There are different levels of crazy. Everyone in my family is certifiable, but we each occupy different rungs on the ladder of insanity. The top rung in my mind has always been firmly held by my grandfather, my mom’s dad, although in retrospect I recognize that he and his siblings may have an entire tower all to themselves. After all, it’s hard to compete for that top spot when your sister has managed to end up at sea with the Coast Guard after a one night stand with a sailor, forcing them to divert course and drop her off at the nearest port. It’s also hard to beat a brother who didn’t leave his house for twenty years, or the myriad others with substance abuse issues of all sorts, but I still believe my grandpa holds his own nonetheless.
He was from an extremely poor family in rural Arkansas and grew up with eight brothers and sisters. He never forgot growing up hungry or sharing a bed with all those siblings. That feeling of being cramped next to so many people never left him, and he blamed his hatred of crowded areas on this experience. It makes sense, but I doubt that’s the true origin of his phobia, mostly because social anxiety pops up in multiple members of the family. The distaste toward being touched by just about anyone is carried forward in both my mom and me, and god knows I was never forced to cuddle with anyone against my will.
The genetic component of mental illness is absolutely undeniable in my family. I have studied the science of inheritance and worked in an office with a genetic specialist, and to this day I have no explanation for the 100% penetrance of psychiatric disorders throughout the gene pool. Of the nine siblings in my grandpa’s brood, every one of them was afflicted with something, although one of the youngest had symptoms that were mild enough for him to remain pretty darn functional. All three of my grandpa’s kids ended up with psych problems, as did all seven of us grandkids. (One or more of them may disagree with this assessment; I could cite examples to the contrary.) This is not an indictment of anyone’s character – on the contrary, I believe it adds spice to the casserole of our personalities. Anyone can navigate life without killing people; it takes a Hook to do it all while battling the desire to kill your damn self.
My grandfather’s exploits are legendary. Some of the more amusing stories include when my mom and her brothers awoke in the morning to a neighbor chewing my grandma out because he had passed out drunk in their driveway and was currently curled up asleep on the hood of their car. In another instance, he was walking through a residential neighborhood, presumably drunk as a skunk, and spotted a potted plant he rather liked. For god knows what reason, he decided he was going to take it, so he grabbed hold of it and took off running. Unfortunately for him, these plant owners had planned for such a theft by attaching a chain to the planter. My drunk-ass grandpa didn’t notice this, so after a few paces down the sidewalk, he got yanked to the ground and lost both the plant and some of his dignity.
There are plenty of other stories like this that are more or less innocuous, such as the time he treated his best friend to a prostitute and then tried to cure the resultant STD – which turned out to be syphilis – with Blue Star Ointment. Or the fact that he would always take off the entire month of January from work because he was sure he was going to die that year and didn’t want to leave any of his vacation time unused. But there were plenty of other, not so innocent manifestations of his mental illness. He would terrorize the family in his manic states, gambling away all their money and locking them out of the house when they went to church. He would take my uncles out on various expeditions and then, after getting too drunk to drive home, put his twelve year old son behind the wheel for the return trip. At one point, my alarmist great grandmother had them all crawling around on the floor because she had convinced them that he was going to shoot them if he could see them through the windows of the house.
This last was utter nonsense, but it shows how the mental illness of my grandma’s side of the family – in all its hyperbolic, religious zealot-style glory – interacted horribly with my grandpa’s. Yes, he was incredibly unstable and alcoholic and prone to extreme mood swings, but once he got a proper diagnosis in his 40s, he was able to begin the process of righting the ship and moving toward improvement in both his psychological state and his relationship with his family. Medication and sobriety cured him of the worst of his tendencies and helped him become the ornery but loving grandfather I grew up with. As for my grandma’s family, there is as yet no cure for the kind of insanity that leads people to believe Jesus speaks to them directly, sends signs via visions of lions in their home, and raises people “from the dead” on the operating table, even when the doctors flatly deny that anything of the sort actually happened. Give me Xanax any day and I can tackle bipolar; leave the prophetic visions to someone else.
