No help for students here

Last week was "Disability Awareness Day" at the college where I work, and where I sometimes take classes. I took time off work, took a lot of information from NAMI, and a display board, and set up a table to represent NAMI and to provide mental health resources for people who need them. Just like last year when I did this, there were no other groups there that had anything to do with mental health. All of the organizations focused on other disabilities. Unfortunately, though I do not regret doing this, I did not reach much of an audience. Few students came by any of the tables, and even fewer came by mine.

When one group of young students stopped by, a guy with curly black hair about, 19 years old, was openly laughing at the mention of "mental health". I said, "These are brain diseases. They affect people's brains, just like any other disease affects the body. They are physical and sometimes genetic. There is a lot of stigma that surrounds these illnesses and that's because people are not educated about them." The laughing fool looked confused. He went to take the last copy I had a of a resource book just because his friends were picking things up (as they at least seemed interested), and I told him not to take it if he wasn't going to use it as that was my last copy. He put it back as he had no intention of reading it.

But, that was the negative side. On the positive end, there were a couple of people who had questions about mental illness and about NAMI. And it was worthwhile to be there just for them.

This college offers no resources for mental illnesses whatsoever. This day of giving out information at one campus for two hours, one day a year, is the only thing I know of that they do at all which relates to mental health, and the only reason that relates to mental health is because I'm there with some pamphlets. There are no counselors for students to go to. There is not even a sign with a suicide hotline on it anywhere. There is nothing. This college has nine campuses and many thousands of students. My friend who is a professor at one campus has told me repeatedly that he tries to get the college administration to open up a counseling center for students who need help, and these people don't listen. He has told me of many students who crossed paths with him, who needed mental health assistance. I find this college's lack of concern about this issue to be ridiculous and disgusting.

Young adulthood is the time period when Schizophrenia usually starts. It is also the time when Bipolar Disorder sometimes starts. It is a time when many people deal with stress and depression, some attempting suicide. Many veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan also come to college here, and my professor friend is concerned for their well-being as well. Many of them deal with Post-Traumatic Stress. The college offers no resourcs for them either.

What the college does offer, is something called a Male Outreach Initiative. This is an actual department in the college devoted to increasing the number of males who attend this school. They offer special services just for men. There is a women's center, too, but it's not really funded well, nor is it large enough to help women with anything. There is ono women's group on this college's campuses, no feminist organization of any kind. There are no mental health support groups. There is really not much of anything to assist a female student, such as myself, who goes to this school and needs some help. They leave you to fend for yourself.

Since it's a community college, I realize funds are an issue. But at the same time, because it's a community college, it's huge and it's the only large college in this county. There are tons of students of all ages, and if mental illness affects one in four people, as the statistics show it does, then there are thousands of students here who could use help. I know there were times in the past when I was lost, confused, horribly depressed, delusional, and suicidal at this college, and that I went and sat there in the library, or on a bench outside, or in a class, in a state of crisis and confusion, with no one to turn to other than, say, a professor whose job it is to teach English Composition 1101 and not practice psychiatry.

This is not acceptable. This situation is in need of correction, but obviously mental health resources are not available in many other schools, and in society at large, either. There is a waiting list about a year long to get into the community mental health center that I go to, if you're a new patient. If you have no insurance and no money, you may be eligible for this one clinic in downtown St. Petersburg, for which you need a referral from a physician, to get your medications temporarily, but you may not be eligible for that even if you manage the 45 minute trip to get there during the office hours.

While I'm glad there may soon be a health care reform bill that passes through the Senate, I am left to wonder when adequate mental health care will be available for all the citizens who need it in the United States. Probably not in my lifetime.

and we're back!

After some difficulties regarding a person who saw a post here that mentioned her/him, I had to make the blog private temporarily. I apologize to all my readers, because I know how annoying it to click on a link and then see that you need a special invitation to read the page. Unfortunately Blogger doesn't have a way to block anybody (as far as I know), so I had to block everybody, for a couple of weeks. Now that the situation with that person has been resolved, I hope that things can get back to normal around here. I need this space to write my stuff. It helps me to think clearly about issues that I'm dealing with, to evaluate various options of how to respond to situations, to debate with myself and others, to affirm who I am, and to feel much less alone in the world than I feel when I do not have this place to write.

Hence, there's a new guideline. If you don't like it, simply leave. Don't read it, and don't write to me about how I should remove my writing from my blog because you have a problem with what it says. It won't mention you. I don't write about other people here hardly ever, so there's not much chance you'll find your name. And if you do happen to find, and don't like it, then let me know without harassing me and accusing me of libel (this includes anybody and everybody). I don't lie here. What is said here is true. It is my view on my world, and it is primarily, after all, about me and Schizophrenia. It's not about you. If you think it is, I am sorry for your ego problems. Simply be gone with yourself. (Not to be rude or anything, but seriously, be gone).

