Brain Chemicals Or Trauma? Why Am I Ill?

I’ve been formally diagnosed with mental illness for the last 6 or 7 years, although I have suffered for many more. I have been through the system, seen the bits that make sense and the bits that defy belief. I’ve been alongside other ‘mentally ill’ people, many of whom I have come to admire and greatly respect. I know the reality. I’ve even read the books, well some of them at least. Ok, so I don’t claim total knowledge and am definitely no ‘know it all’, but I’ve seen enough. Enough, that is, to know I need to know more. It’s like the tip of the iceburg, I’ve had enough experiences to know that there is way more under the surface than I can even imagine. Oh, and as I’m prone to hallucinations my imagination is very good.

There are many questions in mental ill health. One of the first ones I asked, I think, were

1. Am I going crazy?

2. Why am I going crazy? (more succinctly put as ‘WHY ME?’)

3. Will I/things get better?

I think most people ask this kind of thing when they feel that their world is falling apart around them. Hey, we’re humans – apparently curiosity is one of our strong points. I needed to know what reason there was to it. I needed to make sense of it, to fit something into a box in my mind and go ‘oh yeah, ofcourse it was that’. I thought that if I knew what went wrong (read: what I did wrong) then I could fix it.

There you have it. Three very normal questions in an abnormal situation. It really was the great unknown for me, and for my family & friends. I eventually settled for the ‘party line’ and accepted the answers given to me by the professionals. I think we all clung to the safety provided by someone knowing what they were talking about. It wasn’t enough, but it helped.

Now, though, I’m sitting here once again asking ‘Why Me?’. I’m not (totally) asking what it is that I have done wrong – I don’t believe that it’s a divine punishment or some kind of bad karma. No, this time I want to understand what is (and was) going on inside my head, my mind and my life to explain what it is that I’m going through. I don’t expect that I’ll have the answers tonight, things are too complicated and woolly – even the psychiatrists will admit that if you ask them. It’s just that I need to keep looking for my own answers; ones I believe and ones that will help me recover.

My main suspects?

The pesky brain chemicals that my medications are meant to keep in check, maybe they’re the root of the problem. At the moment I’m reasonably sure that the tablets help in some physical way – the antidepressants apparently increase my serotonin (read: feel good chemical) levels giving me a chance at feeling a bit happier. I’m also told that the antipsychotics reduce my dopamine levels (this, in turn, reduces my hallucinations and other ‘overactive’ symptoms). Admittedly people aren’t too sure what the mood stabilizer does, but it seems to works so, hey, that’s (almost) fine with me. The bit I’m not so sure about is what throws the brain chemicals out of sync. Plus, in my eyes, there’s a big gap between a chemical imbalance and the thoughts, feelings and experiences that I have. So maybe they are part of the picture, a piece of the jigsaw in the puzzle that is me. As things are, it doesn’t make much sense without looking at the other pieces.

My experiences, good and bad (past and present) probably pad out a big part of the puzzle. I’m lucky. I’ve got great parents, a supportive family and have had many good things happen to me. I’ve also had many bad things happen to me, like just about everyone else in the world. Some of these still affect me, even when I think that I have healed and moved on it’s pretty evident if you look closely that they're still there. Maybe these things, the bits that form my own personal CV of hang ups, sensitivities and 'No Go' areas, are more important than I realised.

Some things just seem to fit if I force myself to think about them. I have to be careful here as I still need to take care of myself right now, but it’s ok to just touch on it a little. Seeing and feeling insects in my food – amazingly real and frightening at the time, but if I think about it I’ve had a long running problem with what I eat. This has ranged from not eating, to eating way too much and everywhere in between. I have both hated it and needed it, feeling lots of guilt and self-loathing on the way. I never took it to its extreme conclusions – a formal eating disorder, but it’s always been something I fight with. Ok, so I’m pretty sure that everyone with food issues doesn’t experience the hallucinations that I did. I am pretty sure, though, that my hang-ups combined with my own overactive brain chemicals fit together to reveal a substantial part of the picture. Perhaps my own feelings towards my food were the bits that padded out the effects of the chemistry – that caused me to form visions of things in my food rather than, say, in my shoes.

I’ve had so many experiences that it would be a massive task to try to understand all of them, but it’s a start at least. I also want to make it clear that, although I believe that some of my experiences have meaning if related to the path my life has followed; I don’t believe that they bind me. I am not subject to all the different traumas in my life. They do have an effect (sometimes a very big effect) but I can choose where it is that I go from here. Like I said before, in understanding what is going on I think that I can begin to fight it.

Wish me luck

Rachel Waddingham © 2002