Lisa

Yesterday, I went to visit Lisa at Geauga hospital. Angel had been talking about going to see her, but when I got there, there were no other names on her visitor sheet. I remembered how lonely it was in psychiatric emergency. I was glad I had made the trip.
Lisa couldn't get over the fact that I had come. She kept saying she wasn't expecting me even though I'd told her I would be there. I thought maybe it was because other people had told her they'd show up and hadn't. Then I thought that maybe it was also because she was so heavily sedated. I wouldn't be able to stand it myself. She was on suicide watch. I thought about how much more depressed and dark I felt when I played with my meds and took more than I was supposed to. Being that heavily sedated only made the darkness worse. I couldn't understand the rationale of sedating her to keep her from self harming. They must think people only self harm when they're manic.
Her kidney infection had gotten worse. I thought about what I had learned about eastern medicine in massage school, that the kidneys are the house of our self esteem. Their yin emotion is fear and their yang emotion is confidence. Here she was, trying to summon up the confidence to leave her husband by hooking up with another man, but the new man was no better than her husband. When he hurt her, the end result was her getting pink slipped by her case manager, and involuntarily committed to the behavioral health ward.
I shared stories with her about other people I know who have been molested as children and were subsequently diagnosed with mental illness. I shared these stories because I wanted her to know that she wasn't the only one who'd been raped as a child and had resorted to LSD and cutting as a result. I wanted her to know that I understood her pain. As I sat before her, listening to her descriptions of every other patient in the ward, I wondered what her specific diagnoses was.
Some forms of Bi-Polar Disorder diminish the patient's cognitive skills, other's didn't. All forms leave the patient with a level of fear so high it can paralyze them and keep them from taking any sort of corrective actions regarding their personal lives.
She told me the new guy wanted her to lose weight if he was to be faithful to her. I told her she was the embodiment of the Goddess, and that the Great Mother Earth was in fact, our planet earth.
“Think about what shape the Great Mother is, Lisa. She's round, like us. She gives birth to new life every spring. Out of the belly of the earth comes new baby fawns and rabbits and flowers and trees. Women are supposed to be round, Lisa, because we're like the Great Mother.”
“You know, that's true.” she said. But I wasn't sure if what I was saying really clicked.
“Lisa, if we are the embodiment of the Goddess, that means we are made in the image of the divine. US, Lisa, women. We are divine. If you are made in the image of the divine, don't you deserve better than this?”
She didn't look at me. I couldn't be sure if it was more than she could comprehend, or if she was too heavily sedated or if I was talking about something her wall of paralyzing fear would not permit her to absorb.
“I believe in you.” I whispered in her ear as I kissed her goodbye.
I called my mom when I got home. I needed to thank her for always wanting to be a mother. Lisa's mother not only didn't believe her when she had sought her mother's help regarding the molestation, her mother had tried to give her away after Lisa told her what her step-dad had been doing.
My mother hadn't believed me either when I had told her, but my incident had been a one time thing. Maybe it was easier for my mother to forget. But somehow, I couldn't help correlating my mother's acceptance of me with my ability to function with this disease. Equally, I tied Lisa's mother's reaction to her haplessness.
When Lisa explained to me that her new boyfriend's semi rejection of her had made her not want to live, I got very emotional.
“No.” I said, “No, no. That is just an unacceptable answer.” I told her. “Because if you die, if you can't beat this, than what does that mean for the rest of us? If you can't overcome this, that means I can fail too.” and then almost by rote, I said, “For every problem, there is a solution. There is always an answer. There is always an answer. Failure is not an option. Failure is not an option.”
Where had I gotten this? Who had I heard this from? I didn't know. All I knew was that seeing Lisa in lock up left me feeling uncomfortably fragile, breakable, human.
I thanked my mom for visiting me back in 2005, when I was the one in lock up. I thanked her for always wanting me, even when this disease made me a monster. I thought about how many times I had woken up as a little girl wrapped in my mother's arms after my father had been manic. I was all she had back then. I apologized for calling her all kinds of names and for making her the scapegoat for everything that was wrong with me before I was diagnosed.
“You were the only person who came to see me.” I mused to my mother on the phone.
“I was the only person they would allow you to leave with.” corrected my mother.
I thought about how lonely Lisa was in lock up. I thought about how lonely I had been. Why are people so afraid of the psych ward?
Writers know that movies and books about mental health facilities always depict volatile relationships and violence on the ward because ALL riveting writing revolves around conflict. Conflict is what sells movie tickets. But that's not what goes on in the psych ward most of the time. More often, it's dispossessed, broken hearted people who've given up on themselves because everyone else in their lives has thrown in the towel.
A visitor is proof to them, that love still exists in the world.
Mental illness is not contagious. You can't catch Bi-Polar Disorder the way you catch the flu. If people with mental illness make you uncomfortable, maybe it's because we are a reminder of just how untenable our hold on reality is. One deviation in a synapse, one alteration in chemical composition and we're talking to a shoe and our pain response no longer exists. It's more complicated than that, of course. It takes real trauma for our brain chemistry to be wrought askew, but it can happen to any of us. The question is, do you acknowledge your frailty and regard the suffering with compassion, or do you close yourself off from us in paralyzing fear? Just remember that paralyzing fear is one of our symptoms.
You may already be one of us.