In Crisis Yet Again #Blogtober20

Posted on by Astrid

Okay, this may not be the most appropriate post for #Blogtober20. After all, the prompt for today is “relax”. It is also World Mental Health Day. Most people would use this to advocate for better mental health services, or to share tips on coping with mental health issues. Tonight, I’m too stressed out to do either. In fact, this is just going to be a raw post on my having been in crisis tonight – and not having fully recovered yet as I write this, in fact.

I was on edge all day. By mid-morning, I started feeling irritable, but it was still manageable. When it was time for lunch, a different staff from the one assigned to my side of the home came to eat with us. We also didn’t get the usual weekend lunch stuff, such as sausages, pancakes or soup. We did get a baguette with cream cheese on it. It was okay. IN fact, I much prefer that to our weekday lunches. I don’t think it’s even the fact that I didn’t get the treat I wanted, that set me off, but the fact that so much was different about the lunch. Thankfully, after being on the verge of a meltdown for a bit, I was able to calm down.

Then in the evening, I spiraled into crisis. I don’t even know why honestly. I was getting very irritable about the staff having the TV on even though the volume was turned to low. Within the next fifteen minutes or so, I landed in a full-blown meltdown that seemed to last forever. I eventually asked the staff to fetch me a PRN lorazepam, but then somehow got it into my mind to climb over the balcony railing. I didn’t, but the mere fact that I was standing on my balcony on bare feet in the rain and disclosed my thoughts, worried the staff.

I was near a staff all the time until I had to go to bed at 10:15PM because the evening staff were leaving. They did remove the knob on my balcony door, so that for now I cannot go on there. I gave them permission for this, for clarity’s sake.

The lorazepam has started to kick in, but I’m still pretty tense. I must say that I am completely in awe of how my staff handle my challenging behavior too. It must be hard having a mentally disturbed person on an intellectual disability unit. In psychiatric care, they’d probably have sent me for a time-out off the ward. After all, psychiatric professionals commonly see me as a borderline case. I’m not sure my current place is the most suitable for me, but the staff definitely are.

#Blogtober20

17 thoughts on “In Crisis Yet Again #Blogtober20”

  5. Sending you soothing hugs and supportive thoughts. I hope with the help of your staff (who really seem incredibly supportive especially as they don’t really specialise in helping mentally ill people but rather intellectually disabled) and in the right conditions you’ll be able to recover soon. It’s awful when a crisis hits suddenly and so out of the blue, when you think that thiings are reasonably stable.
    I think Mental Health Day is just the right day for sharing things like this and being authentic about your mental illness. Sure, advocating and developing coping skills is vital, but I think posts like this one make people more aware of what it actually feels like to be in your shoes. Because to me it seems like a lot of people who don’t come across mental illness by directly dealing with it or having it in their closest family, even if they do have a fairly good idea of the mental health/illness field and aren’t totally ignorant and are well-intentioned, they often seem to have such a view that “Oh, okay, yeah, poor mentally ill people, it’s sad that they are ill and struggling, but they are such warriors and can always cope no matter what! And they’re such good advocates for themselves!” which is nice to hear sometimes but is not entirely real and in my opinion diminishes the problem a bit by showing how apparently always coping and well functioning we are no matter what diagnoses we have, and giving the image of a mentally ill person who goes to work every day, has a family and manages their struggles very well, is always smiling even when it’s a fake smile because it’s selfish not to smile, and always takes their meds which are obviously working, so the actual mental illness is very much a secondary thing that they hide under the blanket in their bed most of the time, and only sort of are mentally ill when they can allow themselves to do so and are alone. So I think it’s very good that you wrote about how you’re not coping in this particular time, because obviously it’s bound to happen that we will have crises. I hope yours will be over as soon as possible and things will feel better. 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Thanks so much! Yes, I agree mental illness is not something you can hide at all times. I’m glad you feel that my post brought awareness to this fact, even though of course you don’t need to be made aware.

      Liked by 2 people

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