Life After Psychosis

I want to preface this with 2 things.

1. I think I am doing good, great, even. I am as stable as I could ask for, my medication routine is working for me, I haven’t had a hallucination in nearly 4 months and my depression is, for now, controlled. I am thriving. I am in a place that even 6-8 months ago I thought I would absolutely never see, and I am so proud of myself for getting here.

2. This is just my experience. I don’t speak on behalf of every person who has experienced psychosis, but for me - this is what life after psychosis has looked like.

Ok, now that the housekeeping is out of the way, let me tell you why postpartum psychosis continues to ruin my life, even 4 months removed from my last “episode”.

That’s half a joke, and half only funny because its true.

Before psychosis, I struggled with PTSD from an accident I had in college. The accident caused damage to my lungs, and after that every time I felt even a little bit out of breath – my brain would go into fight or flight and start to go into “panic” mode about not being able to breathe. These anxiety attacks were infrequent, and in the grand scheme of things – not that bad.

Fast forward to now. I’d kill for a panic attack that minor again. But oh no no no, not this new Tiffy. New Tiffy, post-postpartum psychosis Tiffy, PTSD controls so much of her life now.

For a solid year and a half, my brain tricked me about once a week… So, somewhere around 78 times my brain convinced me of something that was not real.

Imagine finding out your spouse lied to you 78 times. SEVENTY-EIGHT lies, from little white lies about your cooking, to really big lies about their loyalty or faithfulness. That would lead most people to divorce, or at least into extensive couple’s therapy. Would you be able to just ~*trust*~ them right away? Absolutely not, they have lost that right and not earned a dime of it back.

This is the relationship I have with my brain now. I just don’t trust it. When I feel the most untrusting of my brain, I start to panic about my perception of reality.

I hate the word “triggered” but I am about to use it a lot, so -  here we go.

There are certain situations I know will trigger me to question my reality, and I struggle with these almost daily.

• Noises I can’t identify (also, loud noises) -  Thumps, whispers, creaking, people on the other side of a wall talking on the phone, people wearing masks and having a conversation. Can’t handle it.

• Large gatherings - People gathered into a space where multiple conversations are being had simultaneously. Can’t handle it.

The most triggering place for me is my office. There is a lot of both of those things happening at the office. I used to be so panicked about the office that I was throwing up, daily, at just the anticipation of having to go. I have worked through a lot of that anxiety that its not “throw-up-panic-attack” bad anymore. But its bad enough that I only go into the office 2x a week, and the thought of doing more than that does still make me want to throw up. When the construction began in the office above mine, the thumps and drilling noises made me spiral so badly I was nearly in tears when my boss told me to just go home. The spiral doesn’t end when I leave the office, either. It puts me in a headspace that follows me home, has me questioning my house as it creaks or the oven as it ticks… for the rest of the day my body stays in *panic* mode until I am so drained I fall asleep by, or before, 8 pm.

The other most triggering thing for me lately has been family gatherings. I’ve got a big, loud, crazy family that I love more than anything in the world, BUT yikes has it been hard to be a part of it lately.

Last month we had my favorite yearly family get together. It’s the guaranteed one time of year we are all going to be in one place, have a good time, play charades, and just hang out. This year, we even had limited the number of people so instead of a normal 75-100 people there was only about 25 of us… it was so physically and emotionally draining for me to be there, I had to excuse myself before my favorite part, the charades, even started. It was just too overwhelming to be in a conversation and be hearing 3 other conversations, then I start to panic about whether or not those are actual conversations or if I am just hearing voices on top of my own conversation… the whole thing is a mess in my head but it all leads to the same place – panic. Panic, for me, is usually followed by a full-body shut down. I get so overstimulated, I quite literally run out of battery power, and can not function without just going to sleep. I left the party early, went straight to sleep, and slept through the peak of the party. That was the second time in a week I had to leave a family function early.

It’s pretty defeating to be the person who just *can’t handle* daily office work or simple family functions. It’s pretty disparaging to be controlled by small, meaningless sounds. I’ve put so much work into returning to “normalcy” and it can all feel wasted after just a single “thump”.

I think I am making progress though, and that’s what keeps me going to the office when I can or pushing out of my comfort zone and forcing myself into large gatherings.  

