I spent the first five years recognizing the symptoms, then the next twenty years fighting the disease and getting on with my working life, my social life and, most of all, my faith.
I wanted to work because I didn’t want to be on social security for the rest of my life and not have anything to show for it, like a home, a car and other pleasures. To strengthen my self mentally, morally and mostly spiritually, I wanted to build my faith on the wisdom of the Bible and other literature.
Then I joined Schizophrenia Anonymous and realized that I had accomplished those goals. About five years ago I received the Mental Health America Consumers of the Year award from my mentors in the Agency; and now I’m setting new goals in work, school, and faith-based endeavors to help others overcome their afflictions.
--Sam Irvin
Monday, October 27, 2008
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Battle with Schizophrenia
I have a birth defect called bilateral ptosis which I was tormented by others while in school, but I learned to have faith in God to get me through the pain and it prepared me for the future battle with schizophrenia.
The battle with schizophrenia started for me as a young adult in college and my career on the railroad. It started like it always does to people. I was having delusions of grandeur then the hallucinations started—audio and visual. I was tormented by voices, I thought people were playing games with me and hardly ever got a decent night’s sleep.
I must have lived like this for five years trying to work, go to school and do volunteer work in the community, but it all came crashing down around me. I started going to counseling for depression, the more I talked, the more it was obvious I had a far larger problem. So the therapist talked me into talking to a doctor of psychiatry, Dr. Kim. He gave me a script for tranquilizers and anti-anxiety medication.
My recovery has been better than expected, I believe, because I now am working a steady job at Ohio State University as a janitor. My education has had to take a back seat to work and family commitments and I am a member of Mental Health America. It’s been the best volunteer experience to me than the railroad work I did.
To sum up, my faith in God and a positive attitude on the future have pulled me through.
--Sam Irvin
The battle with schizophrenia started for me as a young adult in college and my career on the railroad. It started like it always does to people. I was having delusions of grandeur then the hallucinations started—audio and visual. I was tormented by voices, I thought people were playing games with me and hardly ever got a decent night’s sleep.
I must have lived like this for five years trying to work, go to school and do volunteer work in the community, but it all came crashing down around me. I started going to counseling for depression, the more I talked, the more it was obvious I had a far larger problem. So the therapist talked me into talking to a doctor of psychiatry, Dr. Kim. He gave me a script for tranquilizers and anti-anxiety medication.
My recovery has been better than expected, I believe, because I now am working a steady job at Ohio State University as a janitor. My education has had to take a back seat to work and family commitments and I am a member of Mental Health America. It’s been the best volunteer experience to me than the railroad work I did.
To sum up, my faith in God and a positive attitude on the future have pulled me through.
--Sam Irvin
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Cobbler's Children
My grandfather, an electrician for Pennsylvania Railroads, never seemed to get around to completing the wiring in his own home, where he and my grandmother raised five children. The wires were looped onto nails and the switches didn't get boxes until he died, at which point my grandmother hired someone to do it. It was a case of "the cobbler's children get no shoes," according to my grandmother.
In the same way, I sometimes catch myself doing a poor job of caring for my own mental health, even though I've learned a lot about mental health by working at MHA for 11 years.
For example, I tend to scarf down my lunch at the computer instead of taking a lunch break. It seems that I will get more done that way, but research says I would probably get more done (and have to re-do fewer things) if I would take regular breaks from my desk.
I need to exercise, eat right, drink enough water, get enough sleep, and find healthy ways to deal with stress to stay healthy, and that includes being mentally healthy.
I need to keep my work area and home a pleasurable place to be in; mess is depressing. I need to make time to spend with my family and friends. Come to think of it, those are the same things I suggest to parents and others that I work with at MHA.
So, I'm going to publicly state my goals for the next few months:
- Start a success team for 4-6 people to meet with me weekly. We will brainstorm with each other about problems and solutions and share goals and successes
- Start an acoustic jam session once a month to get more music back in my life
I invite you to ask me about those goals if we talk. I don't know if it's mentally healthy or not, but for me, fear of mortification is a powerful incentive for following through and a disincentive against procrastination.
