Untreatable

I've been coming to the conclusion for a little while that my mental illnesses may be untreatable, and that isn't anything negative. I've reflected on all of the treatments I've tried since I was a child seeing a psychiatrist for a panic disorder and depression, which started around ten years old. I started taking Zoloft, and my journey began because I couldn't go to school, where I was severely bullied, without melting down mid-lesson, or devolving into a stress fever and trembling with an upset stomach because of the agoraphobia.

DBT, CBT, worksheets, talk therapy, a list of medications I lost count of that my body had bad reactions to — some landing me in the hospital — and several doctors. More traumas, more diagnoses. The cycle repeats. I'm now thirty-five.

For twenty-five years of my life, I have tried everything the book throws at you. Throughout it all, I've coped with a nightmare disorder from infancy into adulthood, panic attacks so severe I will pass out occasionally, agoraphobia that creeps back easily from isolation, and worsening depression because of my BPD and PTSD diagnoses.

I am still shocked by the revelation, after I go back over my tumultuous life; how in the hell am I even alive?

Despite exhausting most of the treatments out there, I've still not gone into remission. Sure, I cope better than I had before, but it's kept me alive, at the least. Coping doesn't entirely mitigate symptoms for me. Dialectical behavioral therapy didn't ease my symptoms or help me reduce them, it just taught me how to redirect them (which is still a very important skill to learn). Cognitive behavioral therapy wasn't effective at all, and filling out graphs and worksheets just felt like homework. Writing, however, has been my savior since I was a child. It's been my escape, and it has given me a way to get all of this stuff out in a safe and controlled way. I fear what would have happened to me a long time ago if I'd never had an outlet like that.

My entire identity — who I am at my core — has been shaped by repeated and prolonged traumatic situations. I can trace the source of many interests and personality traits back to trauma responses I developed to survive. If you take all that away — if you re-file the trauma into a different part of my brain so it doesn't affect me as much anymore — I am a blank slate. There is nothing beneath it. Sure, I have the things I love and other interests, but everything about what I love and do has all been put into place to cope with, and find comfort in, the darker things to survive. And that is how I've survived, along with my alters and spirit guides who pull me back from the edge on my worst days.

The places I go when I experience derealization or depersonalization, or the void-like worlds I venture into in dreams and meditations, are fascinating. Liminal spaces, nostalgia, regression to an earlier state of mind, dissociating into a whole different year in the past for a few days, existing in a space between reality and drifting through other empty — sometimes Hellish — worlds, and existing with shadow men lurking in the dark corners of my home, have all become a comfort to me. I'm not as afraid of these things anymore. They are quiet, melancholic, and like a warm blanket on a cold rainy day. Of course, they can sometimes be distressing, like when I dissociate so deeply that I feel I'm in 'the wrong time,' or in a year in the past, or the shadow men's large eyes become especially plentiful and vivid, but I've found ways to just accept it and let it happen.

Some may feel this is a sign of giving up, but I don't see it that way. I am confronting the reality of my situation, that I'm so severely mentally ill with such a long and complex history of trauma, that it may be detrimental to my well-being to even fully heal. Healing may tear down the careful structure I've built from what I've had to work with for an entire life so far.

That doesn't mean I don't need counseling or medication. Those things are what help me survive, and being heard and accepted is an important part of surviving and learning more about yourself and the way you cope. If I'd never been introduced to a psychiatrist or a counselor at a young age, I genuinely fear I'd have become another headline, in one way or another. The medication helps me sleep where I'd had incurable insomnia before, and sleeping more than four or five broken hours a night is much more conducive to survival than going through life sleep deprived. Psychiatric hospitals, while a distressing experience for me, have kept me from taking my own life when I was a danger to myself.

Popular methods used in therapy may not be effective for everyone, but it doesn't mean you should stop seeing a mental health professional, discontinue medications, or not seek out any of those things if you don't already have them. They're important no matter where you are on your journey. We just have to work on surviving and maintaining that survival, which many of us can't always do on our own.

I've learned to cope best by being comforted by my darkness instead of fearing it, and by delving into it to the point of an obsession sometimes. It's better than staying afraid and letting it eat me alive. If it's here to stay and refuses to budge, nor should it in my case, then I'll just have to turn it into a creative outlet that I can enjoy.

©2024 Shane Blackheart