Countrymouse Posted November 2018
On My Mind
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Replacing the much lamented 'On My Mind' profile option, this thread is for musings, jottings, whimsies, preoccupations and the rest of the thesaurus for anyone to jot down anything they please.
I can't remember what the maximum character count was before, can anyone else? But anyway it wasn't very many so let's keep to that.
We use that term here too! Wonder where it originated from..
boondocks (n.)
"remote and wild place," 1910s, from Tagalog bundok "mountain." A word adopted by occupying American soldiers in the Philippines for "remote and wild place." It was reinforced or re-adopted during World War II.
So, I called a head start preschool and found out what size clothes the kids wore. I have started sewing projects to give to the children. I am doing dresses and small stuffed animals.
These meds don't really treat schizophrenia or bipolar, the hope is that the meds will lessen the symptoms. For some people they work really well, for others they work less well. The meds do have really unpleasant side effects that can become permanent.
As was said in a NAMI Peer to Peer presentation in regards to meds. "There is a tiny bit of your brain that's not working right. The meds numb up your entire brain in hopes of helping that one tiny spot."
Some families have disappointing results with AP meds, other families have tremendous results.
On the personal side, we are lucky that my son will take anti-anxiety drugs. Anxiety is often the side effect of the symptoms (with the paranoid version of scz, well who wouldn't be anxious if everyone was out to hurt you;) Interestingly enough, his paternal grandmother's scz was quite similar to his - the voices she heard were also the voices of actual people in her life.
I just read Liz S.'s book, a great read - oh my the trouble my MIL's lying caused (!) Now we realize for her it was real, but at the time people believed her lies. She used to tell people all kinds of stuff that she claimed I had said. Eventually, I wouldn't visit her or even talk to her on the phone . There was no way I could have possibly said such things as his extended family believed, I hadn't spoken to the woman in years. My husband's family (especially his mom) hated me for the terrible things I (hadn't said) to his mother.
As Alvadeer pointed out in another thread - we often get dragged back to take care of these abusive people in the end. Even though her mental illness caused the issue, the abuse suffered is real.
I am so glad you read Liz Scheier's memoir, Never Simple. It's one of the most profound I have read on the subject of dealing with a mentally ill loved one. There is only so much that one can do, and he medical community can do almost nothing. You are so right about the idea that medications may help. Even if some drug or some drug "cocktail" is found to address things, nothing in our diagnoses today is much more than guesswork. In a case in my own family, when questioned, a doctor said basically they know it is "bipolar disorder" if Lithium works. And that's about the truth of it. So little is known about our brains and dementias of the aging brain aren't understood much better than brains impaired by varous mental illnesses and disorders for being "understood at all".
Therefore we end up medicating so that someone can be "lived with" or "cared for", and even when something is found that holds a patient between being knocked out completely or over the top "acting out", the cocktail doesn't continue to work after a bit of time.
Anyone who had dealt with mental disorders knows exactly what we are talking about. It can become/can see so very hopeless. And often it IS in fact quite hopeless. We just don't know enough now.
"Anyone who has dealt with mental disorders knows exactly what we are talking about".
You are so right. Once you know SMI, you can't unsee it.
I think one of the bigger problems is how few people actually can recognize mental illness when they see it. Schizophrenia and bipolar are like their genetic buddy autism in that they are spectrum disorders. Sure, we all can pick out the SMI homeless person who is yelling at the empty space around them, but, when we are looking at the people in our families, who we grew up with, recognizing mental illness is complicated.
Even psychiatrists aren't comfortable diagnosing SMI until they have worked with someone for at least 6 months. What is really interesting is that no one wants to diagnosis children with mental illness. The reason is pretty simple, children can present the characteristics of their mentally ill family members.
While there are complicated explanations, there is also a single word for how that happens - it's called normalization.
If you grow up with a parent with SMI there is a strong chance you will normalize their SMI behaviors. If one sibling tries to point out that Mom or Dad's behavior is questionable, they might be shouted down by the other siblings. Or they might be alone as the Liz was in her book "Never Simple". Liz's struggle to communicate how hurt and confused her life was by what she saw as her mother's constant lying, is painful to read.
Of course she sees her mother's constantly changing statements as lies. That's how rational people process information. In other words - Liz realizes her mother is not telling the truth, her rational brain concludes that mother is liar. Problem is mother is suffering from SMI and isn't rational.
We tend to look at the moments in which our family members with SMI are acting normal and use that as the proof our brain needs to keep normalizing all of their behaviors.
So glad I did. Not only an inspiring & honest book but funny, insightful & very well written too. I was amazed at her natural boundary making skill.
It appeared her Mother had BPD, a strange label I have never got my head around. I think I've met one or two, not sure.
I felt the air had been sucked from the room with one - just so needy.
Like a black hole. The other was a trouble maker - had a non-friendly smile & an excited glint in her eye as she found a sensitive topic to poke & drive a skewer into each person she met.
That description of the meds numbing the whole brain fit with my experience with Scz. The 'positive symptoms' of voices/delusions get dulled & the 'negative symptoms' of deep stillness/blunt affect can be somewhat lifted.
My LO has been very stable a long time. But I still see both distraction & bluntness.
As a child I found trusted adults to nag at to DO something... Yet none would get involved (or saw the futility in doing so). I had & still have the siblings that prefer to look at the rug, never what was swept underneath.
You couldn't have gotten any more "old fashioned" than my father - born in 1920, spent his whole life within the same rural community, church elder - and he never had those kinds of beliefs.
The SMIs are all cyclical in nature (recurring at intervals) this particular person with BPD has several regular episodes a year. The episodes last for weeks as she skates back and forth between the symptoms mentioned in the first paragraph. During those episodes she makes her family's life miserable. Even when the episodes decline they all do the traditional egg shell walk, they are terrified they will set her off again.
When she was younger, she was better at hiding her issues. If she slipped up and people saw her upset in public and asked her what was wrong, her blue eyes would get round, her voice would pitch higher and she would blame husband or children for upsetting her. She looked as innocent and childish as Shirley Temple as she told her story. People would comfort HER.
She's older now, early 40's, getting worse, and her public filters are slipping. Instead of coming to comfort her, people are now approaching her family and asking them if they realize she has a mental illness.
I agree. Many years ago, when I was hosting a buffet supper in my home and handed my FIL a plate and told him to help himself, he refused the plate and told me that a man is served his food by a woman.
My response was "So manhood is something a woman serves you on a plate?"
Nothing to do with being old fashioned, the man despised women.
a puddle, stepping,
to the side
I am reminded today of the film Groundhog Day. When Ned greets Phil on the street (everyday) & Phil steps into that deep puddle (everyday). Then the FREEDOM of stepping around in time!
I see you today puddle - all wet & awaiting, yet my feet will stay dry.
(Just because one person cannot do a thing - does not equate to this person having to do that thing instead).
Get two aluminum Coke cans with a string between them . Probably work as good as what you described . 🤪
Harvest moons are my favorite.
Glad that you dodged the flooding. Sorry about your daughter’s yard.
I saw the flooding on the news. What a mess!
A shout out to AlvaDeer for posting about this supplement and thus helping my MIL in such a tangible way!