Make recovery more than a drug, fill it with positive people and activities

by Harry in Indiana

Hello everyone! I am Harry. I am 24. I have an awful headache. I have been suffering from mental illness since 10 and didn't seek treatment until 15. It began in the fall of 1993. I had a weekend that I describe as being sad. The world turned flat. I became obsessed with beings coming for me in the night.

At home things were good. My parents loved me and nurtured me, but I began acting impulsively and had emotions and thoughts I could not control. I would have little bursts of the F-word and many other things.

In middle school, my head began to hurt on the left hemisphere. I could barely wake up for school in the morning, and was in a sleepy painful confusion that really hampered my personality. My father also suffers from bipolar and obsessive compulsive disorder. I moved with my mother far away from him and I was ready to redesign myself. I found myself needing sleep all the time. My head hurt. Sometimes words and thoughts were muddled and I had trouble with my memory, and my personality was deeply affected. I sought cognitive therapy and psychiatric care and felt there might be rational relief.

It has been almost ten years since the beginning of psychiatric care and a thousand drugs later I don't feel much better. I have seen neurologists for CT, MRI scans and everything checks out, but the neurologists and psychiatrists are at a loss; perhaps because they are not equipped to handle me. I feel somewhat alone and on a long precarious branch, and I don't know how to get down.

I am an avid cyclist and swimmer. I make furniture and paint. I think my case points out a most unfortunate flaw in psychiatry. The well-designed pills and marketing medications prescribed to me when I was a kid left me high and dry as a young adult.

Not having health insurance makes getting proper help difficult. Despite my anger with big pharma, I think there is a silver lining, and I have found doctors who do want very much to help me.

Be your own advocate before filling a prescription; research the drug online or in a drug encyclopedia. Make your recovery more than a drug, fill it with positive people and activities. Its most definitely easier said than done.

Sometimes I get lost on my way to the doctor in my car in a city I've lived in for most of my life. My thoughts are frozen, my memory is fuzzy, my face is numb, but I persist, perhaps because survival is a primal instinct and because I really love life and no longer want to be a passive character in my body and in the world.

Take a nice bath, get some good rest. I greatly appreciate this forum. Thank you.