Happy trails,
Judith Allee
Parent Support Coordinator
Monday, October 20, 2008
Three Noses
When I first applied for the position as Suicide Prevention Coordinator, I told several of my close acquaintances. When I got the interview, I told more people about the job. Since my first day on the job, I have told even more people about my job.
Nearly every time I tell someone that I am the Suicide Prevention Coordinator at Mental Health America of Licking County, I am given either strange or sympathetic looks. (Thankfully, I do get the occasional look of admiration, along with the comment that I am doing very tough work.) At first, I understood why people I knew gave me the looks of sympathy or fear. Suicide is one of the last taboos in America. We can freely talk about sex, pedophilia, homosexuality, HIV/AIDS, and abortion. But mention suicide, and people take several steps back, like you’ve just grown a second nose.
This is why I have a job. Since people don’t talk to their friends, parents, children, and so on about suicide, not many people know the truth about it. Unfortunately, this also means that the rate of suicide in America is still alarmingly high. Most of the completed suicides stem from mental illness, most often depression. Depression is a treatable brain disorder (another word for mental illness). Logically, this means that suicide is preventable if depression is caught early enough. Having just attended Gatekeeper training with the Ohio Suicide Prevention Foundation, I would like to impart some of my knowledge about how to prevent suicide to you.
Nearly every time I tell someone that I am the Suicide Prevention Coordinator at Mental Health America of Licking County, I am given either strange or sympathetic looks. (Thankfully, I do get the occasional look of admiration, along with the comment that I am doing very tough work.) At first, I understood why people I knew gave me the looks of sympathy or fear. Suicide is one of the last taboos in America. We can freely talk about sex, pedophilia, homosexuality, HIV/AIDS, and abortion. But mention suicide, and people take several steps back, like you’ve just grown a second nose.
This is why I have a job. Since people don’t talk to their friends, parents, children, and so on about suicide, not many people know the truth about it. Unfortunately, this also means that the rate of suicide in America is still alarmingly high. Most of the completed suicides stem from mental illness, most often depression. Depression is a treatable brain disorder (another word for mental illness). Logically, this means that suicide is preventable if depression is caught early enough. Having just attended Gatekeeper training with the Ohio Suicide Prevention Foundation, I would like to impart some of my knowledge about how to prevent suicide to you.
When we encounter stressful or threatening situations in our lives, our brain (three pounds of protoplasm housed in our skulls) helps protect us. With the way the economy and politics are going, more Americans will be facing stressful and threatening situations in their lives. Our brain, or more specifically, our amygdala, releases three different hormones that are related to fight-or-flight. We become equipped to either stand up for ourselves (fight) or escape the danger (flight).
- Testosterone is what gives us strength in our muscles to either fight or run away.
- Epinephrine (also known as adrenaline) moves blood flow from body functions that are not necessary for the fight-or-flight response, like digestion, to our muscles and brain.
- Cortisol soothes the body after fight or flight has taken place. (Ever used hydroCORTISONE cream to make swelling go away?)
There is only one problem. These days, none of us are chased by saber-toothed tigers or giant wooly mammoths; instead, we sit at our desks or on our couches, and when stressful or threatening situations occur, we don’t use up the testosterone, epinephrine or cortisol that are released into our system. As beneficial as these hormones are to our body, too much of them in our system destroy little things in our brains called neurons. Most often, the neurons in the part of our brain that stores short-term memory, mood and emotions, the hippocampus, are affected. The breaking down of the neurons that determine our emotions and moods causes people to become depressed.
Like I mentioned earlier, 90% of people who die by suicide suffer from some form of brain disorder (mental illness), mostly depression. Depression, like other mental illnesses (thanks, Kristen!), is highly treatable with medications and therapy. If we begin to screen everyone for depression, we can catch it, treat it, and prevent suicides.
I do hope that one day, I work myself out of a job, but there is much work to be done until then.
