Father, wrap your arms around those who hurt

By Jack Smith

Heavenly Father,

Tonight my heart is heavy. It is heavy with pain and angst for many who are hurting.

I pray you will comfort those who are suffering in silence from an insidious sickness, an invisible illness that turns the brightest of your days into the dark night of the soul.

Wrap your loving arms around the millions of mentally ill men who sit hopelessly in our jails, not because they are criminals but because they are homeless, because they are sick with mental illness and because they can’t find treatment anywhere else.

Bring peace to confused children who don’t understand why their father can’t get out of bed.

Shower serenity on the devoted wife who wonders if the man she married will ever come home.

Shine your light on the heart of the 19-year-old loner who tonight is planning his suicide, his bipolar disorder unknown even to him.

Comfort the mother who feels like a failure for feeling nothing but pain and emptiness when holding her newborn baby.

Quiet the fears of the elderly man whose failing health has brought on the black cloud of depression.

Bring hope to the teenage girl so desperate for the pain to go away that she cuts her arm again and again.

Strengthen and revive the families torn apart by the demons of addiction and illness.

Hearten and encourage the exhausted mother and father whose child has lost hope in her darkest hour of need.

Hear my prayer, Great Physician. Help me get stronger, Lord, so I might shed this selfish cloak and help others who suffer as I do.

Amen.

 

Houston, we have a problem

By Jack Smith

I suffered the indignity of having my bags searched without a peep. I turned the other cheek when my electric razor was confiscated.  I said nothing when my laptop was pulled from my bag and stored in a vault halfway across the clinic’s campus…as if it possesses the United States military’s nuclear codes.

But now I have a serious problem. And it comes just as my recovery was taking shape. It was announced today that Auburn will play Ole Miss on ESPNU. Only we don’t get ESPNU on the unit.

Houston, we have a very serious problem. And if you really want me to learn to live with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and whatever else you diagnose me with, you damn well better fix it. Like today.

The game might be six days away, but I can’t wait that long to resolve this crisis. A crisis management truism I’ve learned in my job the past three or four years is it’s best to address the crisis right away. So what gives?

I can’t for the life of me understand the lack of urgency here. I’m trying to figure out when I can hack into the common area computer, which has more restrictions on it than ipads in Beijing, so I can at least watch the game online.

In the process, I’m learning to relate to all sorts of people I have nothing in common with except my illness. But all these people who don’t watch or care about college football confuse me more than six rounds of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) did in 2012. I don’t get it.

The good news is I’m on the verge of getting pissed. Getting pissed is good. It’s good because it means I care again. Anyone who has suffered from Major Depressive Disorder can tell you that at its worst, severe depression sucks so much life and energy out of you that you lose the capacity to get angry about anything.

You feel nothing and care about nothing. I don’t ever want to feel that way again.

I’m learning to feel all sorts of emotions again, too. I cried during “Ferris Beuller’s Day Off,” our “therapeutic movie” this evening.

I shared a belly laugh with a fraternity brother who came to see me today and even laughed out loud during a group “Catchphrase” session. It’s a game where you get participants to guess the word on the card by describing it in any way except saying it. The word was medicine. “You take this to feel better...” said the lady whose turn it was. “Heroin!” shouted a young skateboarder who talks just like Jeff Spicoli from “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”

Heroin use isn’t funny, but the whole room busted up. People with mental illness like to laugh just like anybody else. Only they don’t much feel like laughing a lot of the time. I think we need to learn to talk about mental illness the same way we can talk about cancer or heart disease or any other illness. It wouldn’t hurt to be a little less uptight about it, too.

Laughter may not be the best medicine for mental illness, but it’s better than most.

Depression:Wimp of a word for major illness

By Jack Smith

William Styron called the term “depression” a wimp of a word for such a major illness.

In “Darkness Visible,” Styron says the word “has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.”

Put another way, depression is a hell of a lot worse than the word implies. Many have “felt depressed” at one time or another, usually from a negative event in life. Chronic clinical depression (called Major Depressive Disorder) is another matter, and a surprising number of people suffer from it. Most things I read suggest 1 in 10 battle depression.

Think about what that means. In a town of 50,000, some 5,000 people are suffering from depression.  It breaks my heart to think of those who suffer in silence as I did for too long.

I am one of a fortunate few, though. I am currently seeking treatment at a place called The Menninger Clinic in Houston. It is one of the best places in the world for complicated mental illness cases.

My case is a bit complicated because I’ve had several different diagnoses and I’ve abused alcohol most of my life since high school. Shortly after my recent overdose, one doctor confidently declared that I’ve needlessly suffered for years because I’ve been misdiagnosed all this time. He diagnosed me with Bipolar II disorder (and the depression that goes with it) and put me on lithium.

The frustrating part came a week later when a second doctor declared with equal confidence and assurance that I was most certainly not bipolar. He said I suffer from major depressive disorder and anxiety issues that make it worse.

Already depressed and anxious for answers, I was now confused and frustrated.  That’s what led me to Menninger.

Part of the process here at Menninger is spending many hours a week with my treatment team. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about my tortured history. This exhausting process has given me a chance to read through my journals spread out over a decade. While flipping through it, I found a description of what depression feels like. I hope sharing it helps others who suffer know they are not alone.

It is hard to explain how much depression hurts.  I feel like I have descended into hell. I am mired in a pit of utter despair and hopelessness, and my body aches. My mental illness tortures my mind but it causes physical pain, too. My back aches, my stomach churns with anxiety and my head and face feel lifeless and heavy.

My disease lies to me. I don’t want to believe the lies, but my depression is cunning and ruthless. It waits until my body and spirit are weak because it is one cruel bastard. It tells me I can’t get out of the bed, shouldn’t bother going to work today and I may as well just shut the door and pull the covers over my head. It tells me there is no hope. Depression is misery.

That’s what one of my worst days felt like, but I don’t feel that way today. I awoke early, feeling rested, read from Romans and shed a happy tear after reading a stirring, quite remarkable letter of hope from my daughter. She and her brothers and their mom are my inspiration today.

I miss home but know this is where I need to be right now. God has put me here and I can feel his loving arms holding me up. His arms and the prayers, love and support of many who have reached out since I began sharing publicly for the first time the nature of my illness.

Thank you, family. Thank you, friends. And thank you, strangers who may not know me but do know my story all too well.

Regular access to my blog is not allowed, nor is access to Facebook, but I have conned the staff into letting me write this entry.  Maybe I can share some more as my journey here progresses.

If not, I will share more when I return home.

Grace and peace.