Mental Health Awareness Month: NAMI

The National Alliance On Mental Illness (NAMI) is a nationwide organization that provides informational and emotional support for the caregivers who work to keep people with mental illnesses on track and stable—or at the very least it lets the caregivers know they're not alone.

The organization has 1,000 state and local affiliates across all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. To keep it accessible to everyone who needs it, NAMI is funded through pharmaceutical company donations, individual donors, sponsorships and grants.

My parents found a lifeline in NAMI when I was diagnosed as bipolar over a decade ago. Now my mom—a retired teacher, so this is totally in her wheelhouse—has taught classes to help NAMI members better manage the situations they face and has undergone formal training to be a group meeting leader. I'm so thankful for everything my parents and my sister's family have done to support me in my bipolar adventures. NAMI has helped them help me manage my life with a considerable degree of success and relative normalcy.

If you’re interested in learning more or finding a NAMI group to attend, please visit nami.org.

Mental Health Awareness Month: Depression

Everyone can feel occasionally sad, lonely or unmotivated as a result of anything from grief to just having an off day. But when these feelings become exponential and overwhelming and prevent you from functioning, you could be suffering from clinical depression.

And there isn’t a single kind of depression. It’s diagnosed when you present any long-term combination of symptoms including feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness, trouble concentrating, insomnia, fatigue, loss of interest in pleasurable things, restlessness, suicidal ideation—and even physical symptoms including body aches, digestive problems and appetite loss. Depression symptoms also vary widely based on age, gender and personal circumstances.

There isn’t a single kind of treatment either; depression can be managed with any combination of psychotherapy, antidepressants, exercise, certain supplements (vitamin D and fish oil have noticeably increased the efficacy of my meds) and in extreme cases electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)—with focused attention paid to people expressing suicidal thoughts and reckless behaviors.

Depression can also present itself along with other clinical disorders including psychosis, bipolar disorder and seasonal affective disorder. In my case, I have both bipolar II disorder and major depressive disorder—which means my shutdowns are almost always epic: I collapse into a deep, deep hole of despondency, exhaustion, physical pain, dull panic, slurred speech, a metallic taste on my tongue, and a fog that feels like a hot, wet, suffocating blanket I can’t find a way out of. All I can do is sleep in a drenching sweat, lose all track of time and frequently wake up with the pain of an oncoming migraine that thankfully never fully manifests itself.

Plus I’m totally no fun at parties. :-)

On a personal note, I have serious issues with the word depression in itself. I know it’s impossible to find a word that succinctly encompasses all these symptoms, but colloquial English has appropriated depression to mean feeling kinda blah, and people also associate the word with low spots in the ground, dips in the road and economic slumps, so they tend to think that clinical depression is just sadness. And if we depressed people had a nickel for every time someone told us to cheer up or decide to be happy, we just might be rich enough to actually BE happy. I know people who say these things are often coming from a place of not understanding and of just trying to be helpful, but the word depression is exactly the reason they’re confused and ultimately unhelpful.

And on that note, if you know someone who’s depressed or struggling through a depressive episode and you want to help, just ask what you can do. Some of us want to be left alone, but some people may want you to sit quietly with them so they don’t feel alone … or bring them some ice water … or call 911 … or some people may genuinely want you to try to cheer them up.

This is way off-topic and completely unhelpful given most of what I’ve just said, but if the latter request is the case, I recommend you start with my all-time favorite joke:

What’s brown and sticky?

A stick.

Inpatient

After a year of unemployment in Chicago where I half-assedly looked for jobs and shuffled back and forth from Cedar Rapids, I more or less officially moved home eleven years ago this month.

My bipolar disorder was escalating and I was seeing what I now understand was a hack psychiatrist (because how can you know what to look for and who’s competent when you’re new at finding mental health professionals and you’re crippled by a mental illness?) who kept prescribing medication after medication (including the anticonvulsant Depakote that I had NO business being on due to its highly problematic interactions with my Lamictal mood stabilizer) without following up or even letting me know what catastrophic side effects to look for. And my unmanaged Depakote cocktail was a living nightmare of day-long blackouts, terrifying hallucinations, and sleepwalking through what was thankfully benign but could have been fatal odd behavior.