That’s not to say that this is an easy road to hoe – mental illness is a bitch and a half and has dogged generations of my family from the cradle to the grave. That may sound like an exaggeration, but my mom swears she could see signs of OCD in me from the time I was still in a high chair. I would stretch my wrists and ankles repeatedly until it felt “right,” make everything even, count shit like a lunatic – all from a very early age. One of the worst instances of my OCD as a child was this weird phenomenon where I would feel like I couldn’t take a “full” breath. I don’t know how my mind decided what a “full” breath was, but I knew when I wasn’t getting it and I would freak out. I’d start searching for that truly deep breath by breathing heavily over and over until my chest hurt and I got lightheaded. My dad had endured asthma as a kid and was convinced I had it too. He was at home with my sister and me at the time while my mom was a resident at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, so he took me to the doctor multiple times to get me treated for what he was sure was a respiratory disorder. My mom was insistent that nothing was physically wrong with me and that I was just another crazy person in the family, but it took a good while for this notion to really sink in.
Mercifully, the breathing problems subsided and gave way to other, less painful compulsions that I learned to manage mostly in secret. Instead of making noticeable movements to feel “even,” I learned to be more subtle, by tapping my fingers and toes in the rhythm of the speech I heard. Later, when I started learning typing in school, I began typing on an imaginary keyboard in my head. When this became second nature, I would change up the rules of the game, typing only certain letters corresponding to the number of syllables in a given sentence. It was (and is) a very convoluted system that I have yet to be able to properly explain to anyone. When I was in one of two stints with a cognitive behavioral therapist, he asked for permission to mention my case to an expert in the field. The result? Said expert was unable to even comprehend what my compulsion actually was, let alone try to devise a solution for it. It’s a weird sort of validation being told that you are such an exceptional case that the brightest of minds can’t figure you out. I no longer feel ashamed of this fact. Instead, I feel like they should have to bow and kiss the ring because I outsmarted the fuckers.
Intrusive thoughts were another inward manifestation of the OCD that largely went unnoticed by others until they exploded out of me. My mom is a one-of-a-kind doctor – a specialist in her field who has known what kind of medicine she wanted to practice since before it even had a name – and has consequently gone through lots of intensive training. This involved frequent overnight shifts, long hours, and being tied to a pager before Q-Tip made it cool. I hated her job because it took her away from me, so the time I did get to spend with her was precious. When Bonnie Raitt’s Nick of Time album came out, my “Uncle” Ray loaned us his copy. My mom and sister and I listened and danced to that CD for hours on end on her one weekend off. We made plans to do so again the next time she would be home for a while, but on that same day, Uncle Ray picked up his CD before we could enjoy it together again. For some reason, the disappointment of this triggered in me the realization of my mom’s mortality and launched a whole series of intrusive thoughts about her death. I sat in my room and cried for what felt like hours to an eight year old, unable to enjoy my time with my mom because my brain wouldn’t let me.
My mom always recognized my symptoms and, in her quest to help me through them, tried to get me treatment. She took me to a number of different mental health professionals over the years, and I lied my ass off to almost all of them. They would ask me questions about my symptoms, and I would deny having any at all. I don’t know why I did this, but it happened time after time until my mom gave up and told me she would take me to see someone any time I decided I was ready.
I put off any such decision for as long as I possibly could. Over time, the idea of “OCD” as a part of who I was sunk in and started making sense to me. The up side of it was that my insane perfectionism made me an excellent student, seeing as I couldn’t stand not completing my work at the highest level. I wouldn’t be able to sleep if I hadn’t completed my homework and gotten my backpack and clothes ready for the next day. I agonized over every question I missed on tests and quizzes. I would lose sleep over any perceived error in my performance, going over and over in my head how I had gotten something wrong.
As a result, I was a straight A student. I was also terrified of getting my OCD treated for fear of my grades slipping. While the OCD kept me striving for perfection and jumping through hoops in my head, the depression that set in over the years convinced me that I wasn’t really smart but only did well in school because of my OCD. Any time my symptoms would flare up, I would remind myself that I had gone X number of semesters with all A’s and I didn’t want to give up that streak.
This bullshit continued until my senior year of high school, when my compulsions got so bad that I couldn’t focus in class. Instead of helping me, they were now making it impossible to follow what the teacher was saying. I was having to constantly consult the notes of classmates to catch up on what I had missed while the crackhead hamster in my mind was sprinting along in its wheel. That was the last straw that forced me to finally own up to my symptoms and accept a formal diagnosis from a psychiatrist.
As anyone battling mental illness knows, this is only the first in a very long series of steps toward getting better. From there, you start trying different treatment options. Maybe you give meditation or talk therapy a go. Maybe you try medication. Whatever the case, inevitably the first attempt fails or possibly even makes things worse, so you go back to the drawing board, feeling like even more of a failure. I was lucky to hit on a medicine that was a good fit within the first six months, but only after ignoring my doctor’s advice by taking myself off a medication that clearly wasn’t working. I’ve since learned how dangerous this is and would love to go back and slap my teenage self. But maybe this is that same perfectionist streak talking.
