Age enough, and the timeline of your life will arc in such a way that you can view your past self from the outside, like viewing the exterior of a back carriage from the front of a train traversing a curve. Life throws you the curve and time does the rest.
From the mid-nineties through the early aughts, with 1998 and 2001 particular in-mind, I didn’t know how balmy I was, nor did I have much appreciation of how unsettling my manner could be for others. Now, my former self seems unsettling to me as well, despite knowing from memory that I didn’t have any evil intent at the time.
I can hardly blame anyone for feeling put-off during any one or more of my episodes.
A few years ago, I was shown a YouTube video of a therapist who claimed – probably truthfully – that statistically, women found mentally ill men creepy. He went on to opine that this was a tragedy, as if mentally ill men are owed some kind of equal consideration by women in their own personal lives. To me, that part sounds like horseshit.
It keeps popping up in pop-psychology that people proffer to me; this idea that people – especially women – are somehow obligated to act with a para-professional kind of compassion towards random, mentally ill strangers, either as a duty in and of itself, or in service to actual mental health professionals whose jobs would thereby be made easier. That the duty of care that binds nurses, therapists and so on, were somehow applicable to people outside the job (again, especially women).
Again; horseshit. I neither wanted nor needed this special consideration at the time. And there is a reason we distinguish professionals in the first place: they have responsibilities the general populace don’t have. It’s not like my friends, neighbours and acquaintances could join the relevant professional organizations, nor receive the relevant award rates. Any such compassion would therefore be supererogatory.
What I would have liked was better mental health care. Specifically, better advice. In either late ’97 or early ’98, before the first time the wheels really came off.
In early ’98 I went to the GP clinic nearest to my flat, and the local GP was adamant that I shouldn’t consider my mood, the changes to my personality, nor my extreme insomnia to be mental health issues; that I should put the idea of mental health care out of my mind categorically.
He did his little chest puffy thing about being a doctor in the Korean war, and that “yours is not to reason why” regarding the nature of my shift work and what it was doing to my sleep cycle. Suffice to say, I followed his advice, mostly just in the form of resignation to the fact I wasn’t getting any help, and off those wheels came. La-la land ’98 wasn’t much fun for anyone involved.
1999 wasn’t too bad. I got prescribed paroxetine by another, quite decent GP, although this was before some of the side-effects (especially for the 25-and-under), and before things like discontinuation syndrome were known about. Then between a newer, dismissive GP, newer, early shift work, and being pressured into going cold-turkey off of paroxetine, things started to fall apart again in late 2000 before eventually going haywire in 2001.
Again, I don’t think I should have got special consideration from neighbours and the like at the time. And I don’t blame any medical professional for only using what limited information was available at the time.
I do wish I’d fronted up to a hospital on a few occasions, though. I’ve since been told that if I’d done that at the time, reporting my full list of symptoms, standard practice would have been to sedate me and keep me under observation for a period. And gawd, didn’t it sound nice when I heard that?
Only, I was a casual shift worker, so a hospital overnight could have spelled unemployment. Looking back I have no idea how I managed to do my job while being so flat out bonkers. My internal narrative is unreliable on the matter, and viewed with better perspective and more objective data years later, it’s confounding. How can anyone do that?
By 2002, more than two decades ago, it was over. Mostly. No more psychotic breaks. No more panic attacks. I don’t really know what to attribute the change to, but I did make an effort to correct some of my attitude problems come late 2001, and it is that case that the time from the onset of puberty to the mid-20s is a turbulent period when psychotic traits can peak.
Thing is though, is that I’ll never be sure what exactly happened. I do still have issues, and things that need looking in to, but nothing particularly florid. Certainly nothing for emergency. And waiting lists for assessment are a thing, more so now than before.
“Psychotic depression”, “depression with psychotic features”, and other maladies with references to the “psychotic” have been raised speculatively, but no retrospective diagnosis is possible. That’d be unethical. no attempt can be made.
For one, a number of these conditions are superficially similar, requiring blood tests contemporary with the psychosis in orders to distinguish between them. Moreover, some of the treatments for some of these conditions are contraindicated with the others, meaning that a misdiagnosis could lead to very real harm.
Suffice to say, I don’t have the necessary blood work from ’98-2001. So I’ll just have to resign myself to never knowing the full picture.
I can accept this. And I can better see – and regret – the distress I caused some of those in my social proximity, while also being more appreciative of what compassion I was shown. Compassion that I didn’t much deserve at the time. Learning to understand grace over time is whole other story.
I’d be lying though, if I said I wouldn’t have preferred a diagnosis at the start. Imagine that. It’s early ’98, my GP does the right thing and refers me to a competent psychiatrist for assessment, I get some answers and resign from my job eight-or-so months earlier than I actually did. It’d probably have helped save others some drama, while leaving me without the mystery.
Still, that’s not the way things panned out.
