The One about Mental Health

3 days before I launch my book I am sitting in the Doctors surgery.
Again.
"I'm exhausted and wore out" I tell her as I slump across the desk. "I've the flu and the galloping consumption, I've the black lung, I've the cold sweats and I haven't slept in weeks" says I rolling my eyes like a nervy horse.
She remains unmoved.
"You may give me an anti-biotic and a few inhalers, and throw in a few sleepers, or at least some steroids" says I, imagining how quickly I could clean the house on a cocktail of the above.
"I need to be at the top of my game, the papers have been alerted, the wine has been ordered and there are even women coming from Cork who will expect me to be hilarious, girl."
30 Deltacortil ought to do it.
My Doctor calmly watches me.
When the room has been filled with my rushing words, so many that they are trying to escape out the vents, she responds with a few of her own.
They include denial, delayed bereavement, grief, and mania.
She suggests I take medication for depression.
I have always fought this like a mule.
"If I'm manic, surely I don't need to go higher?" I mention.
She rests her chin on her interlocked hands and pauses...................
"Maybe you would benefit from a mood stabiliser?" she wonders.
And that dear reader is how I ended up on Lithium.
My sister googled the brand name and informed me.
If my default setting is high as a kite, and the only form of stabiliser I had ever heard of was on a childs bicycle then how on earth would I be on a tablet that would alter that.

"You may go see the man" says the Doctor and makes an appointment for me at a Mental Health Unit.
The man looks like the Doctor from Downton and is wearing tweeds similar. He has me fill out a 7 page questionnaire about the sanity of my entire seed, breed, and generation. Then his assistant (my case worker) interviews me for an hour. I wander off mid rant and become absorbed with the greening fields and shining stones outside the window.
And then I get called from the waiting room to see the Head Honcho of the Shrinkos.
The drugs turned my happiness off.
"You have no off switch" shouts Hewhomustnotbenamed once upon a time having had an argument with me entirely  in his head on the train before he ever put a long leg across the step.
The fizzing seratonin in the test tubes of my brain stopped fizzing and calmed, then disappeared.
The drugs turned my hunger up. 
Trying to stabilise mania and elation means that the chemicals that cause them must be routed and defeated. And the side effect of this suppression  is a massive appetite increase which may explain why I could eat the fill of the table and wonder what time the dinner was at.  
Normally when I was out -everything was loud and piercing, strident, shrill, other peoples children, phones, traffic. I felt vulnerable. I felt like I may blow off the side of the world like a Dandelion Clock. With the medication I felt grounded in my body, and less likely to jump 6 foot in the air if a car honked, or someone from behind tried to pull my hat off.
Again.  
I gained 5lbs in a week.
"Hop up on the scales there" says the Doctor a month later at my review.
"I presume the use of the word hop is ironic" I slur as I heave myself onto it and she makes a surprised face. "Wow" says she.
 "How" says I.
Speaking slowly and carefully I tell her I am sedated and dumbed down, that there is nothing on the entire planet that would remotely interest me,that even getting dressed hurts, that I am at home slumped in an armchair watching documentaries eating lovehearts to which I have become addicted, (there's a no-brainer)that I can't meet people as I can't think straight and can't answer the phone because I can't remember how to talk  and that I have not been outside the door to weddings or gigs or launches or speeches or films or bands or pubs or .........................
She heads me off at the pass.
"Michelle, I think this is the first time you have ever come in the door that you were not halfway through a story, why not relax and enjoy the space and peace, why not bite them in half, or try skipping a day?
"I could try skipping a week, and not just the tablets" I rejoinder and she takes me off the tablets the Downton Doctor had prescribed and puts me on a milder version.
She reads aloud to me from the screen his diagnosis.
All 7 pages of it.
 And I sit with my head cocked to one side like a robin, examining the wall, as she says you are Bi-Polar Type 2, highly functioning, and that the most important thing is to control the mania and encourage sleep.
"I release her back to your care" he finishes.
No further consults necessary.
I had to stop walking at a beach because my hip and knees  hurt so much.
I am carrying another self around with me.
I have become a recluse.
"It's a huge price to pay" a woman says to me in a supermarket.
And the only reason I don't hurl the box of tiny tablets on the puttering flame of the firelog is because the sleeping has become addictive too.
I have a close down system at the end of every night, at midnight wrapping the dogs in tiny blankets and laying them in their bed, blowing out the vanilla candles around the house, standing smoking a solitary cigarette under the church tower in the yard while the strings of solar lights flicker and die, retiring to the pineapple chunk with a book by a woman who humbles me.

And in the end I wouldn't let it best me.
And we found a dose that still allows me to sleep, but be awake and aware.
It's early doors. I'm feeling my way.
I watched a documentary once about Mo Mowlam and  of how her surgeon said the tumour in her head was pressing on her brain and provoking certain responses and reactions.
And of how she grew silent before quietly saying "you mean my entire personality is a collection of symptoms?"
I attended the interviews and courses they insisted I take to learn how to do what I had already done.
I started a small business hiring myself out to the nation to prove that your labelling does not define you, that your "illness" is only the human condition manifest, and that you can no more be castigated for the chemicals in your brain than for the pigment in your eye colour.
And that we need to break the cycle, stop the stigma, talk about it, share it.
I've outed myself on a public forum.
Again.
And then without fuss or fanfare or a drop of Prosecco launched a website to let people book me, as a living breathing example of how I perform not despite my illness but because of it, and of how it's Ok not to be Ok, and how it's absolutely ok to ask for help.
The only fizzing in my head now is  Lovehearts.
On a sugar high I bought an exercise machine from a  late night tv shopping channel and hope to be considerably smaller on a stage near you in the near future.
Don't mention my twitching eye.

MDM 


Scourged is available on  Amazon
or signed copies directly from author on her NEW website

http://www.shellshock.ie/