Oh yeah, and exercise as much as you can, and you can help save your neurons from destruction!
--Brittany Schumann
Suicide Prevention Coordinator
Friday, October 10, 2008
Badges
When the phone rings at Mental Health America of Licking County it’s generally because someone needs help. Sometimes that help takes the form of redirecting the caller who may have called us by mistake, but many times people call MHA because they know something is wrong and they don’t know how to make it right.
I have a scar over my left eye. I like to tell people that I got from a motorcycle accident. I know people who attribute their crows feet to experience and their furrowed brows to their children and their laugh lines to their grandchildren. These are the badges, the benchmarks of lives lived and experiences collected. We all have them: some of us show them off and some of us go to extraordinary lengths to conceal them.
But when it comes to the health of our brains it seems that most of us would prefer to remain undercover in the belief that if the rest of the world can’t see our badges, then our identity is protected.
This was brought to mind by a call we recently received. A mother called out of love and concern for her son who experiencing some behavioral challenges. She knew something was not right, but did not know how to make it right.
After talking with a member of the MHA staff, it seemed pretty clear that her son was experiencing symptoms of schizophrenia. She was advised to seek help from a mental health professional to get a diagnosis and to initiate treatment. We offered to provide her with some educational materials about the disease and other resources.
The mother responded that her husband didn’t want his son to know anything about schizophrenia.
This was an issue of concern for us because schizophrenia has a genetic component.
The mother disclosed that there were several cases of schizophrenia in her husband’s family.
Like with so many mental illnesses, great advances have been made in the diagnosis and treatment of schizophrenia—much of it within the last decade—but the father seems to think that with no diagnosis there is no illness. It’s kind of like thinking that you can’t be overdrawn at the bank if you still have checks in your checkbook.
Among a range of challenges that we face in confronting mental illness, the most persistent and yet most addressable one is stigma. Sooner or later we are each forced to admit that flawless beauty and perfect health are ideals and yet we stubbornly cling to this notion that our brains are always 100% healthy. Life takes its toll on the brain just as much, if not more so than on the rest of the body.
When someone asks me about my scar, I have an opportunity to tell a funny story. The badges caused from a mental illness can also become opportunities, but we first have to recognize and accept them.
--Graham Campbell
Associate Director
I have a scar over my left eye. I like to tell people that I got from a motorcycle accident. I know people who attribute their crows feet to experience and their furrowed brows to their children and their laugh lines to their grandchildren. These are the badges, the benchmarks of lives lived and experiences collected. We all have them: some of us show them off and some of us go to extraordinary lengths to conceal them.
But when it comes to the health of our brains it seems that most of us would prefer to remain undercover in the belief that if the rest of the world can’t see our badges, then our identity is protected.
This was brought to mind by a call we recently received. A mother called out of love and concern for her son who experiencing some behavioral challenges. She knew something was not right, but did not know how to make it right.
After talking with a member of the MHA staff, it seemed pretty clear that her son was experiencing symptoms of schizophrenia. She was advised to seek help from a mental health professional to get a diagnosis and to initiate treatment. We offered to provide her with some educational materials about the disease and other resources.
The mother responded that her husband didn’t want his son to know anything about schizophrenia.
This was an issue of concern for us because schizophrenia has a genetic component.
The mother disclosed that there were several cases of schizophrenia in her husband’s family.
Like with so many mental illnesses, great advances have been made in the diagnosis and treatment of schizophrenia—much of it within the last decade—but the father seems to think that with no diagnosis there is no illness. It’s kind of like thinking that you can’t be overdrawn at the bank if you still have checks in your checkbook.
Among a range of challenges that we face in confronting mental illness, the most persistent and yet most addressable one is stigma. Sooner or later we are each forced to admit that flawless beauty and perfect health are ideals and yet we stubbornly cling to this notion that our brains are always 100% healthy. Life takes its toll on the brain just as much, if not more so than on the rest of the body.