Looking back with the benefit of the curve, viewing things from the outside, aside from seeing how disturbing I must have looked to others, I’ve gained a few insights at the expense of realizing just how much I be-clowned myself.
If you’re any kind of rationalist, you’re probably at a heightened risk of a particular conceit; that your behaviour and attitudes are going to be rational independent of your mood. I certainly had that conceit; that I could be agitated, yet soldier on with a clear mind.
I used to have male friends who resented women more deeply than I realized at the time, and they did on occasion try to use me as a soundboard for misogynistic ideations. I didn’t rationalize or take these ideations to heart – quite the contrary, I most often thought they were bullshit in the very first instance. So I imagined that I was 100% immune, not realizing the possibility of any kind of emotional contagion.
Not being able to have much in the way of honest, candid discussion with The Guys, of my own volition, and without much consideration, I did what any number of other guys have done for eons; I leaned more heavily on the emotional labour of women – a sexist imposture I can only blame myself for. When you add a bit of emotional contagion from the misogynists to this imposture, maybe just tone, maybe just a posture, and overlay all of that over a psychotic break and a complete lack of awareness about what may be triggering you, you wind up with a babbling loony of a guy who makes a bit of a pest of himself with women.
A tip for my fellow guys: When a woman is worried you want to date her, but you don’t because you’re even more terrified at the prospect than she is, don’t try to diffuse the tension with sarcasm (or facetiousness). It probably won’t be received as sarcasm and you’ll have only yourself to blame. And it’ll be even worse if at the time you’re generally barking mad and randomly reacting to a minefield unknown triggers.
With the benefit of hindsight, I can’t help but suspect that some of The Guys – the misogynists at least – seeing my state, were deliberately trying to wind me up as some kind of proxy as revenge for some perceived injury they’d suffered at the hands of women. If I’m honest, although I can’t quite remember, I’m not entirely sure I didn’t pick up on this at the time and just fail to act accordingly.
Thing is, I really didn’t like incel and PUA types even back then, and I was big on personal boundaries, so I kind of failed to instantiate my own values. I should have reconsidered seeing a better GP instead to offload my immediate dramas, sort things out for myself, and then deal with the neighbours, friends and family where necessary when I was more stable. Coulda, woulda, shoulda, I know.
Suffice to say, it’s been well over a decade since I’ve regularly seen any of Those Guys, and it’s been better for all involved, other than maybe them. You don’t want to be around people like that when you’re balmy, if only to help lessen what a nuisance you may become.
It’s not all been gained perspective though. Some of the arc entails loss of perspective as sanity increases.
At the time of any of my mental breaks, I used to think that my thoughts were coherent. In fact, I was obsessed with exorcising these thoughts through articulation – that if I finally managed to speak them clearly, or put them on the page without error, that I’d be able to just forget about them and move on more calmly.
This was nonsense. My supposedly clear and rational thoughts were in reality so incoherent that they were impossible to render in a grammatical fashion. Even the most basic rules of language made such articulation impossible, and even when interpreted charitably, these views and opinions born of psychosis were still so much nonsense.
Insoluble internal contradictions. Non-sequitur segues. Hidden premises that I thought were obvious, but nobody could actually understand because they were literally impossible to understand. Bad jokes nobody could see the point of. Diversions, largely so I didn’t have to think uncomfortable thoughts. But mostly, just shit that couldn’t be resolved in logic, all of which was presented by myself, as perfectly reasonable.
It didn’t help that I’d get sooky-pissy when people didn’t get where I was coming from, or worse, when they thought I may be coming from a place of malice.
Me, a bad guy? Well, no I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone, but you can’t blame anyone for considering me to have been at least a little bit suss.
Dear younger self: Again, go to a different GP, don’t bother the woman next door, or anyone else in your social circle with your nonsense. Once you realize that they’ve been triggering you, you’ll soon come to the conclusion that it’s your responsibility to manage your own triggers, not their responsibility to deal with the fallout, and that you’ve been an ass all along for not taking the right steps to take care of yourself. Also, ditch the man-babies. Stop lying to yourself. They aren’t your friends.
The loss of perspective comes in when becoming increasingly more rational again. Trying to remember the nonsense that was swirling around your head, even if only to take responsibility for it, isn’t really doable. If it’s so incoherent that you can’t reliably put it into words, you’re just not going to be able to retain it with a sane mind, and you can’t really put it to paper with any kind of fidelity to the original thought. Retaining the incoherence requires the insanity to remain in place. No thanks.
(And I’m really glad I wasn’t blogging back then. Good grief.)
At any rate, the train still progresses around the curve, and with each passing year I can see more of the carriages from the outside, the way that others have seen them. Meanwhile, personal gibberish from the past is becoming increasingly less memorable. I hope this progression continues to work out for the better.
~ Bruce
Circling The Abyss 