Every psychotropic drug gives you temporary—sometimes awful—side effects as you ramp up on a new prescription and wean off of it when you find out it doesn’t work. And thanks to this doctor’s random changes of drugs and cocktails, I was in a constant state of up-and-down side effects that left me miserable and confused and unable to function in a multitude of ways.

On top of all that, I was newly single and living alone for the first time in seven years, which meant I didn’t have an extra brain in the house to remind me to take that litany of changing meds on their prescribed schedules.

So by the time I decided I was moving home, I was a mess. A catastrophic, dissociative, emotional-train-crash mess.

And as Christmas drew nearer and nearer, I found myself more and more overcome with panic and dread about holding myself together through our family activities, worrying that I’d ruin them for everyone and inevitably escalating even more.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t comprehend.

I didn’t want to live.

So eleven years ago today, my parents—my terrified, confused, helpless parents—and I together made the heart-wrenching decision that I needed to be hospitalized. Two days before Christmas.

The ensuing details are still hazy to me, but from what I can remember: I sobbed on our couch in Greek-tragedy emotional pain as I slowly wrapped my muddled brain around what I was about to do. Mom and Dad came with me to the emergency room. I was evaluated by a doctor. We were put in an empty holding room for four hours while they looked for an open bed, which they eventually—thankfully—found right there instead of in a hospital 200 miles away. We were taken to the mental ward where we first had to go through a room where Mom and Dad had to leave their coats and Mom had to leave her purse.

When we got in, I had to forfeit my coat and clothes and phone and basically everything but my glasses. I was given scrubs and hospital socks. I met privately with a doctor, who took me off every drug I was on and prescribed yet another new cocktail of drugs. Which meant more simultaneous ramping-up-and-down side effects.

And when I was finally done being triaged, I was given an opportunity to say goodbye to my parents and then I was escorted to my room.

I made one last look back as I was halfway down the hallway, and the looks on my parents’ faces—their anguish, fear and inconsolable sadness—will be forever seared in my memory.

And so will my feeling of complete, comforting relief from accepting the fact that all of this was bigger than I was, I could finally release the demons fighting inside me, and I was in the protective, hopefully healing care of people who could manage whatever it was that was tearing me apart.

Eleven years ago today I launched into an unknown of what ended up being a full week in a locked mental ward in a hospital.

Eleven years ago today I started yet another roller coaster of the disorienting, miserable side effects of changing medicines.

Eleven years ago today I finally knew I was safe from myself, I was being cared for by experts, and for some reason what I found to be the most important: I wouldn’t ruin my family’s Christmas. I knew that not being there would be disruptive. But I also knew that being there would have been even worse.

Eleven years ago today, I started what would still be a long, bumpy road to healing, but I knew I was at least on the road to healing. It was one of the worst things I’ve been through and one of the best things I’ve ever done.

If you’re struggling with the out-of-control pain and confusion of mental illness, please know there’s no shame in asking for help—even to the point of being hospitalized—and putting yourself in the focused care of others.

There most likely won’t be immediate healing. But there will be hope. For you, your family and your support network.

There will be calming, restorative, essential hope.

This is just a bucket of melty cheese encased in pointless single quotes ...

but I cannot overstate its inherent truth; I wouldn't be here today if it weren't for my family and friends. If you are a part of a mentally ill person's support team—even for a moment—you are a saint. And on behalf of everyone who ever needed a reminder to take his meds or a voice of reason before taking a wrong turn or just a random hug in person or via text, I thank you.

When you’re a total stupid dumbass

who absent-mindedly takes your Saturday PM meds when you wake up at 5:00 on a Monday and then a few hours later you take your Monday AM meds and quickly send yourself spiraling into a painful, disorienting, blinding, terrifying—but ultimately non-threatening—double-dose overdose situation last week so your mom devises a brilliant MomGyver fail-safe using nothing but rubber bands and a butter knife to save you from your stupid self in the future.

Also: While most of these pills are supplements to enhance the efficacy of my psych meds, the collective volume of psychotropic and supplemental pills has finally reached a critical mass that obligates me to take them in two shifts instead of in my usual badass single-fistful gulp.