This is what “normal” looks like after psychosis. Its over-run and dominated by the inability to trust your own brain. Everyday I celebrate small victories like grocery shopping without being triggered or lasting in my office for a full 9 hours without crying or throwing up.

I don’t know if this is how I’ll be forever, but I am hopeful I can keep working through it one small victory at a time.

“Normal”

I swear I used to be “normal”. At least I thought I was. I had battled with depression seriously maybe one other time before I had a baby, but nothing close to what I experienced postpartum. I struggled with my fair share of anxiety – but thought everyone did from time to time. My anxiety, I’d later find out, was PTSD from an accident I had in college. The only real “mental health” struggle I really had was ADHD.

And now, one baby and a lot of hormones later, my “mental health” rep sheet is a tad longer than that. I don’t know if “normal” is a thing that I will ever be again.

The first two psychiatrists I went to heard that my grandmother was a bipolar schizophrenic and immediately dismissed the idea of “postpartum mood disorders” and jumped straight to “bipolar schizophrenic”. They didn’t seem to care how normal I was before I had a baby, they didn’t listen to my symptoms, they just labeled me and told me I needed medication or inpatient services. Call me stubborn, but I refused medication from my first two psych’s because I didn’t feel the need to listen to them if they weren’t listening to me.

And then, in June of this year, I found myself in the office of yet another psychiatrist. He sat with me for over an hour at my first appointment and we talked about EVERYTHING. I half expected him to write me off just as the others had, but this time it was different.

He explained genetic mental illness to me like this – let’s say someone has a family history of alcoholism. That person isn’t automatically an alcoholic, but instead would be considered more likely to become one under the right circumstances. If that person experiences undue stress, that could trigger that “alcoholic” gene to turn on.

Whether this is exactly what he meant, or if its scientific at all, I don’t know, but this is how I interpreted it and it made me feel heard.

“I don’t think you are schizophrenic.” He told me, “I don’t know if you are bipolar, but having a baby was your ‘triggering’ event.”

He wasn’t jumping to conclusions. He was listening, attentively, and he laid out my options so I could decide my next step, instead of having one chose for me. I felt seen. Most of all, I finally didn’t feel like all of this was somehow my fault. For so long I had felt like I wasn’t mentally strong enough to become a mother, like I had inherently done something wrong, that the depression and psychosis could have been somehow prevented.

Through blurry, tearful eyes, I looked up and asked, “am I going to be like this forever?”

He sighed, handed me a tissue, and said, “I don’t know.”

Strangely, I found his honest uncertainty comforting.

He went on to explain that the hormonal surge of postpartum often causes these triggers in people prone to depression or psychosis, and that sometimes the “prone gene” can be “turned off”, or altered, by medication, or sometimes with time and lack of hormones they go away on their own, but sometimes they don’t, and it becomes a lifelong issue.

Its been nearly 6 months since this appointment and to be completely transparent, I ask him every 3 weeks during our check ins - “am I bipolar?” and his answer still remains “I don’t know”.

I ask, in part, because I am neurotic and have a need to be in control… but also because after doing my research, bipolar disorder really does explain a lot for me.

So, all that to say, I don’t know what my new “normal” is. Or if I will ever be “normal” again. Right now, I am stable. I don’t consider myself depressed. I haven’t had any hallucinations in a few months. I am doing really good, and I am proud of myself for getting to this point. If anything, I’ve learned that standing up for yourself as a patient is important, and that “shopping” for the right doctor can be LIFE-CHANGING. Great doctors are out there, doctors that listen to everything you need to say and ask all the right questions and make sure you are comfortable with your treatment plan, so don’t settle for doctors that throw you a prescription and move on to the next patient. I am also extremely grateful for the advances in modern medicine and availability of mental healthcare that I know my grandmother did not have the same access too. In a way, this whole journey has made me feel a lot closer to her. She struggled so openly with her mental illness during a time where mental illness wasn’t acknowledged as a medical issue, she was often misunderstood or labeled “crazy” or “having a nervous breakdown”. I think she’d be so proud to see mental illness talked about the way it is today.

So if this is the way I am going to be forever, then I will spend forever breaking the stigma that mental illness isn’t “normal”. Who wants to be “normal” anyway?

What the Suicidal Person Wants You to Know…

This took me about 2 weeks to write – because even though I consider myself “recovered”, I am not too far removed from the darkness. It doesn’t take much for me to get *that* bad, but it has gotten a lot easier to bring myself out of it, and that’s progress.

