Hey folks, Keith of Earth here. I, like many others, suffer or have suffered with an invisible monster that has over the years been categorized and boxed into a shape that the general public can understand. For some, this monster may talk behind your back and call you names. It may even convince you that everyone you love is trying to somehow ruin you. It can change your thought patterns to a fight or flight mode for seemingly no reason, or you may be triggered to become filled with fear, doubt and anger. It can ruin lives, and in some cases take them. It can turn a perfectly normal and intelligent person into a neurotic mess. For many, it has a name, and a "treatment". I'd like to say a few things about this subject to hopefully open the doors to new ways of looking at it for some. I'm going to try and stay away from the labels, as I think it's far more complicated than what government appointed drug dealers and makers have documented and I want to avoid confusion. I'm not discrediting the work done by the scientists and experts in the fields, I'm simply speaking from experience.
I'd like to offer a brief explanation of my history with and without mental health issues.
It all started around the 4th grade when I was first introduced into the system as an "at risk". My grades were never good but I had just stopped caring at all about lessons. I didn't pay attention, and whenever I did, the attention was quickly drawn short. I remember the last time I cared about learning in school was around this time. For the most part it was a frustrating mess to teach me. You could imagine how much of an issue that would be for the authorities. I'm sure they would have loved to reinstate corporal punishment while having me as a student.
So I eventually was noticed by the counselor after some particularly questionable acts, who managed to convince my parents that I needed to start trying medication, particularly Ritalin otherwise known as methylphenidate, a derivative of methamphetamine. After a meeting with a child psychiatrist we will call D, I was now to be taking effectively what junkies and college students take to stay awake for days. Coincidentally, I also suffered major sleep issues as a child that have translated into my adulthood. It seemed to be helpful in some ways, but I remember coming home after school every day and crying, so the pediatric psychiatrist known as D suggested trying a different "medicine". Dexedrine, otherwise known as Dextroamphetamine, Dextro being sugar and amphetamine being.. well, amphetamine. It wasn't long before I started to freak out in rage fits constantly, as you're charged with adrenaline, dopamine and serotonin boots while on this drug and I was not of an age to understand how to deal with my ridiculous temper.
My mom noticed the harm it was doing and decided to stop the medication before it went any further. For the rest of my elementary years I was assigned learning assistants to keep me focused and help me with my math skills. Those men and women don't get enough credit in that field. Everything was fairly smooth sailing from then on up until middle school, 7th grade, when I wrote a song that had some very dark content (as any pubescent teenager would normally experience) and I shared it with a friend who I wanted to start a band with. He brought it home and shared it with his dad, who then shared it with the middle school counselor. The next day as lunch rolled around I was called into the counselors office with my parents, 2 police officers, and some faculty. They asked me about the poem, then said I had to go with the officers. It was very confusing to me, and as the officers patted me down for weapons I noticed the other kids watching this all happen. This ostracized me from everybody and marked me as a dangerous person in the eyes of my peers. Rumor has it the other kids thought they found a pot plant in my locker.
As luck would have it I was brought to the local hospital where I wasn't informed about anything going on until I ended up in a room with one of the hospitals faculty and told that I was being admitted for a stay and that she was a family care practitioner. Being 13 years old, this was rather frightening, but I didn't quite grasp the severity of it until later during my stay.
For the first week I stayed in a cozy little room similar to a jail cell. It had brick walls with no window, all grey, with a little chrome toilet in the corner, a thin mattress in the middle of the room, a camera in the upper corner and a very large reinforced steel door with a little window in it. The most light I saw was from the television, I was allowed to watch Inu Yasha and sit in the visitors room for a while as they waited for the Mcnair wing (filled with wing-nuts) to have a spare bed available for me. I was pretty good about it, and eventually the day came when I got my room. Everybody else was so.. old. I was 13, and everyone there was at least in their 20's. I wanted to be cool, and the first thing asked of me was "You Smoke?", which I said yes to, after all... it was the only way I would be allowed fresh air.
In case you haven't noticed, there has been a lot of illicit substances being forced on me up to this point which is an important part of mental illness that I will try to address
As quickly as a stomach ache I got anxious and wanted to go outside for some fresh air. I started to pace and so I asked my appointed nurse if it would be alright to go outside for a little while. He asked me to wait a moment, then left and came back with cup of Ativan, otherwise known as Lorazepam, a highly addictive anxiety medication used to relax the nerves, and in high doses render you unconscious. I said I didn't want that, and I just needed fresh air but he left me no choice. I wasn't going to take the drugs, and again I was without a choice. I was then forcefully led back into the jail room where two large men in security coats waited for me. Seeing this frightened me, and so I became rushed with adrenaline. The nurse told me I had two options: either I take the pills or they will inject me with something to put me to sleep. I cried out, moving to slap the pills from the nurses hands. I was then immediately grabbed, thrown to the ground and held down while somebody inter-muscularly injected me with a drug I am unaware of. I spent the rest of the night crying, alone and afraid.
As time progressed I began to develop some serious trust issues and paranoia. sometimes not wanting to eat anything that wasn't from a can. My parent had divorced, I felt alone and angry, began to drink on the weekends, smoke pot regularly and hang out with a rough crowd. Everybody thought I was a drug addict and a loser. Girls didn't like me, guys were intimidated by me, and I was an asshole about it. Instead of taking it all on the chin, I became a very closed off and upset person, mostly talking to my journals. I had started to deal with suicidal thoughts and school was just a place I went to sit in the detention room and look at a desk for 6 hours a day with intermittent lectures about wasting my time. I dropped out halfway through grade 9 and started working for my dad as a general laborer at 5 dollars an hour in the summer. From then, moving onto kitchen work, I had started to develop a steady income and by the age of 16 after dealing with anger management courses, drug and alcohol counselling and constant bullshit from my dad's self destructive spiral of alcohol abuse due to my mom's absence, I decided to move out. I rented a basement suite with a new friend, an ex Oxycontin addict. Oxycontin is basically heroine your doctors made, very clean, addictive and deadly. It didn't take long for every kid in the neighborhood to turn it into a party house, where drugs and alcohol were abused everyday. I became addicted to drugs at that point, and would have taken just about anything. After a year of this, I finally decided to reach out and seek help.
My mom saved my life by helping me reach out to family members across the country who took me in for a couple weeks as a vacation to get away from drugs and alcohol. Without that help, there's a chance I would be on the streets right now or dead with a needle in my arm, but who knows what the world has in store for anyone. I began healing, moved back in with my mom and started to feel slightly normal again. I went back to school at this time, occasionally taking ecstasy, which at the time was mostly amphetamines, mdma and caffeine pressed together with the occasional psychedelic or research chemical. Though normal, there was still a looming darkness and dysfunction deep within me. Even in my happiest moments, often all I could feel was sadness, and it was hard to know if I felt alive. I had one more stay in a children's hospital wing after all of this, which eventually led me to move out on my own again at 18, find a girlfriend, hold a job, pay my rent and enter the world as a functioning adult and part of society.
and so that chapter ended, and now that you know this part of my life I want to get more in depth about the current stigma on mental health and try to elaborate more with you on why many people suffer, how to interact with them in a positive manner, and possibly help your friends out if they are reaching out to you. If you'll trust me enough to listen to my explanation of the side of the coin that not everyone has seen, I invite you to continue reading on to part 2 where I'll be focusing on issues I rarely see addressed. It's been nearly a decade since all of this has happened and it's a chapter of my history I've left in the past. I'm now 26 years old and have done many many things to heal myself spiritually. It's been a wonderful ride.