Having found a medication that at least moderated my OCD symptoms, I went off to college proud of myself for getting “better.” Inevitably, this only lasted a few months before it became clear that there were other issues that needed to be addressed. My depression became more noticeable, to the point that I was avoiding social interactions and withdrawing more generally, so my psychiatrist started tinkering with my meds. Upping my OCD med – an SSRI, for my fellow crazies – ended up bringing out hypomanic symptoms, which basically meant being awake for 36 straight hours and having my mind race at insane speeds all day long. So that med came back down and we added a second medicine aimed just at the depression. Miraculously, that one worked and finally made my depression much more manageable. I still had rough days, but they only ever got out of control when I wasn’t taking that one key medicine properly. For whatever reason, I needed either the brand name – which of course my insurance didn’t want to pay for – or one specific generic brand that was slowly being phased out. Every time the pharmacy tried to slip me a different brand, I would end up suicidal within days. Getting the correct pills has been an ongoing battle for the last ten years, and in the end only one pharmacy was willing and able to jump through all the necessary hoops to get me the correct medication. God bless Bullard Pharmacy.
So yay, right? One med manages my OCD, one deals with my depression, and I’m good to go. Right?? Nah bro, not so fast. Because those hypomanic symptoms that popped up when messing with my SSRI became more and more pronounced over time, to the point that I eventually got slapped with a diagnosis of Bipolar II. This one knocked me on my ass. Because, as crazy as I had always known I was, bipolar was on a different level in my mind. This was probably because my grandpa was bipolar, although he was the more “fun” type who went into full blown psychosis in his manic state. Since I associated him with the serious type of insanity, the idea of putting myself in that category was terrifying. It also seemed to create a maddening Catch-22: anything that elevated my mood too much threatened triggering mania, but anything I did to mellow out the manic risked the possibility of worsening depression. The bipolar tag meant that this roller coaster was only going to happen over and over again for as long as we both shall live, amen.
It goes without saying that music was my salvation throughout all of this. It gave my racing mind something to focus on – or rather, obsess over – when my anxiety was high and my brain was stuck in a feedback loop. It acted as a much-needed relief from my laser-beam focus on my studies, offering a worthwhile distraction to my narrow-minded pursuit of perfection in my school work. But most importantly, it quite literally kept me alive through my darkest times. Many critics over the years have railed against the moral deficiencies present in modern music. Not that this is a new phenomenon – every generation bemoans the state of the next generation’s culture – but it is irritating every single time. One of the common complaints is that the music of the younger crowd is less wholesome and somehow more depraved in its make-up, indicative of some failing on the part of its juvenile fan base. Oh what horrible effects this music must have on our youngsters! I would argue that the darker side of music is much more helpful to me in facing my depression. There were plenty of times when I turned to music in the midst of my worst moments, and if I had heard another upbeat boy band I might have decided to sign off right then and there. Songs that conveyed desperation, like Tupac’s “So Many Tears” and Biggie’s “Suicidal Thoughts,” were essential in reminding me that I wasn’t the only one dealing with depression and helping me keep going. Sometimes just the mood or chord progression or vocal inflection on a song was enough to nudge me in the right direction. I once listened to Frank Ocean’s “Bad Religion” 72 times in a row one night until my mind finally calmed down and let me go to sleep. MIMS was a middling rapper at best, but I will always love him for his name – music really was my savior as well.
It took me a long time, and a number of different trials of medications, to come to terms with this diagnosis, as I somewhat dramatically took it to mean something fundamental about my personality. As it turns out, I am just as fucked up as I always was but with two more psych meds added to the mix, and that’s about it. I manage the ups and downs of all the diagnoses as they come and only occasionally feel in over my head. For all those people who insist that some refreshing time in the outdoors or a good laugh or a more positive outlook more generally would “fix” me, I would humbly recommend that they suck a sweaty ball sack because that is simplistic bullshit. Yes, that’s an unnecessarily vulgar response, but to be fair, it’s an unnecessarily snotty recommendation that completely disregards the lived experience of all of us who battle psychiatric disorders. Does this medication-free, holistic approach work for some? Of course. But I would wager that anyone who can manage their symptoms with purely a smile and the smell of pine trees is suffering from a different sort of illness than me. Because I know for a fact that without my Celexa, Wellbutrin, Lamictal, and Seroquel I would not be a functional human being in any sense. And at this point in my life, I don’t feel guilty for that at all. Medicine really is the best medicine.