Anyway - I’ve wanted to talk about this but it’s always felt a little dark, and I don’t want it to be. I think this is important. If people on the outside could get a better understanding of what severe depression feels like, they can be a better resource for their friend, sister, brother, parent, child, or stranger. They could help save someone’s life.

However, I realize there is no “light” way to talk about suicidal thoughts, but as a recovered suicidal person, I am going to try my best.

This is the picture the media, society, whoever… has painted of the “suicidal person”.

That person is sad. That person is pessimistic. That person is dramatic. That person lacks a support system. That person needs to pray more.

Very rarely are those things true.

In fact, these assumptions are incredibly unhelpful.

Here is my experience, here is my *darkness*

That person is sad.

I can’t even call it sad. Sad doesn’t touch the surface of what is happening here.

I wasn’t feeling intense sadness, I was feeling nothing at all – which is worse. Sadness implies you have something to be sad about. I had nothing to be sad about. I was in a life stage I had been longing for. I was a mom!!!! I’ve wanted so badly to be a mom! And yet, *nothing*.

I felt worthless. I wasn’t good enough to be a mom. I was failing my son, he deserved better. I felt guilty for not feeling happy. I felt guilty for feeling consumed by nothingness. It became physically painful for me to do anything, and when all my responsibilities piled up in front of me, I sat in awe of how worthless I was. I proved all those negative thoughts right. I fell so behind on my day-to-day tasks that I felt like I was drowning. I couldn’t catch up; I couldn’t start over… and that’s when death started feeling like an option. I wasn’t sad, I was overwhelmed. I wanted a re-start button. The closest thing to a restart button, was death.

That person is pessimistic, dramatic.  

There is no one on earth who wanted to be happy more than I did. I tried so hard to just *be happier*. I wanted to wake up and feel myself again. In my darkest moment I remember asking my husband as he held me sobbing “why does everything have to feel like this?”.

I did not want to feel what I was feeling. No one wanted me to get better more than I did. No one CHOOSES to feel depressed. Depression consumes you in a way that leads you to believe you have no other option but darkness, or more darkness.

I once had someone I love very much tell me, “It can’t be that bad”.

That sentence broke me. I was trying my very hardest to hold myself together, exhausting every fiber of my being just to barely scrape by, and for what? To be told I was, what? Dramatic?

It is that bad. No matter how it looks on the outside, if someone tells you its ~THAT~ bad, believe them. Love them, support them, help them… but do not doubt them. I’ve never broken my arm, but I know that it probably hurts. If you have never felt that pain, you can still muster up some empathy.

That person lacks a support system.

This may be true for some people, but it wasn’t for me. I had the world’s most supportive and understanding husband who was doing everything he could possibly think of to get me the help I so desperately needed, but I still felt alone in my own thoughts. I felt immensely guilty that my husband was having to take on my burden, I felt weak, I felt unworthy. Everything I was feeling on my own, doubled in size when I shared it with my husband, feeling shameful that he had to spend even 1 second of his time worrying about me.

To a normal person, you’d think “well that’s just not true, he loves you and wants what’s best for you, he was just doing his part, you aren’t a burden.”

You are correct, normal person, that is the case. But depression did not let me think that logically. It made me believe that I was undeserving of the love I was receiving, I was a bad wife, a worse mother. These thoughts cycled in my brain, worsening in intensity until I was so alone in my own head, it did not matter how much love and help I was receiving, I’d been convinced that if I was dead, my husband would have less to worry about.

It sounds extreme. That’s because it is.

People think suicide is “selfish”. I’m guilty of that. Before having experienced this darkness, I’d probably agree with that statement. I would have thought, “how could they do that to their families?”.

What I learned in the darkness is that suicidal people have been lied to by their depression. Depression has convinced them, as it convinced me, that their death would be a welcomed sigh of relief for their loved ones. That dying would be a favor.

Onto my last soapbox –

That person needs to pray more.

I got this “advice” a lot. This, to me, was the most harmful advice I received. Let me first clarify, this is the insinuation that the severely depressed person is somehow not “spiritual” enough, that they could “spend more time with God” and be “cured”. 

I know people who told me this did not mean it harmfully, but in my darkest moments, this advice just made me feel more alone.