I'm back from my three-month checkup with my psychiatrist

And she still wants to keep seeing me every three months instead of the every-4-6-week schedule I was on a year ago. This might sound good to you, but it's HUGE to me and my family. The bipolar med cocktail that she's methodically calibrated for me over the last three years seems to be keeping me stable (though the 12+ miles I've been running every week since March might also have something to do with it), and of course the tireless, diligent support of my family and friends has been an enormous part of that success.

I'm so thankful for all of this—and all of you—that I splurged on a massive bucket of Diet Coke and two super-sticky apple fritters on the way to work. Even though caffeine and sugar probably undermine the efficacy of my meds and exacerbate their weight-gain side effects. But I'm pretty sure I can manage these setbacks.

I’ve had a couple am/pm mixups in the fistfuls of bipolar meds I choke down twice a day

Mom has now ever-so-subtly tried to fix my absent-mindedness:

Mom keeps a pencil on my box of meds

I take the pencil off after I've choked down my fistful of pills every morning and every night so if she's not there she'll know I've taken them. Then she puts the pencil back to remind me to take my next fistful 12 hours later. So I get a dose of love with my pills twice a day.

Mom can be smart that way.

I hate it when the bottom drops out

and I have a sudden-onset bipolar depressive episode that abruptly shuts down my night and robs me of the opportunity to spend time with my friends and cast members.

I hate it that I sat immobilized in my car for 30 minutes tonight before I was able to summon the presence of mind to drive home.

I hate it that I keep getting crushes on straight guys.

I hate it that the arrogance and corruption and immaturity and willful ignorance and daily manifestations of ineptitude coming from trump and his vile, insular orbit are so pervasive and so ubiquitous and now so normalized that we all just roll our eyes after each bombshell and wait a day for the next bombshell, which somehow STILL doesn't land them all in prison.

I hate that I'll read this in the morning and be embarrassed that I posted it. But it's what's in my head, it's why I'm sitting at home in the dark right now instead of enjoying a late cast party, and it's my free therapy. And somehow I feel less bottled up and alone when I dump my thoughts and troubles out in the universe so I can sleep.

Good night.

My little New Year's Eve gathering fell through tonight

So I'm sitting home alone (well, my parents are snoring contentedly in their bedroom down the hall) by the light of the tree with Bitch Kitty glaring at me from across the room and a LOT of oh-my-god-these-are-AMAZING Hy-Vee fudge brownies on the counter. And if you don't live in a Hy-Vee state, it pains me to tell you this but you have wasted your entire life eating really shitty brownies.

But from my safe, cozy—albeit admittedly lonely—perch on our extremely comfortable couch in these last hours of an emotionally contentious year where our country seems to have lost a disproportionately high number of beloved celebrities but I landed a job I love in practically every way and where I have continued to ramp up and ramp down and suffer side effects and endure withdrawal effects of countless psychotropics in my ongoing struggle to beat bipolar depression but in the process my love and appreciation and respect for my family have grown stronger and deeper and more joyous and hopefully more reciprocal, I can't help but harbor grave concerns about the coming year.

I'm concerned to the point of being terrified of the pending horrors wrought from the blind nationalism and the arrogant ignorance of the inchoate and yet already alarmingly destructive Trump kakistocracy. I worry that the gloriously revolutionary American Experiment will fall way too early in its young life at the hands of a predatory, self-serving demagogue who stupidly let himself become a political puppet in a game of nuclear chicken that could precipitate national, international or global destruction. I also worry greatly that our educational systems and standards and our national and local infrastructures and our economy and our safety and even our civility will collapse in the process or the aftermath.

On a personal scale, I worry that friendships will end and loved ones will die and control will collapse and accidents will cripple and ideologies will interfere and dreams will fail and fortunes both monetary and emotional will fall and I know these worries are universal and though they can easily isolate us they can also unite and inspire and ultimately augment us, but they still compel me to hold my family and friends close and keep my guard up and my emotions girded and my world as calm and controlled and constant as I humanly can.

