Sunday, January 07, 2007

Mental illness open house. Welcome.

I'm mentally ill, politically active, and increasingly sick due to our war in Iraq/Iran.

Canaries/mine

What's on your mind?
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10 comments:

Susan McIntosh Lewis said...

Share, please? You can scarcely say anything I haven't already done, heard of, or considered.

Mental illness/the final frontier.

1/07/2007 4:49 PM
Anonymous said...

egregious...your comment about adhd and creativity on fdl was one I copied and sent about. We are dealing with a dear brilliant family member with multiple diagnosis and none of them seem right. She has good soul, though, and she says she goes nuts seeing the connections that others just don't see or choose not to see. "It's all connected, Mom" she cries, and wonders why she is working so hard to fit into a world that is so crazy. I have been her filter for so long, and others tell me that she is too dependent, that she has to learn how to shut out more of the world in order to survive. (Her doc told me, when she was four months old, that she didn't have a filter or a screen. "She takes in every bit of stimulation until she crashed from overload.") Still the best description of her 22 years later. Anyway, your frank sharing has been of great hope and value to me. I needed to share my thanks.

1/07/2007 9:13 PM
Susan McIntosh Lewis said...

Hi NZExpat,

Good to hear from you.

In another age your family member would be honored as a genius. Instead we tell them they have to change how they think---but they can't.

Your ability to be her filter is probably lifesaving.

We have this in our family, the ones that do have this understand each other, and the ones that don't think we are so strange.

Keep up the support, you are her angel.

1/08/2007 3:44 AM
Anonymous said...

Thanks for the encouragement. Funny how my daughter has always been different but the real crappy part of all this began in Jan 2001 and has just started lifting last fall (for her, age 16-22). One time, she said that it came with realizing that the adults in charge were idiots, particularly after 9/11. She also had strep, which in the past had gone into her kidneys and skin, and this time, it was suggested, triggered a big onset of the ocd, which is definitely a genetic inheritance.

We are on a big experiment here, with her living "on her own" in the States and me over here. Much time on the computer and phone and it has been a rough year, but she is growing in wisdom and maturity through these difficulties.

Do you think the Thom Hartmann books were helpful to you? Also, let me know if you ever want to correspond by email.

1/08/2007 10:36 AM
Susan McIntosh Lewis said...

Hey nz,

Good to hear from you. It can be difficult to tell whether a college kid is having trouble because of OCD and/or related issue versus just struggling to mature. Probably worse in high school but at least we can SEE them and monitor their progress then.

I ordered the Thom Hartmann books, they'll probably come while I'm in Russia but will get right to them after that. Thanks for the info.

OCD is my "new" diagnosis, altho clearly I've been this way for a long time. Am learning that many of the little things that make me happy/unhappy safe/unsafe are OCD kinds of things. My daughter has it too and can spot the precise things in the physical environment that will drive me up the wall. She'll come into a room, look at the thing, and just start laughing [with me, not at me] because she understands.

1/08/2007 12:09 PM
Anonymous said...

Let me know what you think of the Thom Hartmann books. Books here are so expensive, that I want to be very careful of what I get (we are on a tight budget, earning Kiwi dollars and funding US education).

So much of what you say (color texting, getting the environment right) strike such a chord with me. I absolutely love the colored little stick em on flags for marking places in a text.

A student once showed me how he figured out a narrative pattern by using different flags for different narrators at diffent levels of the page margin. Suddenly, voila, there was a whole pattern that emerged, cascading down and down by an orderly sequence and then finishing by cascading up in reverse order.

My daughter spend much time creating patterns out of colored blocks. I still think she should have gone into genetic research. Her grandmother (the most marked of the ocd exhibitors in the family) got her degree in architecture from MIT...in the 1930's, but then never really practiced. No one wanted a female architect you know.

My email, should you choose to use it, is erkroeker at yahoo dot com.

1/08/2007 1:39 PM
Anonymous said...

okay . . . testing here

mandrake

1/08/2007 6:42 PM
Anonymous said...

Hi, I'm gonna write later. Time for schnooze. Just saying hello cuz I saw your post on FDL.

Will be checking in later on.

mandrake

1/08/2007 6:45 PM
Susan McIntosh Lewis said...

mandrake!

You got in under the radar!!!

1/08/2007 8:18 PM
Susan McIntosh Lewis said...

mandrake---

Talk to me. What's on your mind.

1/08/2007 8:18 PM

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