mental illness, the type of disease that will not go away,
cannot be cured and only very carefully managed. That’s basically 25% of our
population and yet, oddly enough, the stigma and discrimination against persons
with mental disabilities has become worse over the past quarter century. This
is a staggering thought when you ponder it a moment, it’s much like the
AIDS/HIV stigma, the Gay stigma…or even, perhaps, the “negro-black-anything
ethnic other than white” stigma. It’s that bad. Alex Gilbert will be a lucky
one, he will talk to his boss and the very progressive high tech company he
works for will indeed help Alex manage his illness. However, Alex also becomes
the 1 in 4 persons afflicted with a chronic mental illness and as much as his
wife Angie loves him, she cannot hold to their relationship. Life goes on,
Angie’s last words the day she moved out, “Life goes on, you’ll see and you
will get better too…but I need to look out for me now.”
That’s the way it goes,
except sometimes, it goes the other way too. Like my fictional friend Alex
Gilberts, I really do suffer from several serious mental illnesses as well as
had a very similar PTSD episode over the loss of a child. I discuss my trials
and tribulations in my new book “My BiPolar Reality; How Life Goes On…” and
this is not what today’s article is about, it’s not about me or some other poor
individual dealing with these complex and challenging issues. This article is
about YOU, the other 3 of the 4 that is NOT suffering with an invisible disease
like mental illness. The intention and point I’d like to make to for you to
please consider and then perhaps re-consider several more times, what it might
be like to be crippled inside like people like me are, when you have no control
over what your thoughts or emotions are doing, it’s being incontinent of the
mind, except instead of wetting your pants, you’re pissing people off (but you can’t
somehow seem to help it)! But that’s not your problem, it’s ours to manage and
deal with, what you should pay attention to is how you perceive and interact
with those of us who are struggling with this affliction. Some of us, many of
us, are sensitive people with sometime fragile feelings. Words can hurt
certainly, but so can those looks you might glance our way. I hate when people
steer clear of me, as if they might catch my moment of madness. If I had no use
of my legs and I hobbled along, would you look at me the same way? How about if
I had diabetes and experiencing a moment of low blood sugar, you’d probably
have a more empathetic reaction. If we were blind, we get help crossing the
street but when we’re crippled inside, when our disease, our disorder, our
wounds are on the inside, they are all but invisible. I’ve even had a relative
simply tell me, “It’s all in your head!” and he could not have been exactly
more right!
While you’re pondering
that notion, here’s something else you might also consider and it’s something
that relates directly to YOUR well-being. We all place a lot of trust and
guidance in the medical arts and science and with good reason (most of the
time), could we agree on this as being a base element? If so, then it’s
perfectly logical that an individual will visit their primary doctor once a
year for a check-up and most people don’t mind doing that too much if they’re
in good health. Sometimes, when our doctors finds something not normal in our
blood tests, perhaps something related to our digestive system or cardiovascular
system, we’ll see other doctors who will, hopefully, help us avoid the grim
reaper. If, heaven forbid you are like our daughter, she was diagnosed as a
Type-1 diabetic when she was 4 years old, you learn to manage and survive on an
insulin dependent management plan. People understand that too, they accept it. All
seriousness aside, if you randomly ask somebody, what’s the worst doctor to
see, more often they say it’s the dentist. Yet, when your teeth hurt, when it’s
got to be dealt with, we all deal with it and everybody seems to pretty much
accept it for whatever it is, right? People understand that too, they empathize
(and sometimes ask for your pain pills too)!
Why then is it, when it
comes to perhaps the most important organ of all, our brain, we’re so deathly
afraid of it that we blame the poor dentist and not the psychiatric/neurological
systems? It’s said, it might even be fact, but the brain control almost
everything at some level doesn’t it? It processes all this information, it
creates electrical impulses which keep the heart beating and we can transplant
the heart; have we done that with a brain yet? It’s still too complex to
understand how and why the brain is able to function in the multitude of ways
it does, but miracle of life and all that, it does what it does and sometimes,
like any other organ in the human body, there can be some sort of dysfunction. There
are so many active systems in the brain too, it’s a virtual matrix of all the human
bodies every function. There is a series of chemical components, they have
effects like very specific types of drugs which create a response in another
part of the brain. A very complex network of synapses of electrical impulses, triggering
and transmitting information faster than light with data immeasurable to our
abilities. The organization of the brain is not one lump mass of matter, there
are several different zones which control specific activities of the body which
is all tied together by a glandular system supported with a cardio vascular and
oxygen based energy source and probably more elements we’re not even aware of
yet. We’re still only talking about the brain too, one has to go even further
to explore what exactly the mind is and how that might possibly work. I think,
however, you get the gist of this paragraph; the brain is indeed a complex and
still relatively unknown area of medicine and the probability that something,
somewhere or somehow, was damaged or is not properly working inside this
massive matrix mounted on top of our necks, is most certainly plausible.
I don’t mean to diverge
so much into the basic science of things, I’m hardly a scientist, in fact, if
anything, I have been the guinea pig in the story. I could cite many famous and
highly successful people with mental illness if that would make you feel
better, but I’d rather you look around you, in your circle at work, your group
of friends, your family…think about that fact…the CDC reports 1 in 4 adults
suffer from a chronic mental illness…and ask yourself, truthfully…who is it or
could it possibly be you? Then please, let the next thought be, do they need
help? In a perfect world we’d all be able to deal with people in the middle of
a psychotic episode, in that same perfect world we could be one another’s
therapists always helping each other work out those complex feelings we each
feel throughout life, but this is not a perfect world like that…sometimes we
need to leave some things to the professionals. Sometimes the best thing we can
do, as hard as it is, is leave too. Ultimately what it is, this Life is a
crazy, mixed-up and confusing place, it’s easy to lose your way, so when you
know somebody who has trouble dealing with Life, cut them slack (cause that
could easily be you)!
In conclusion, although
I hope I’ve perhaps made you think or smile a bit, I’m most interested in
hearing about the struggles of others too. I know my path has not been easy, it’s
been a hard row to hoe, I wrote a bloody book about it and yet, still, now…I’m
still there, like maybe you or one of your friends…Life Goes On and if there’s
anything we can do for each other, is try to act like it’s that perfect world
where we’re there for each other, somehow, someway, we’re all here for each
other because that is the true nature of Life on Planet Earth.
Take care & be well,
d’Philip
Chalmers
11
November 2014
The
San Joaquin Valley
The
California Republic