So much can change in 365 days. Three years ago I wrote international ad campaigns for a prestigious agency in Chicago. Two years ago I was in a locked psych ward, so pharmaceutically emotionless I couldn't even cry. One year ago I was somehow holding onto a job I wasn't even good at but I was apparently charming or earnest or possibly overlookable enough that I survived months of staff reductions. Now I'm proudly living with—and providing reciprocal care for—my septuagenarian parents, working happily as an online product copywriter for a gloriously high-end international retailer, regularly singing and dancing and acting and sometimes just smiling and waving in shows for three different theater companies, discovering the unimaginable joy and love and pride of playing uncle to two intelligent and kind and talented and responsible and remarkably tall young adults who thankfully possess an inherent and reciprocal and mutually straight-faced understanding of my meandering and maybe-just-a-little-bit-perhaps-over-the-line sense of humor, and still clinging confidently to the hope that I will soon find the right psychotropic cocktail to regulate my bipolar depression plus find a boyfriend who loves theater and Hy-Vee brownies and running and tattoos and underpants jokes and freakishly conspicuously indulgently long sentences and living in Cedar Rapids where hopefully our entire families are.

So I face this new year with great but guarded trepidation tempered by a glorious spectrum of hope and joy and gratitude and love and oh-my-god too many shoes and a fervent hope that the coming months are filled with peace and diplomacy and respect and common sense and a governance guided by a deep, profound, nuanced, reciprocal knowledge and understanding of who we are, what is fair, how we're responsible, and the selfish and bellicose and irreversible and potentially catastrophic options we should never even pursue.

And—you're welcome—to end this post and start this year on a far less cataclysmic note, I can report with complete confidence that (at the very least) the first months of 2017 will be filled with staggeringly long, shamelessly self-indulgent, thesaurusly verbose, hopefully thoughtful, possibly funny, relentlessly selfie-enhanced posts.

And since tonight's get-together didn't happen, the dawn of our new year will also be filled with Hy-Vee brownies. Lots and lots of Hy-Vee brownies.

Happy New Year, everyone.

The big picture

It's 11:30 pm and in this slightly dark and judiciously cropped tree selfie, Christmas at our house looks postcard-perfect. But in reality there are boxes and bills and blankets and coats and wet shoes and easily 20 bottles of meds and folding tables and stuff to clean up sick-cat barf and plates of half-eaten cookies and basically something that needs time and attention on every counter, table and square foot of floor space in sight. It's exhausting and defeating just to look at. And none of us is sure how it got this bad.

But in the big picture, it's small stuff. And it really doesn't matter. I moved home two years ago in part to take care of my dad. And I'm thrilled to do it. I drove him to two doctor appointments today and helped get him changed for an X-ray and we drove to the hardware store to get him a rubber tip for his cane and we had lunch and got some Christmas stuff and took our kitty—who is actually pretty sick—to the vet, where he proudly told the doctor that HIS dad had been a vet, and it was an honor and a joy that I'm here to take care of him. And tomorrow we start all over again with two more doctor appointments and more Christmas shopping and probably lunch and I'm going to remember and savor every moment of it because when he's no longer here I can look back and say "I took care of my dad. And we had lunch. And we laughed at dumb stuff. And he told me stories about my relatives and what cool old buildings used to stand where in the city and where he and Mom lived before I was born and which of his friends who've died he really misses and how he hates to be blind and I took care of my dad."

And that street runs two ways. I've been on a two-year emotional roller coaster of bipolar highs and debilitating lows and lengthy hospitalizations and miserable, crushing side effects of taking and withdrawing from maybe 30 psychotropics (which, all things considered, I still think is a really cool word) and quite literally sleeping my life away as we try to find a med combination that doesn't make me unstable and embarrassingly fidgety and relentlessly, overwhelmingly drowsy. And my mom and dad have been my super-advocates all along, organizing my ever-EVER-changing meds, making up a bed for me on the couch on the days I can barely crawl home from work, making sure my insurance is up to date and I'm not missing a dizzying array of doctor appointments with a dizzying array of doctors and making me pot roast and Jell-O with fruit in it and in general just being awesome.

But we're not special; millions of families are facing millions of medical problems, some easier than ours and some crushingly harder. And millions of families also have messy houses, especially around the holidays. And there's a glaringly obvious metaphor in there that can be interpreted in positive or negative ways. For me, it's all good. We'll get the house picked up and back in order soon. My mom will eventually forgive me for announcing to all of Facebook that we live in pestilence and squalor. I'll get my meds—and my brain—straightened out. Mom and Dad will or won't get sicker or better and I'll be right here to take care of them.

