They just make me ... me

This is a second guest post from Patch, who previously wrote for us just under a year ago.

I've never been shy about talking about my health issues. As far as I'm concerned, they're a huge part of my life and a big contributor to the person I am today. My illnesses don't make me any less deserving of love, friendship, or snarky comments. They just make me... me.

As many who know me will know, I suffer from a multitude of mental disorders. Chronic major depressive disorder [severe]; severe generalized anxiety disorder; gender identity disorder; body dysmorphic disorder; borderline personality disorder; and eating disorder [anorexia nervosa restrictive subtype]. In other words, I have played brain bingo and won a full house. I have completed my mental health pokedex. And y'know what? I'm fine with that. For me, there is absolutely no shame in having these illnesses, or in accepting my various diagnoses. They're part of me, part of my history, and most importantly, part of my future.

My illnesses are, in my eyes, a disability. They can, on bad days, severely impact my day-to-day functioning. Even on good days they don't fade. I was first treated for them approximately 5 years previously, although symptoms were present as far back as 14 years ago. In my treatment I have spent several months in a psychiatric unit, nearly died several times, and scarred my body both internally and externally. I've taken medication whose names I can't pronounce, and whose side effects don't bare talking about. I've lost friends, lost years, and lost confidence. But i've gained a whole lot more.

In my darkest days, my friends and family never gave up on me. I've had amazing teachers who approached me with sympathy and understanding, reassuring me that it was okay to take a break and switch off for a while. I've known friends who have sent me silly pictures of dogs, called me with hilarious anecdotes, cried with me about nothing. My amazing mum has made me endless cups of tea, sat with me as I struggled, and driven 8+ hours with a dog in tow to visit me at uni. I am lucky beyond belief to be able to sit here in my university flat, still alive, all thanks to my amazing network of supporters and friends.

Now, I am fearless. I still have bad days where I can't get outside, and even taking a shower feels too much, but I know that they will pass. I know that I will probably carry these illnesses with me for the rest of my life, but that doesn't bother me. They're an integral part of my identity, and I would honestly miss them if they were gone. I am not defined by my illnesses, I am enhanced. I am made stronger, wiser, and ultimately undefeatable.

Talking about mental illness in public is still taboo, despite the millions of people that are afflicted by it. In breaking the silence and sharing my story, I hope you are inspired to do the same.

Guest Post Invitation

We have always welcomed and encouraged guest posts.  However that isn't clear to a casual visitor, so I've tried to clarify it with a standing invitation which - if I have got it right - should be sticky on the list of "pages".

So if you wish, please do write something.

Here's the page with the standing invitation.

Just because…

…I'm responding to my Lamictal doesn't mean I'm not actually ill.
…things feel horrible right at this moment doesn't mean they will forever.
…I know what I'm supposed to be doing (weight loss, self care, et.c.) doesn't mean it's trivial to do that.
…I'm ill doesn't mean I'm not also stressed.
…I'm stressed doesn't mean I'm not also ill.
…I'm procrastinating doesn't mean I don't get work done.
…I love my work doesn't mean it is the only thing that defines me.
…the last thing I heard before crashing was you doesn't mean that what you said made me crash.
…there were things that needed doing doesn't mean my emotional crash is an attempt to get out of doing them.

Some of these it has taken me years to realize.
Some of them I still haven't quite accepted.

Update; switched medicines

I haven't written here for a while, and I probably should have. But then again, I should stop feeling so guilty all the time. :-P

I got picked up by the Huddinge Hospital unit for affective disorders -- they do a sort of an outreach programme to help other medical personal deal with affective-spectrum patients. So I now see a psychiatrist at the university hospital expert unit for Bipolar 2. So far, I have been really impressed with that contact.

December has been exceptionally crappy. My new psychiatrist switched me from fluoxetin+wellbutrin to lamotrigin (anti-epilepticum with recognized use for mood stabilization with bipolars). Stepping off of the SSRI/NDRI cocktail was painful, with almost a week lost in back-to-back anxiety pangs. Then I stepped straight from there to a round with the flu that had me floored for a week. I'm slowly getting back to sensible speeds again, but it is slow running, and not particularly comfortable en route.

As for mood, I feel like a wad of cotton has been removed. I feel clearer, brighter, and more ... interested in things. I also have re-acquired my sudden, unexplainable and deep anxiety/sadness blips where I crash out over a time period of a few minutes, and then after spending up to maybe 30-45 minutes as a tearful wreck suddenly return to normal about as quickly. It's disorienting, and a bit of a strain for the people around me, but I hope that as we ramp up lamotrigin these blips will reduce in frequency.

That's it at the end of 2014. Happy holidays all y'all.

Evaluating differences

I can tell that I behave differently now from a year ago, or a couple of years ago. Different in several ways — some obviously good, some possibly bad.

Unnerving, though, are the differences that I find myself unable to evaluate.

I've been fretting a little bit lately over my own work productivity and focus. Nobody is complaining, far from it — but I notice how my roles in my collaborative projects are shifting around. I am doing far less of the project leadership I used to do: run far ahead and pull everyone else along by persistence, constant communication, and waves of work. I am being less focused, less productive, when I'm actually in the office, and doing less work when not in the office.

And here's the thing: I can't tell if this is good or not.

It's a difference, which unsettles me a bit.
It could be bad, could be a part of my depression, could be something I should work at breaking out of. Breaking out of the lethargy, act as if I don't feel it so that eventually my actions pull my mood with them.
It could also, just as validly from my own viewpoint, be a good thing. It could be that I finally manage to pull down my own self-expectations to something manageable, something that won't exhaust me utterly, something more on the size of what I can sustain happily and healthily.

But right now? I don't know, I really don't.

