I'm currently rereading a book I read about ten years ago--An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison. I first read this book at the prompting of my wife's therapist after my wife was initially diagnosed with bipolar. He told me it would help me understand her disease better. He was right. Jamison, a psychiatrist, writes of her personal struggles with bipolar. She describes her depressions and manias with the skill of a poet. My first trip through An Unquiet Mind filled me with a lot of conflicting emotions, the overriding one being fear. Jamsion's accounts of her psychotic breaks and refusal to take medications terrified me, because I could see my wife in a lot of what she wrote.
My current trip through An Unquiet Mind is prompted by the Good Books class I'm teaching this semester. All the texts for the class deal with mental illness in some way, and Jamison's little volume was right at the top of my list. As I was preparing for class this morning, I reread a particular passage in which Jamison describes visiting one of her patients in the emergency room while he is in the middle of a psychotic break. I came to one paragraph that stopped me cold, filled me with sadness:
Gradually the Haldol began to take effect. The screaming stopped, and the frantic straining against his restraints died down. He was both less frightened and less frightening; after a while he said to me, in a slowed and slurred voice, "Don't leave me, Dr. Jamison. Please, please don't leave me."The sheer helplessness of this man's plea just broke my heart. I've seen my wife in a similar state of medicated fear and anger. As a family member of a person with bipolar, I have had to sit by and watch my wife self-destruct. Because of her illness, she has angered me, frustrated me, frightened me, distracted me, and depressed me. Many times, I've had to remind myself that the things my wife did were not my wife. They were her illness. That thought has kept me sane and loving.
I'm lucky. My wife takes her medications willingly. She doesn't battle her psychiatrist as a majority of patients with mental illnesses do, as Jamison's patient in the above passage does. My wife has her ups and downs. For the most part, however, she manages her bipolar; her bipolar doesn't manage her. Jamison's patient eventually ends up committing suicide, largely as a result of his refusal to take lithium.
My wife has harmed herself in the past, cut her arms and breasts with scissors and knives. Her body bears the scars. She's told me that she was simply trying to lessen the pain, that she wasn't trying to hurt herself. The contradiction of that line of thinking in some strange way makes a lot of sense to me.
As a diabetic, I sometimes suffer from very low blood sugars. These low blood sugars do something to the chemistry of my brain. I find myself in states of mind darker than an Edgar Allan Poe story. Everything I'm doing or planning seems doomed to failure. Not just failure, but abysmal failure, torturous failure. Even thoughts of my son or daughter or wife can't lift me out of this swamp. If my wife's epidsodes of darkness are even half as bad, I understand her impulse to do anything to take her mind away from the pain. Self-mutilation. Alcohol. Drugs. Indiscrimate sex. Anything.
Wow. I'm usually not that deep at this time of the morning. I don't know what's come over me. Kay Redfield Jamison has obviously effected me strongly. That's not a bad thing. Sort of like my son, Jamison's An Unquiet Mind reminds me of what's really important in my life: healthy mind, healthy heart, healthy children, healthy wife, healthy soul.
Saint Marty gives thanks for a quiet mind this morning.
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| Thank you, Kay Jamison |
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