When someone asks me about my scar, I have an opportunity to tell a funny story. The badges caused from a mental illness can also become opportunities, but we first have to recognize and accept them.
--Graham Campbell
Associate Director
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Coming Out
A year ago this month, I came out. Not in the traditional sense of the word, I did not announce that I was gay. I told my parents and my friends, (and only some of my friends) that I have a mental illness.
This is National Mental Illness Awareness Week. It is also the time of year that Mental Health America prepares for its Annual Awards Dinner which will be held this year on November 13. Last year, I was recognized with a great honor, as Consumer of the Year. Before the announcement was made, Paddy Kutz, the Executive Director of the agency, where I was then a volunteer, asked me into her office.
When Paddy first asked me if I would feel comfortable accepting this recognition and the fact that it would require me to acknowledge my role as a consumer, I was a bit hesitant. I had not yet come out to my family and friends. I was concerned that people would only see me as my diagnosis and not be able to discern where it left off and my personality began.
A few people I told warned me that I would never be able to find work again, once the secret of my diagnosis was out. I would be socially ostracized. My husband and I like dogs better than most people, so I wasn’t really worried about that.
People have told me to say that I have anxieties-that I experience depression. Both of these statements are true. My friends were concerned that if I told my whole diagnosis, I would suffer social bias and additional fallout from the stigma of having a serious mental illness.
I decided that that I needed to address the stigma of mental illness in our community. So, I decided to state that I am a person who experiences bipolar disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
I feel strongly that it is important to show yet another face of mental illness, to demonstrate that there are many faces of mental illness in our community and they belong to someone you know.
Mental Health America served 1 in six individuals in the county last year, that’s you or someone you know.
An equal number of men and women develop bipolar disorder and it occurs among all ages, ethnic groups and social classes. Approximately 2.5 million Americans live with this disorder, but the number of people affected is even greater.
People living with bipolar disorder experience alternating episodes of mania (severe highs), depression (severe lows) and mixed states, which contain elements of both.
If left untreated, people with bipolar disorder are at great risk for suicide, substance abuse, incarceration, and other harmful consequences. The mortality rate for people with untreated bipolar disorder is higher than it is for most types of heart disease and many types of cancers.
But with accurate diagnosis and treatment, people with bipolar disorder have better treatment success rates than people with heart disease. Essential components of the treatment process for people living with bipolar disorder include medication, psychotherapy, support groups, and education about the illness. It is estimated that 80 percent to 90 percent of people with bipolar disorder can be treated effectively with medication and psychotherapy.
Raising awareness of bipolar disorder is an important step towards promoting early detection and accurate diagnosis, which is why the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) created Bipolar Disorder Awareness Day, scheduled this year for Thursday, October 9.
The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that two percent of the U.S. population or one in 40 people experience Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, or OCD, in their lifetime. That is two to three times more common than schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
Many people are familiar with the television series Monk, and its detective with his own form of OCD, but there are many manifestations of obsessive-compulsive disorder and individuals suffer to various degrees.
You never see successful people with bipolar disorder on TV or Film.
Bipolar disorder has caused the most serious episodes in my life, but even with years of treatment, OCD continues to cause me the most daily problems.
I thought that I would try to explain to you what is like to experience OCD, and then I realized that I cannot. Just as I cannot explain to my husband why the simple task of choosing a restaurant for lunch has frequently reduced me to tears, why I can’t eat at a salad bar or buffet, or an office party, why I can’t leave my dog over night, or have people in my house or the host of other rules that govern my daily life.
My husband, Graham, has patiently stood by me for 20 years, confused but supportive, as the rules change suddenly without explanation, it is one of the many reasons I adore him.
I’d like to thank Paddy Kutz for her encouragement for helping me to find the voice to speak. I’d like to thank my parents for continuing to support me. And most of all, I’d like to thank Graham who stands by me no matter what I say.
If you or anyone you know are concerned about depression or anxiety, please contact the Mental Health America office for more information. There is help. And if you experience a mental illness, I urge you to tell someone you know. You may be surprised at their reaction. And they may be surprised to learn that the face of mental illness is not so frightening, it is their roommate, their daughter, their co-worker or friend.