Everybody else is welcomed, and I love your comments, and I encourage you to return. And if you want to post something here or share a discussion with me here by writing a post together on a specific issue, let me know. If it involves the issues that this blog is aimed to address such as psychosis, suicide, solitude, perseverence, and living with a mental illness or other disability, then I will certainly consider writing about the topic of your choice or letting you post here yourself.

Again, I am sorry that the blog was gone shortly, in case you stopped by. I won't be making it private again, so please return whenever you like.

~Jen

perhaps I'll finish school? maybe....

I'm very nervous about going back to school. While I really want to finish my degree, which I first started working on 15 years ago, I haven't been able to complete any classes in the past year and a half. I want to be able to go back, and I think I might be able to do it, but I'm not sure. I really need to get past this hurdle in my life. It is important to me to get a degree so I can feel the fulfillment of an accomplishment finally achieved, and it's also important because I want to go on to get a Bachelor's Degree and be able to do a job that I actually can afford to live on, unlike my $9 an hour job which has no future to it. I want to think that someday I'll be able to go off the disability benefits, work full time, and support myself through work alone. I don't know how feasible that wish actually is, however.

I want to be able to say, "I have a degree", to myself. It's not about a status symbol, or what other people think of me. It's about what I think of me. I think I'm a failure, and I feel that way all the time, because I have not accomplished most of the things I've wanted to do in my life. I'm tired of feeling that way. I want to feel that I have fulfilled some goal other than just survival. I want to graduate from college. I want a future where I'm not in total poverty all the time. I need a degree to make that future possible.

So, I am trying to go back. It's really up to the school as to whether or not they'll allow me back in. They don't have to allow me, since I've already surpassed the number of attempts at classes you're allowed to make in your life, and the government also does not have to grant me any more financial aid money. Without financial aid and approval from the school, then I can't go back at all. I guess we'll see what happens.

In the meantime, I've been keeping myself busy with activism activities for NAMI and NOW, my part-time job, and trying to lose weight. I also battle depression these days, but that's old hat to me, and no big deal really.

On the bright side??

To be quite honest with you, I'm not feeling the positivity vibe that would help me to write a list of things I'm happy about and grateful for, though, I certainly do understand and appreciate the suggestion you folks made in your comments to my last post. Not to be a downer and all, but I wanted to mention this interview I watched online with one of my favorite authors, Barbara Ehrenreich, about a new book she's written called: Bright Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. You can watch the interview at the Democracy NOW website.

In this interview, Enrenreich describes how, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, she went looking for resources for women living with that illness, and found things that infantalized women, such as pink teddy bears given to patients, and writings that said cancer was caused by negative thoughts, and could be combated with the power of positive thinking. I totally understood her angst about this discovery, since I've been living with a chronic physical illness, which was totally debilitating for a few years, since I was 19 years old. I remember when I came across some writings by people like Deepak Chopra about how illness is created by one's thoughts, that these writings, frankly, pissed me off.

Ehrenreich argues that when you get a serious, life-threatening illness, which may be caused by toxins in the air or genetics, and not thoughts in your head, or when you lose your job because some corporate scheme destroyed jobs for people such as yourself and the economy's in the toilet, well, then, you have a right to be angry about the situation you're in. She says that anger, while considered horribly "negative" by the people who follow pop psychology, and those who write it, is actually, really, just a normal human emotion. I tend to agree.

In one particular statement she makes in this interview, I found great comfort as I feel the same way, and wrote the same thing myself, in a recent post here. She says that cancer is "not a gift", and not her friend, and not something she's grateful for. Wow, what a concept!! You don't have to be grateful that your life is entirely corrupted by a debilitating, life-threatening disease and you very well might die. You don't have to be HAPPY about that! Why aren't more people saying this? Why aren't more people just plain realistic about things?? I wonder....I think that Ehrenreich is really onto something here. I think blaming people for having negative thoughts that led to them getting cancer is stupid, heinous, and unacceptable, and I've been saying that for years. I have a real problem with people like Deepak Chopra, and the main reason I disliked him when I first came across his work was the fact that, while he blamed cancer victims for having thoughts that led to cancer, he, himself, has never even had cancer! So where does he get off accusing other people of being responsible for the fact that they had lousy luck and got a fatal disease??

I do believe people can have lousy luck. I'm not saying we aren't responsible for our general state of mind. I understand that cognitive behavioral therapy not only works well, but it works for me, and I do it all the time. I remind myself to look on the bright side, to not get into self-pity or complaining, to avoid dwelling on my problems, to not make people feel lousy by telling them everything that I might be miserable about, and to avoid people who want to dump their constant, incessant misery on me (as some people I know tend to do).