And my slightly dark and judiciously cropped tree selfie might not show our struggles and messes, but it totally captures all the warmth and joy and love and—I'm sorry—really ugly ornaments in this house, in this family, in this world of uncertainty and unfairness and hope and fierce, unbreakable devotion.

My nephew brought his dog over to bring me back to life tonight!

Bridget (the dog, not my nephew) is the best medical dog in the world except 1) she has no accredited nursing degree 2) she keeps asking to borrow my stethoscope and I'm beginning to suspect she doesn't even have one of her own 3) her scrubs are decorated with little superhero kitties, which—I'm sorry—is COMPLETELY implausible for a dog nurse 4) she is way too fidgety to just lie down and snuggle 5) she's even worse when you try to get her in a picture, like this tender loving emotional nursey one of us both sitting upright and attentive and side by side in front of the lit tree.

So I swear my bloated woe-is-me ramblings on here every time I spiral out of control aren't thinly veiled solicitations for love notes in the comments. In actuality, they're not even veiled at all. I know I have a vast support network, I am humbled by its size and sincerity, and sometimes getting lengthy lists of Facebook comments reminding me you're all out there does more good than you could ever imagine. So thank you. Between you, my parents (who are the fiercest, most devoted advocates a crazy bipolar man could ever hope to have), Bridget the dog (who at this moment is selfishly in the next room not doing a damn thing on behalf of my mental health), a workday highlighted by two Diet Cokes, a bag of Famous Amos cookies and my favorite shoes, a 500-hour nap and a bowl of store-brand Jell-O that was so deliciously limey that no other lime in my past or future will ever measure up, I am exponentially better than I was when I started typing my unfocused manifesto 24 hours ago. I'm not out of the fog yet and I'm gonna spiral out of control again sometime but I learn new ways to cope each time and when I brain-dump on here again to organize my thoughts, my Facebook support army will come out of the woodwork again and make me feel able to keep on keepin' on.

My mom's secret alter ego

is Mega Super Awesome Pill Figure-Outer Lady with Pillbox Thumb Opening Action(R) and Micro Pill Splitting Power(R). Seriously. You should see how fast she can calculate and portion weeks of simultaneous weanings up and down in separate am and pm boxes without running out of refills for me.

I don't know how she does it all without getting her cape caught in the pillboxes but that's part of her superpowers and we mortals don't question anybody's superpowers. Mostly because it's impolite. But also because we secretly want to try on the cape but it's considered the height of rudeness to ask.

Go, Team Jake!

Here's me and 4/7ths of Team Jake, who are on call 24/7 to provide wake-up calls and remind me to take my meds and send me random texts to remind me I'm loved and provide courtesy laughter for (most of) my dumb jokes and refuse to let me feel like I'm broken and give me big hugs out of nowhere and to tell me gently and respectfully that I have too many shoes, which, of course, I don't because there's no such thing as too many shoes but I play along with our little charade because it makes them feel appreciated and I genuinely appreciate every one of the things—both little and big—that they do for me. Because some days I really need to feel loved and every day they remind me that I am.

The therapeutic benefits of ice cream

Misery is feeling so shitty at work that you have to admit defeat and come home early from the job you love and never want to jeopardize.

Cozy is getting home to find your folks have made up the couch like a bed so you can climb in it the second you get your shoes off.

Happiness is being awakened in time to have a home-cooked dinner with your folks.

Frustration is choking down the newest mountain of evening psychotropics in the hopes that this cocktail will finally—FINALLY—be the magic bullet that promotes social confidence and friendly comfort and eliminates embarrassing side effects like wiggling and grunting and face touching and hair swirling and eye rolling and knee shaking and foot tapping and diminished motor skills in my hands and fingers and time-sucking distractibility with Facebook or rubber bands or the shoes I'm wearing or how many 5 Hour Energies or Diet Mountain Dews I can nurse before lunch.

But there is a mighty cloud of joy amid all that complicated emotional mess: the unbridled happiness I get from slurping up a giant chocolate malt my dad made for me (with extra malt because we're not savages) and enjoying it along with my parents as we discuss the news of the day interspersed with attempts to fix my mom's perpetually broken iPad even though none of us has even a modicum of a clue what we're doing. It's a small gesture of love and goodwill for what I often feel is an irreparably broken man.