Accepting and Not Accepting Professional Advice

A sheep in a grove. Not a metaphor for the groves of academe, honest.

I'm taking Prozac. I had no idea. I'm not one of those types who obsesses about the drugs the doctors give me. I went to the doctor and she gave me fluoxetine.  Never heard of it, started taking it. Turns out it's Prozac (well to be precise it turns out that Prozac tm is fluoxetine.) Just now I am seeming quite anxious.  I hope this is a side effect that the doctor warned about, that sometimes you feel more anxious for the first couple of weeks. Because I'm not enjoying it but if it means the drug is working and will kick in to reduce anxiety soon, that would be nice. 

That was just some stuff to tell you before I get on with the post.

I had my appointment with Occupational Health at St Andrews the other day. 

I am really glad I found out about them because it was very useful to have somebody to talk to and get advice on things like when to go back to work.  I'm actually surprised - maybe disappointed - that I didn't know about them before. It was only when a friend with depression told me that it had been useful did I think of going to them. I have been doing well since then so didn't feel the need, but when I had my recent crash I definitely knew that I wanted to talk to them.  I can't comment of course on whether Occupational Health or equivalent at your university or workplace is good and beneficial. Indeed I can't tell you that at St Andrews they will be useful to you. But it's certainly worth investigating.

Some of the advice I got I am taking but some I'm not.

And the main piece of advice I'm not taking is that I am writing this blog post.  I was advised that it might not be in my interests to blog about my illness here (or on facebook or twitter), because things I write here might come back to hurt me.   However, the advice was further that if I had to blog then be sure to let me wife read it or let it sit for a day or an hour before posting it. 

Now I have mixed feelings about this advice. Because the whole point of Depressed Academics is a place for me or anyone else to talk about this issue in our lives. And to be a vehicle for other people to see that it is there in our lives.  I've mentioned before I find it dispiriting that this little blog is one of the first hits when you search for depression in academia, because it shows how little there is out there. 

So therefore my gut reaction is that I want to blog here about my depression and current mental health issues.  So here I am.  

But it's really important to say that I don't think that anyone should talk in public about their mental health - or any other kind of health issue - unless they are completely comfortable doing so.  That is incredibly important to me.  I mean that being open about my issues is my choice and I don't want anyone to think that they should do the same.  I don't want anybody to see this blog or my posts and think: wow, well there is depression in academia but you have to talk about it.  No, absolutely not! There is depression in academia and you don't have to talk about it. But if you do want to talk about it, like some of us here at D.A., then this is one place you can do so if you wish.

So that advice on not blogging? Well, I think I'm going to not accept it. Which you can obviously tell because you are reading this. 

But does that mean it's bad advice? No, I think it's probably good advice. Mainly because of the point I made about nobody being under pressure to be open. Also because - and this is a very good point I hadn't thought of - when you are in the midst of mental health issues, your judgement about what to say and what not to say may not be quite right. And also maybe it could hurt your career.  Either because somebody treats you wrongly, either consciously or subconsciously (and in either case very likely illegally), or because you say something which is held against you which you wouldn't normally say.  The latter is a worry because in the heat of stress and upset one might well say something, maybe about a colleague or the university or the department, and which may be true but would have been better left unsaid.  

I can say that being open here on Depressed Academics on the off chance it helps others is just simply is more important to me than my career. I am incredibly lucky to be a full professor at a great university. So actually I really don't have to worry about my career much, as long as I'm able to do my job. I'm also firmly convinced that I don't want to move into more senior university management, not least because I'm not sure my mental health could cope with it. If a statement like that comes back to bite me later, well so be it.

So I conclude I suppose that this was good advice that I am choosing not to take.

But I will take the advice of not posting this until I let my wife read it.  Just in case. 

Other advice was good and I am taking it. 

One was to try and do things with my time off. Not just slump in bed (which is where I am writing this, sorry!) So to get out for a walk for example. That was great advice and I took it the next day. The lovely bucolic pictures on this post are from that walk, up the hill that overlooks Cupar where I live. Obviously these are selected, and I didn't take a photo of the cellphone mast with the unofficial dump next to it. But that aside, these pictures are actually representative of the walk. 

Another was to take the whole time off which the doctor signed when I went to her last week. Which is five weeks.  I don't really want to be off for five weeks, but my brain just doesn't seem to be there. Plus of course judging when to go back is tricky when the whole problem is anxiety and your brain not quite working well. 

Another piece of advice was not to feel guilty about taking that time off. I'll try to work on that one, but I am quite good at feeling guilty. 

I'll close with a random observation which might one day be another post. While I was in the throes of my referendum obsessions, I wrote many thousands of words on facebook and in blog posts etc, and it seemed very easy. I mean I wasn't sitting there thinking "oh I must write, oh no..." And I also seemed to find my voice. I don't mean that my voice is talking endlessly about the referendum, but that I mean the "voice" in the sense of an authorial voice. If you don't like the word voice, I suppose it's just a writing style.  But I'm going with voice. 

So I found my voice over the weeks before I crashed, and I found that I quite like it. It's long winded, has asides and longer diversions, doesn't start where it ends. So I don't see any reason why you should like it, but I find it easy to write and some people do like it.  

So I wrote this post in that voice and here it is.  If my wife says it's ok.

Appointment and Shopping

I've got an appointment at Occupational Health Service at St Andrews University, which I've heard good things about.  So that is a good thing. 

I wish I'd known about this organisation earlier. I'm a bit embarrassed I didn't, but also I suppose it needs better publicity.

I went shopping today to get some beer and crisps.  But making tiny choices seemed very hard: should I look for meringues to make Eton mess??   It's well known that decisions become hard when you are anxious, but I really saw this - and felt it - today.

I'm microblogging this because ... I don't know, but I am.