This is National Mental Illness Awareness Week. It is also the time of year that Mental Health America prepares for its Annual Awards Dinner which will be held this year on November 13. Last year, I was recognized with a great honor, as Consumer of the Year. Before the announcement was made, Paddy Kutz, the Executive Director of the agency, where I was then a volunteer, asked me into her office.
When Paddy first asked me if I would feel comfortable accepting this recognition and the fact that it would require me to acknowledge my role as a consumer, I was a bit hesitant. I had not yet come out to my family and friends. I was concerned that people would only see me as my diagnosis and not be able to discern where it left off and my personality began.
A few people I told warned me that I would never be able to find work again, once the secret of my diagnosis was out. I would be socially ostracized. My husband and I like dogs better than most people, so I wasn’t really worried about that.
People have told me to say that I have anxieties-that I experience depression. Both of these statements are true. My friends were concerned that if I told my whole diagnosis, I would suffer social bias and additional fallout from the stigma of having a serious mental illness.
I decided that that I needed to address the stigma of mental illness in our community. So, I decided to state that I am a person who experiences bipolar disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
I feel strongly that it is important to show yet another face of mental illness, to demonstrate that there are many faces of mental illness in our community and they belong to someone you know.
Mental Health America served 1 in six individuals in the county last year, that’s you or someone you know.
An equal number of men and women develop bipolar disorder and it occurs among all ages, ethnic groups and social classes. Approximately 2.5 million Americans live with this disorder, but the number of people affected is even greater.
People living with bipolar disorder experience alternating episodes of mania (severe highs), depression (severe lows) and mixed states, which contain elements of both.
If left untreated, people with bipolar disorder are at great risk for suicide, substance abuse, incarceration, and other harmful consequences. The mortality rate for people with untreated bipolar disorder is higher than it is for most types of heart disease and many types of cancers.
But with accurate diagnosis and treatment, people with bipolar disorder have better treatment success rates than people with heart disease. Essential components of the treatment process for people living with bipolar disorder include medication, psychotherapy, support groups, and education about the illness. It is estimated that 80 percent to 90 percent of people with bipolar disorder can be treated effectively with medication and psychotherapy.
Raising awareness of bipolar disorder is an important step towards promoting early detection and accurate diagnosis, which is why the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) created Bipolar Disorder Awareness Day, scheduled this year for Thursday, October 9.
The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that two percent of the U.S. population or one in 40 people experience Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, or OCD, in their lifetime. That is two to three times more common than schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
Many people are familiar with the television series Monk, and its detective with his own form of OCD, but there are many manifestations of obsessive-compulsive disorder and individuals suffer to various degrees.
You never see successful people with bipolar disorder on TV or Film.
Bipolar disorder has caused the most serious episodes in my life, but even with years of treatment, OCD continues to cause me the most daily problems.
I thought that I would try to explain to you what is like to experience OCD, and then I realized that I cannot. Just as I cannot explain to my husband why the simple task of choosing a restaurant for lunch has frequently reduced me to tears, why I can’t eat at a salad bar or buffet, or an office party, why I can’t leave my dog over night, or have people in my house or the host of other rules that govern my daily life.
My husband, Graham, has patiently stood by me for 20 years, confused but supportive, as the rules change suddenly without explanation, it is one of the many reasons I adore him.
I’d like to thank Paddy Kutz for her encouragement for helping me to find the voice to speak. I’d like to thank my parents for continuing to support me. And most of all, I’d like to thank Graham who stands by me no matter what I say.
If you or anyone you know are concerned about depression or anxiety, please contact the Mental Health America office for more information. There is help. And if you experience a mental illness, I urge you to tell someone you know. You may be surprised at their reaction. And they may be surprised to learn that the face of mental illness is not so frightening, it is their roommate, their daughter, their co-worker or friend.
--Kristen Frame
Compeer Coordinator
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