How to keep your friendly neighborhood pharmacy solvent:

I mean seriously. And I take just as many meds in the mornings as well. Granted, about a fourth of my daily pill pile—which is a totally awesome band name—is OTC stuff with purported powers to control the side effects of all this pharmacology. But none of any of it seems to be working for shit. I'm still shaky and chompy and chubby-tummied and chronically, relentlessly exhausted. I'm still struggling to claw my way out of deepening pits of depression on an almost weekly basis. The unnerving and sometimes terrifying symptoms of my Cymbalta withdrawal seem to be escalating. And I'm weaning myself off of Abilify next. BECAUSE NONE OF IT SEEMS TO BE WORKING. Despite my many plans to the contrary, I pretty much slept my way through this entire weekend. I didn't go to a play I had tickets for. I didn't help my brother-in-law paint his house. I didn't do any half-marathon training. I didn't go to our neighborhood block party. I didn't even take a fucking shower.

But I have hope. And the greatest support network a bipolar person could ever ask for. And the ability to sit back objectively and make fun of the absurd and ridiculous stuff. And the delusion that I can stubbornly will myself to get better. But not, unfortunately, the ability to swallow two daily handfuls of pills without violently gagging. And clearly I don't have the self-control—or maybe just the self-sufficiency—to shut up about it all on social media. Which, on some levels, makes all of you part of my support network too. Which I suspect may be my subconscious goal with all this whining. So sorry to drag you all into my mental drama here. But thanks for playing along. I'm going to sleep now. Which I'm really good at; I practiced all weekend.

There's no real way to "fix" bipolar depression

You just have to ride it out. But sitting around with your parents, eating a malt made by your dad and listening to Widor's organ Toccata sure collectively go a long way toward making you better.

Thank you

As anyone who spends more than a few seconds on social media every month probably knows, I'm bipolar. As probably nobody knows, my bipolar depression got so acute and so scary that I spent the week of Christmas in a psych ward. It was there that I decided I needed to move home to Iowa to help take care of my dad—who has lost his sight to macular degeneration—and where my family could take care of me. It was also where I told myself if I really did move to Iowa I'd get involved in the theater again. Now fast-forward four months. I've already done one show, and tonight marks the point where I am for the first time in my life doing two shows simultaneously. I start rehearsals for A Chorus Line tonight and I open Barefoot in the Park this Friday. Plus I have a kick-ass job. Plus my meds are working so well I forget what it's like to be manic until my increasingly rare manic waves hit me. And I honestly can't remember the last depressive episode I had. (Then again, huge chunks of my manic episodes are a blur too. Which is both a blessing and a curse of being bipolar.) I owe A LOT to so many friends and family members and social-media acquaintances who have believed in me and given me encouraging words and friendly hellos—and parts in theatrical productions—and I don't even know how to begin showing my gratitude. Which is a lot to say for a professional writer who usually can't shut up. So I'm showing my gratitude by living my life and enjoying what it brings to me and believing in myself even when I don't really believe in myself. I love my family, I love my friends and I love my life. And I send an epic thank you to everyone who's helped get me here.

I'm thankful to be home and cozy and safe ...

after a 300-mile adventure today with snow and sleet and beautiful hoarfrost and huge trucks barreling down the highway and stops to see my ex and pick up the last of my crap that had been lingering in Chicago and buy some shoes and celebrate the staying-awake properties of my new meds (yay, lithium!) and all the while sharing the day with both my parents, who remain my stalwart supporters and I'm so grateful for them.

I'm thankful for family and friends who believe in me fiercely, even when I don't

I'm thankful for new opportunities to participate and stretch and thrive. I'm thankful for productive dance rehearsals and honest sweats and meds that seem to work better each day and 5 Hour Energy when they need a boost. I'm thankful my mom cries when I have a good day and my dad hugs me freely, which we never seemed to do enough in the past. I'm thankful I have a safety net in my family when so many others with illnesses like bipolar depression don't. And right now I'm this close to being thankful for a deep deep sleep after an awesome day.