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"Don't take my devils away, because my angels may flee, too." ~ Rilke
I went to a psychiatric hospital last month. I wasn’t scared to go in, although my husband was terrified that they would clockwork-orange me within the hour. They didn’t, and they even seemed to figure out rather quickly what might be wrong with me. It took only two hours. Seven years and two hours.
The place is on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C., in a neighborhood very close to three different psychiatrists I have seen in the past seven years. They were each helpful to some degree at some point in time, but in the last six months, even under the care of the doctor who once cared for John Hinckley Jr., I was not getting any better. I used to joke that if I had the same shrink as the guy who shot Reagan, then either I was in very good hands, or I was really crazy.
All three psychiatrists I had seen before last week had offices in fancy buildings up and down Connecticut Avenue, the kind of buildings that have their own names starting with “the”—The Albemarle, The Essex. One of these buildings was so fancy that it had its own doorman and library on the first floor. I would dutifully sign in at the front desk each time I had an appointment and then sit in a waiting room so fancy that I swore I must have looked to the other patients like the wayward daughter of some senator or ambassador. Suffice it to say, I was the only one in the waiting room—a place where classical music blares into ficus plants and Poetry Quarterly is fanned out on marble end tables—with a ring in my nose and a roller derby button on my backpack.
In my memory, the sessions now run together as an endless stream of “What’s on your mind?” followed by 49 and a half minutes of me talking, saying things, but still leaving each time with the same sense of “unfocused dread,” as William Styron puts it in Darkness Visible. (Reading this book, for me, was like holding up a mirror to my face.) I had never left a therapy session feeling better, only better off for having gone. I thought that as long as I was saying things 49 minutes a week, then one day my condition would improve.
I was told at some point I had a generalized mood disorder, a real disappointment to anyone who wants a specific and revealing answer to years of questions about my mental health—or even to anyone who appreciates good writing. The phrase “generalized mood disorder” does not lend itself to lyrics or poetry, or even to a witty Facebook update. It just sits there, unmocking, uninspiring, unhelpful.
I was given drugs, and then more drugs. There was never the magic burst of an explanation for my symptoms that I sought—no satisfying a-ha moment. Once you start to hope for a repressed trauma, just to have an answer, you’re too far gone to have any objectivity on how awful it is to hope for a thing like that. I just wanted to know what was wrong with me, and that drive had replaced even the desire to feel better.
I got a diagnosis. I am on the bipolar spectrum. I had long suspected it—I knew that this was what I really meant when I say that “my turning radius is set” in one of my songs—but no doctor was ever looking at my lyrics in an attempt to map my subconscious. I have to do that on my own. I have to choose whether to embrace this term, bipolar: newly specific, highly known, frequently thrown around with jocularity in non-clinical settings, probably in reference to me. A good friend once told me that I am a “medley of dichotomies,” and I cheerfully took it as a compliment.
Since I have never had manic symptoms, I thought this diagnosis unavailable to me. I have come to find out that one of the ways clinicians define mania is what I would just call bliss: “euphoric feelings induced by art, music and nature.” Now I have to choose whether to give that up.
The hospital’s recommendation was more meds—a third to add to my daily cocktail—a mood stabilizer, and I know what that means. Am I afraid I will lose more of my already blunted creative powers? Count on it. It’s like that Smiths song where Moz sings, “And the senses being dulled are mine. The senses being dulled are mine.”
I went to a psychiatric hospital last month. I wasn’t scared to go in, although my husband was terrified that they would clockwork-orange me within the hour. They didn’t, and they even seemed to figure out rather quickly what might be wrong with me. It took only two hours. Seven years and two hours.
The place is on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C., in a neighborhood very close to three different psychiatrists I have seen in the past seven years. They were each helpful to some degree at some point in time, but in the last six months, even under the care of the doctor who once cared for John Hinckley Jr., I was not getting any better. I used to joke that if I had the same shrink as the guy who shot Reagan, then either I was in very good hands, or I was really crazy.
All three psychiatrists I had seen before last week had offices in fancy buildings up and down Connecticut Avenue, the kind of buildings that have their own names starting with “the”—The Albemarle, The Essex. One of these buildings was so fancy that it had its own doorman and library on the first floor. I would dutifully sign in at the front desk each time I had an appointment and then sit in a waiting room so fancy that I swore I must have looked to the other patients like the wayward daughter of some senator or ambassador. Suffice it to say, I was the only one in the waiting room—a place where classical music blares into ficus plants and Poetry Quarterly is fanned out on marble end tables—with a ring in my nose and a roller derby button on my backpack.
In my memory, the sessions now run together as an endless stream of “What’s on your mind?” followed by 49 and a half minutes of me talking, saying things, but still leaving each time with the same sense of “unfocused dread,” as William Styron puts it in Darkness Visible. (Reading this book, for me, was like holding up a mirror to my face.) I had never left a therapy session feeling better, only better off for having gone. I thought that as long as I was saying things 49 minutes a week, then one day my condition would improve.
I was told at some point I had a generalized mood disorder, a real disappointment to anyone who wants a specific and revealing answer to years of questions about my mental health—or even to anyone who appreciates good writing. The phrase “generalized mood disorder” does not lend itself to lyrics or poetry, or even to a witty Facebook update. It just sits there, unmocking, uninspiring, unhelpful.
I was given drugs, and then more drugs. There was never the magic burst of an explanation for my symptoms that I sought—no satisfying a-ha moment. Once you start to hope for a repressed trauma, just to have an answer, you’re too far gone to have any objectivity on how awful it is to hope for a thing like that. I just wanted to know what was wrong with me, and that drive had replaced even the desire to feel better.
I got a diagnosis. I am on the bipolar spectrum. I had long suspected it—I knew that this was what I really meant when I say that “my turning radius is set” in one of my songs—but no doctor was ever looking at my lyrics in an attempt to map my subconscious. I have to do that on my own. I have to choose whether to embrace this term, bipolar: newly specific, highly known, frequently thrown around with jocularity in non-clinical settings, probably in reference to me. A good friend once told me that I am a “medley of dichotomies,” and I cheerfully took it as a compliment.
Since I have never had manic symptoms, I thought this diagnosis unavailable to me. I have come to find out that one of the ways clinicians define mania is what I would just call bliss: “euphoric feelings induced by art, music and nature.” Now I have to choose whether to give that up.
The hospital’s recommendation was more meds—a third to add to my daily cocktail—a mood stabilizer, and I know what that means. Am I afraid I will lose more of my already blunted creative powers? Count on it. It’s like that Smiths song where Moz sings, “And the senses being dulled are mine. The senses being dulled are mine.”