April 4 2019 marked the only anniversary I care about celebrating: one month of taking my pills regularly for the first time. For the first three weeks, my body shook and shivered and I had the chills. There was tapping at my elbow and I felt a bit like jello. My diagnosis of bipolar disorder had resulted in two things: my becoming a vocal and active mental health advocate, and a wild pill journey which started in 2014 but never went according to plan. If this sounds a little impossible, bear with me. I assure you it actually gets better.
I first tried a little white pill designed to treat mood disorders, called Olanzapine, back in 2014 when I was first diagnosed. It stole my dreams from my sleep, so I stopped taking it within two weeks. This was my first brush with medication. For three years after, I remained unmedicated. However, determination wasn’t enough to contain the mood swings. Middle of 2017, driven to desperation by depression, I sought out a psychiatrist famous across India and was prescribed yet another antipsychotic. Over the course of a few weeks, I grew numb. My desires came to a standstill and life ceased to hold anything of promise to me. When I worried about this to the doctor, I was told that my emotions needed to come to a ‘normal’ range and that what I felt pre-medication was not normal. Who wants to be normal, I thought unhappily. Within a few weeks, I quit the medication. Later that year, another bout of unbearable depression had me seeking out a kind psychiatrist all the way in Mumbai. I had initially reached out to request her to be part of a mental health awareness event I was organising in the city, called Living Stories, to talk about her journey of becoming a psychiatrist. Ironically it is I who ended up talking about my journey to her; by virtue of becoming her patient. I was prescribed a whole package of medicines—from anti-anxiety to antipsychotic to mood stabilisers-I was given it all. I took these medicines for around three months, which should seem impressive but really isn’t, considering the number of days I skipped in between. It’s just a day, I told myself, the medication will remain in my bloodstream from the previous night anyway. But that’s not how medications work. And so today, here I am, still using the word ‘trying’ before the word ‘medicine’.
Until September 2018, I did not have a therapist who could help me understand my relationship with medication. I was simply made to feel like a bad patient for fearing it so much. I first went on pills in 2014; the mere fact that the pills gave me a totally blank sleep scared my active, dreaming mind so much, I stopped them in two weeks. In the years that followed, my mental illness grew up with me. Whenever my tendencies to harm myself grew extreme, I would seek help. I would be given medicines, and I would be inconsistent. It was the same cycle all over again; seeking medicines in times of desperation, begging to be off them the second I felt better. And in this way, I stumbled into 2018, where the psychiatrist refused to explain the medicines with the level of detail I needed. The chemicals prescribed to calm my curious mind, usually in large doses, led me straight to Google and had me believing the worst. I wasn’t always wrong; some mood stabilisers were making me so stable, I had no moods after taking them. Nor much of a personality.
Here’s a true story. Once upon a time not so long ago, I had a history of overdosing. When I felt desperately sad, which I did for many, many months last year, I succumbed to swallowing 50 pills at a time to stop the pain. These were a cocktail of mood stabilisers, antidepressants and anti-anxiety pills. Sometimes, an antipsychotic was thrown in the mix. You see, living was painful. To live with a mind stuck on a loop with a series of invasive, painful and ever-spiraling thoughts grew unbearable. When I said this to a psychiatrist, however, I received the most poignant response – “This won’t kill you,” he waved me off with yet another prescription. At that point, I should have known enough to change doctors, but shopping for mental health professionals is exhausting. Add to the mix deep, suicidal depression and hardly any human connection-it wasn’t the most conducive environment for healing. I did not get better-not for 9 more months.
My work as a mental health advocate took a slight beating, by which I mean to say I did way less than I usually could have. To whatever I did undertake, I did complete justice, including a workshop series called ‘The Inside Story’, which I conducted in three cities. I also got certified in expressive arts-based therapy in clinical practice from Fortis Hospitals and UNESCO CID. This might seem like an irrelevant spot of information, but this is to say that a person can seem functional on the outside, and be dying on the inside and not a soul will know otherwise. This is also to say that even though my life was actually falling apart, my love for mental health and art, and my parents’ love for me somehow kept me alive.
My depressive phases are of two main kinds – exhausted and hateful (towards myself, mostly) – and in the hateful phases, I could move heaven and earth just to die and remain dead. Late in February 2019, another phase of depression hit, and this time the hateful kind. After a 10-day battle with the blade, the blade won. That is when I finally accepted the terrifying reality that medication might have to become a part of my life, whether or not I liked it. I have been with an excellent therapist who’d tried to ease me into medication previously but had failed, but never made me feel guilty for it, and never gave up on me. This time, as she looked at possibly the 7th depressive phase I have slipped into since knowing her, she looked at me closely.
“Do you think it’s time to reconsider medication?” she asked gently. “I can’t keep doing this, I cannot keep slipping, I cannot,” I mumbled through ravaged nails; confused, scared and anxious. The anxiety had taken over my body and turned me into a human knot. But then my psychologist did something incredible. She first made the effort to understand everything I was afraid of—which was a list that began with irregularity, ended with side effects with almost everything in-between. Next, she proposed to call the psychiatrist herself and set up an appointment for me. This small act meant eons to me. To give you context, this was the same psychiatrist I had visited in September on my current therapist’s recommendation. He was great, we had a good conversation, he prescribed some medicines, but I could never go back to him because I had never eaten the medicines. My anxiety has made me avoid all sorts of situations in ways I am not necessarily proud of, including this one. Left to my own devices, I might have never called the psychiatrist. A small act of kindness on behalf of my psychologist and here I am.
In the past, whenever I was asked to take medicines, my instinctive question was, “Who will give me my meds?” as opposed to, “How will I manage them myself?” Today, I use an app that reminds me to take my medicines on time every single night. I am not dependant on anyone to regulate my medication. However, I am on a bunch of medicines; lithium, an antidepressant, an anti-psychotic and anti-anxiety pills, and it would be a joke if I said there were no side effects. Some days, all I can do is to get up in the morning, roll out of bed and then live my day instead of staying buried in my blanket. There are many, many evenings when I burst into tears of pain and frustration after the third throwing up fit session of the day. The moods do not magically stabilise. It takes time and discipline, investing in a passion helps. I reconnected with my love for art and am now turning my mood swings into leaf collages or acrylic rainbows. And if you’re wondering why I chose to put myself through this ordeal and stay on the meds, let me explain myself.
I used to live my life across a very large spectrum. Sometimes, I end up spending too much time on one end of this spectrum, and it doesn’t do me any good. My medications allow me to explore the entire length and breadth of my mood spectrum by helping me spend equal time everywhere. I do not necessarily stick to the boring middle ground all the time. It’s just that the highs don’t swallow me anymore, and the lows don’t have me carving my skin with sharp objects. It has only been a month this time, but it is the most regular I have ever been with medication my entire life; and that is saying something.
This is Sanchana’s second story here. Watch the first one here.