But what I'm talking about isn't cognitive behavioral therapy. It's the general idea that you can control everything in your atmosphere by choosing to think certain thoughts. I don't believe that's possible. I don't believe there is much scientific evidence that it is possible. I'd like to believe it's possible. I'd like to believe that everything in The Secret is real and true, and that all my wishes are in my own command. But I don't believe that.

I don't believe any of that nonsense. Neither does Barbara Ehrenreich, who is a person I respect.

I think sometimes people need to think more positively than they do. When I say this some of my own family members come to mind, as I know at least one person who is prone to constantly complaining about their miserable existence. I think you can choose to NOT constantly complain, or dwell on the negative things in life. I think you should choose to NOT do that. And so, to some degree, I guess I do believe there is power in positive thinking. I just think it's really overstated in pop psychology.

So I wanted to mention this here. I know some of you will disagree (probably adamantly). But I tend to believe that being a realist is more productive in life than dreaming of Utopia. I think people need to take the responsibility for creating the change they want to see in the world, and not just assume that it will magically happen because they chose to believe it would.

Melancholy as a response to daily life

Susanna Kaysen wrote the book Girl, Interrupted, some years back, and you may recall that it was made into a movie that was somewhat popular. Kaysen has a sharp intellect, though, and that movie didn't do her writing justice. Today, as I sat in a bookstore, like all the bookstores I've sat in one hundred million times, I read an excerpt from an essay by Kaysen, entitled, "Three Cheers for Melancholy", in a book called Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression. Here is that quote:

My main objection to optimism is that it's incorrect. Things are somewhat more likely to turn out badly. Taking the long view, things are definitely going to turn out badly, since we all die in the end.

Kaysen's argument in this well-written essay is that depression is a normal response to the lives we live on this planet at this point in time. She says that, rather than medicate ourselves for it, we should understand, and, ultimately, accept depression as a natural, normal occurrence, and not a biological entity.

I can't say I agree with that. I've been through much depression in my life, for, probably, most of my life, and some of it was what doctors refer to as severe clinical depression (if not most of it). At the same time, I understand what Kaysen's getting at.

I think there are too many self-help books in this world. I think there are too many memoirs about people's languishing through drug and alcohol and gambling and sex and food addictions and how, finally, they saw the light and got a therapist and everything got better so they wrote a book about their misery to help all of the other miserable people on the planet. Depression, or melancholy, has been the topic of much literature throughout the history of the written word, and perhaps that is because depression has been a part of the human experience throughout the history of time, rather than a newly discovered illness with biological underpinnings that need to be repaired immediately, lest we suffer any more.

I don't like suffering. But I guess I don't know what life is like without it either. And maybe some of the reasons, maybe all of the reasons as to why I'm "depressed" right now are because of the facts of my life.

And here are some of those facts:

-I'm 34 years old.
-I have no college degree
-I have no partner, boyfriend, husband, whatever you want to call it
-I have no children and probably never will
-I can only work part time and might never be able to work full-time
-I'm poor, and that's not going to change any time soon, so there are a million poverty-related reasons as to why I might be depressed
-I have few friends, and only one with whom I spend any actual time doing anything remotely enjoyable
-I have a humiliating, stigmatized mental illness that few people understand and few people want to understand
-I have numerous physical problems I've been living with for the past 15 years or so, and they are cumbersome, painful, and also, so ingrained in me at this point that I never even talk about them
-I have untold thousands of dollars in medical debt that I cannot ever pay, so I do not open my bills
-I might not be able to get another student loan to go back to college because I had to withdraw and was not able to pay back the money I owed.
-I have no college degree (I know I said it already)
-I might never have a college degree
-I live in Florida, and I hate Florida
-I'm severely overweight even after six months of strict food control and serious exercise on a very consistent basis
-I have to take medications for the rest of my life that made me gain 100 pounds in three years
-My entire family is severely screwed up with a million problems, and I worry about some other people's problems so much, it makes me completely deflated and miserable, yet, I don't know how to not worry about them
-I am horribly lonely
-I haven't accomplished 80% of the things I wanted to do with my life

I guess that sums it up. The crux of the problem is, I believe, my life.

I should add that I know there is depression that is helped by medications, and that sometimes medications are necessary. But I'm on two antidepressants, and have been for years, yet they don't seem to be helping much these days. Then again, without them, I might be totally apathetic and too exhausted to get out of bed - who knows?
I just think that sometimes in our culture today, people, including myself, put so much faith in medical science that we can lose sight of common sense. Logic would say that grief is a normal part of life, that sadness is a normal part of life, that fatigue is a normal part of modern life to some degree, that pessimism is, actually, often warranted and smart rather than being totally "negative", and that pop psychology is full of a bull. And I say this, even though I do cognitive behavorial therapy and I constantly do try to be positive and think of the glass as half full - not half empty - and that is how I deal with life these days. It just doesn't always feel authentic, and it doesn't always work.