Mike’s Story
One beautiful spring day 25 years ago I woke feeling an exultant happiness. In the bathroom mirror I saw tears of joy. Every dog has his day, and I knew this day was mine, I had been anticipating it for three months or more, and knew that I would recognise it when it came, and inside my mind, some powerful spiritual-type voice was saying “This is the Day. This is Your Day, Michael.”
For me, the trials of life were over, and the solution clear. Kill yourself.
Twenty-four hours later, I woke up in a car filled with exhaust fumes, hundreds of miles away in the New Forest. A sense of failure, a sense of being cheated, and with serious carbon-monoxide poisoning, and with temporary brain damage. It was about a month before I could tell the time again, or count money.
In the Maudsley Mental Hospital, two days later, doctors told me “You don’t try to take your life when you are happy, you must learn to be honest.” I suppose they think if you are slowly burning in a fire, you relish the moment and want it to go on forever. For me it was crystal clear. I was doing myself and the world a favour. Ending the pain, closing it all down, was indeed a reason to be happy.
Two years later, I took 50 double-strength aspirins, was very ill for a day, and went temporarily deaf. I told a doctor I took them “by mistake,” with no intention of harming myself. I would not accept that I had depression, because
I didn’t want to have that label, I had enough labels already, Abused Child, Introvert, Loner, Thief, Fantasist, Alcoholic, Recovering Alcoholic. Accepting that I had depression would have been like taking the hair shirt and crown of thorns, a self-sentence to failure and mediocrity.
I had to stop drinking to discover depression. I didn’t know. I knew there was “something wrong inside me” and became familiar with the idea of not wanting to wake up in the mornings. I found something I didn’t like when I got sober. Me. I had flimsy and fluctuating self-esteem, but protected the void sometimes with a large ego. That’s a real bad personality set-up, and the basis of an unmanageable life.
I felt like an impostor on the planet, although sometimes bursts of apparent normality shone through the clouds. Then came the rain again, the colours sapped out of life, I could feel the doors closing, the ton weight back on my shoulders, the separation, the oppression of the other self. Life, happiness, acheivement, love, all became laughable, the spark flickering and dying once again.
Long-term friendships, and work, became almost impossible. Periods of huge elation intervened sometimes, which I know now is called a manic high. A bliss of infinite proportions, reckless love for life, unstoppable flows of ideas, a sense that the true Genius was surfacing. Delusive grandeur, an overblown sense of significance, an impatience with the uninspired around me, and the severing of actual relationships. My second wife thought I was schizophrenic, she wanted to have me sectioned to protect me from my compulsive overspending, lack of sleep and food, wild geographical sprees, all symptoms of what is now called Bipolar Illness, or Manic Depression.
Then, the roller coaster would stop, I’d have a few days perhaps sensing a coming change, then down into the black pit. Days, weeks, months. From the highest high to the lowest low, it’s a long way to fall, and it hurts beyond belief.
Eventually, maybe twenty years later than one might reasonably expect, I finally get diagnosed. Only because I chanced on a book by Spike Milligan which listed all the symptoms of manic-depression, and I had all of them. The round of doctors and therapy began, thin and spare, cursory and indifferent. Leaving consultations with an empty feeling, astonished that the self-adulated science of psychiatry concerned itself only with whether I slept and ate adequately, and was I taking the medication. It seemed if I could turn up, that was evidence of wellness. “He is a well-dressed bespectacled man” reads one report. I found out later, if I didn’t turn up, this was also evidence of wellness. To these people, lack of wellness would probably be defined by foaming mouth and secreting axes about one’s person. If im not a danger to myself or others, it seems I am not hardly worth a second look.
Somewhere along the line it occurred to me, that if alcoholics can keep each other sober, maybe depression sufferers could help each other manage their illness. Those who have not been there, with the best will in the world, simply have no understanding whatever of the extremes of the illness, and though medication can smother the symptoms, it cannot touch the deep-rooted causes.
There seems to vague theory sometimes that we do it to ourselves. Well, I didn’t.
My parents taught me to dread and fear life, a philosophy that seemed also to be freely available at school. The violence was bad at home but the scorn and ridicule, judgement and apparent hatred did the real damage. 50 years on, I still hear the echoes of those messages, but I no longer buy into them, I try to set them aside. My childhood was appalling, but no worse than many others, but extreme sensitivity and vulnerability made very day a risk, every goodness suspect, and drove all my hopes and expectations into a shoddy panicky corner.
I learned to pretend, lie and cheat, and became addicted to any substance or behaviour that made me feel better for a few moments. Where my friends seemed to grow and progress, I felt like I was hanging by the slenderest thread, scrabbling in the dirt with my fingernails looking for a moment of recognition, hoping only for some miracle to come along and snatch me out of the loneliness and misery. Sometimes a period of normality would come along, teasing and insulting, like a bright new toy waiting to be smashed. Walking a tightrope for a while as if I didn’t know it would fray and break.
With bipolar illness undiagnosed, I scrambled and tumbled through life, and tasted some victories, glided and soared, inevitably nose-diving into The Black Pit, sometimes numbed out and anaesthetised by a refusal to feel, and learning to play the game of apparent normality, acting like Everyman, some masked tragi-comedic figure in a Mediaeval play. Like many others, I learned to tell doctors the bits they seem to be able to understand, and tell friends and employers some kind of cover story. Paste over the cracks, move on, play the game as best I could, still lacking the basic needs of survival, like Honesty, Balance, Real Human Interaction, Care, Responsibility, the real tools of an adult life. (see Scott Peck…The Road Less Travelled.
In 2003, it began to change when Jean Arnold, a friend, asked me if I thought we could start a group for local depression sufferers. For me now, change was no longer an option, since commitment and responsibility, never really available to me, were obviously going to be required.
We started our group that September, four people drinking tea round a table, simply happy to be there. The group story has its own chapter in this book.
Let me say that the group is the love of my life. It’s real, whether there are two or twenty of us, and it works. It keeps me as well as the confines of my illness will allow, and it often holds the power of my illness at bay. Despite some of my previous theories of life, (One Man Against theWorld, the Ice Man, The Reclusive Genius..etc) I have found that people are the best medicine for me.
People who share their pain, their hopes and their hearts in order to help others survive. People who attain some recovery to pass on to the new person.
I found out that even I can sustain friendships, and be part of something, and that illness can be put into perspective, and managed.
I am not a guru, I am not a natural leader, I’m still a flawed and damaged man.
I cannot tell anyone what to do, but I can tell people what I did, where I am, and what is in me. I can’t do that with medical professionals.
I am sustained by the love, generosity, and spirit of the others in the lifeboat. I have seen qualities in some of the group that astound me continually, unselfishness that I have rarely seen elsewhere. Honesty and goodness have an infectious quality, as does the will to survive and grow.
This is no miracle story. It’s a long partnership of Time and Care. There have been days, one or two, where I have practically crawled to the group, or when it has been the only thing I have managed to do within that week.
However, the overall process of getting better and managing better, the gradual recovery which is harder to accept than the concept of cure….this is the reward.
I’m still here.
Mike. Feb.2007
