“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?