I had been praying, I had been seeking out God. Guess what? I was still depressed. I still thought I was better off dead.

At night, after my baby and husband had gone to sleep, I’d sit in prayer. Most of the time through heavy tears, I would plead for God to take away the pain, to take away the darkness, or even to just take me away from all of it, I’d tell Him how thankful I was for all the blessings I had, but I struggled to feel the joy of being “blessed”. I spent countless nights crying myself to sleep, only to wake up and do it again.

Depression would rear its ugly head and say, “not even God can save you.”

I was led to believe that God’s cure for depression was somewhere in between the lines of verses about anxiety, overcoming obstacles or finding strength. That simply isn’t true.

When the bible does address depression and suicide, the answer is far from “pray harder”.

In 1 Kings 19, Elijah is overwhelmed, he is tired, he is comparing himself to others and he just doesn’t understand “God’s plan” for him. He gives up. Elijah becomes suicidal and asks God to take his life.

God sends an angel to Elijah who tells him to “take rest, eat cake”. 

When he is rested, Elijah seeks God again. He still feels unworthy and overwhelmed. God understands, so to ease Elijah’s burden, He names 2 men who Elijah can depend on to step in for him, and a 3rd man who is to be his right-hand man.  

Gods actual cure for depression had 3 parts.

1. Take rest

2. Fuel your body (eat cake)

3. Ease the burden

This brings me to the real point of this post.

Lets summarize all the things that are NOT helpful to say to a severely depressed or suicidal person.

UNHELPFUL

-          choose happiness

-          just be happier

-          you are just sad, sadness will pass

-          you need to be more positive

-          you are being dramatic

-          it’s not that bad

-          you are being selfish

-          spend more time with God/in prayer

-          maybe you need a hobby

-          try making new friends

- everybody feels like that sometimes

-          you need to “get out” more

(if I missed one, please DM me, I will add to this list because I think its helpful to know)

If these are all the wrong and unhelpful, then what is right? What is helpful?

Ultimately, what helped me come out of my darkest moments was God’s actual cure for depression. Those three things are what could help save a suicidal person. THESE things are helpful.

REST.

I needed to take rest, I needed to let go of all responsibility and just ~rest~. On a few occasions, that was laying in bed for the whole day. On those days, my mom or my husband would take on my household duties. I laid in bed, painfully fighting intrusive thoughts, but the laundry still got done, the baby got to daycare, the floors were clean (thanks mom). I didn’t have to watch those responsibilities pile up in front of me, I got to take the rest my mind and body needed.

EAT CAKE.

This goes hand in hand with rest. I wasn’t eating. I wasn’t doing much of anything for myself. My mom came up and stayed with us and she and my husband planned dinners, she would go to the grocery store, she would bring breakfast up to my office, she asked me what I wanted for lunch and would make sure I got that thing. She was making sure my body was fueled and taking one more thing off my plate.

EASE THE BURDEN

You can see what a huge role my mom had in easing my burden at home, she was truly a God send.

My husband helped a lot too, he is also the one who researched therapists in our area and found one that he thought was the best fit.

Whitney, my therapist, helped me learn coping mechanisms, provided an outlet to talk to and an honest feedback to tell me when I wasn’t thinking logically or needed more intervention.

While I never told my boss outright what was going on with me, she could tell I wasn’t performing at my “normal” and when things got bad, I had to tell her the workload was just to much for me, and she took care of it. Somedays, I just called in sick because that was easier than trying to work.

Little by little I chipped away at what I could, but I couldn’t fully do it on my own. I needed support, I needed guidance, and I also needed medication. Those are the things that pulled me away from the darkness, and it didn’t happen overnight. It took weeks, if not a few months, to be able to look back and say “wow, I don’t even know who that person was, because it was not me”.

Helpful things –

-          Is there anything I could take off your plate?

-          Let me take *child* for a few hours so you can get some rest.

-          Would you like me to come stay with you for a few days, I would love to help around the house.

-          I saw this funny video and it made me think of you.

-          Can I bring you a meal?

-          Can I pick up some groceries for you?

-          Do you need someone to talk to? Cry with?

-          YOU are the best YOU for your family, they are so fortunate to have YOU.

If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis call 800-273-8255 to talk to a dedicated suicide prevention specialist. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger of committing an irreversible act, call 911.