The 18th of
February is not only my younger Sister Beth’s birthday, but also now the
anniversary of the day I had my nervous break down. Last year and the year
before, the date was a painful reminder and I went back into a semi-decline.
This year however I have made some significant bounds along the road to a
healthier mental outlook. I did receive a reminder though in the form of a
letter from the secretary for the laboratory which I worked in in Switzerland.
I had completely forgotten that the day before I ended up in a mental hospital
I was trying to organize to go and see my principal supervisor in Besançon in
France.
I had experienced
depression before in my life and looking back in hindsight had been psychotic
previously. In my teenage years it was at one point thought to be a case of
M.E. or to be attributed to the events happening in my life with my Father’s
erratic untreated manic phases. Our family doctor, an elderly Scot did not
believe there to be anything seriously wrong with me, despite my at times
debilitating mood swings. Depression was not afforded the fashion status it
receives now and I honestly don’t think it ever occurred to my doctor that this
is what was ailing me. Even if it had she was from the school of thought that
one just had to pull one’s self together and snap out of it.
So that Friday when I
went into the laboratory at EPFL in Switzerland and announced that I was
quitting my PhD and entered into a nightmare of mental flailing was the
culmination of a struggle I hadn’t really acknowledged I’d had for many years.
The ensuing madness and destructive thought patterns had been insidiously
encroaching into my mind and then sparked by a series of stressful incidents
flamed into a fiery internal hell my mental inferno of self doubt, paranoia and
malaise. The convoluted and distorted thinking that clouded my outlook and
tortured my internal psyche rapidly unraveled and my grasp of reality disserted
and tormented me.
This past Saturday at
a dinner party I met an intern working at the local government hospital in the
psychiatric ward. I didn’t initially divulge that I have bipolar. She described
the type of patients she treats and I realized that some of them suffer from
what I myself have experienced. I tried to sound like I was asking purely out
of curiosity what the conditions were like and how these patients were treated.
She mentioned that some of them had to have handcuffs and in my mind a
Victorian asylum sprung to mind. I wonder whether this is the case. In my own
experience in a private hospital here in Zimbabwe, I found that most of the
nursing staff were uninformed when it came to mental illness and as there are
no tangible physical ailments, many of the nurses I encountered could not
fathom why I was there or see what was wrong with me. There is no direct
translation of the word depression into Shona, the closest phrase being “to
think too much” or Kufungisisa.
Reflecting back on my
thoughts and my interpretation of the events that happened I realize that I had
partly lost my mind or my mind had over analysed and misinterpreted what was
happening around me. The disintegration of my sanity culminated from a number
of things. I returned to Switzerland in January 2010 after what should have
been a vacation but which had actually been a stressful time of completing end
of year assignments and studying for exams. I therefore was not rested and
returned to a pressurized work schedule. I consequently went down sick soon
after returning and fell behind in my work. Thinking that I had just had a
holiday my supervisor was not impressed. Unguided in my research I was starting
to get stuck in a quagmire of details that were not actually that pertinent to
my main questions. I realize now I was manic, not settling to anything and my
thoughts being all over the place. Outwardly I seemed precocious, highly
sociable and rather noisy and brash, to all intents more out going than normal
and the life of the party. Inwardly though I was feeling ostracized, isolated
and alone and frustrated with my lack of progress on my project. I also felt
ultra sensitive to any reproaches from my supervisor or others.
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