Mental Health During Isolation and Pandemic Distress

You know Spring is waiting out there. The trees are turning a lovely shade of green, the skies are clear and lovely blue but something dark and foreboding waits for you. A disease that has crippled the world, brought empires to their knees. It has happened before, the Black Plague, the Spanish flu. They call this one the Coronavirus and half the people out there think it’s a joke and aren’t following the rules of distancing and wearing masks. You are doing all you can but it’s only been a month and you are near your breaking point already. Experts claim this could last well into next year and you have no idea how you’re going to make it. It almost seems as though it would be better to just get the virus and be immune. But then there’s the risk! This is a dark horror out of a Twilight Zone episode, but it’s real!

Check out my Book Launch Video, just click on the Youtube Link right next to this text!!

Hello my dear readers! I hope none of you found the previous short statement too scary, it is a description of what I have been going through this past little while and suspect some of you have gone through as well. In hopes of helping anyone who regularly reads this blog, I just wanted to let you know once more that if you click on the photo of the Tower Bridge on the right column of this blog, you will be able to download my latest book, “Alert and Oriented x3” 

So what’s been going on? A few days I called in to our health link line (811 for anyone who lives in Alberta) and was given instructions to isolate for ten days. It really has been hard, especially since my two best friends have very good reasons to keep themselves away from anyone who has even a slight chance of having Covid-19. One of them has a little boy at home and the other is taking care of her elderly grandmother. The cool thing though is that my apartment is much better than any prison could be, as long as I don’t get bored of the things I have to do in here. I am using my time to write stories, to read, to play video games, and I hate to admit it but I have been treating myself to some non-sugar comfort food.

Something I am curious about that I would encourage feedback on is that I wonder if anyone, especially those who have a mental illness that is well controlled, experiences the imitation of symptoms when they are sleeping. Lately I have been thinking a lot about my psychosis and what made my voices and delusional thoughts so convincing. Part of it of course has to do with the fact that these delusions and hallucinations came from within my own head but so realistically seemed like they were coming from others. I can recall I would do something, say threw out a small container of milk, and then through my mind would flash the thought that someone might really be pissed off at me for doing that and in an instant it was like I could hear someone swearing and cursing and threatening me, and it seemed to come from one guy in particular.

I have really been trying hard to be able to put into words what it is like to have delusions. One of the sad things about mental illness is that a person can be tormented by negative thoughts and false delusional ideas and end up getting so frustrated trying to hold everything together that they lash out and end up being abused or assaulted, sometimes by family members (yes, this has happened to me) and often by people who are offended by people who have a mental illness. This is why it is so important to have places that are safe for people who have mental illnesses. Of course, this means there should be psychiatric hospitals, but there should also be group homes where people with mental illnesses can live independently but still in a community where they are understood and supported. I lived in such a group home for around 15 years and I went through a huge amount of personal growth at that time which I never would have been able to do otherwise.

Well, unfortunately this is going to be a short one today readers. I would love it if any of you would contact me with ideas or suggestions, or even just to converse, my email as always is viking3082000@yahoo.com

 

Habits and Those With Poor Mental Health Conditions Like Schizophrenia and Bipolar

Has anyone out there read the classic work “The Gambler” by I think Dosteyovski? It tells the tale of a man so obsessed by gambling that he plots to murder his landlady. I won’t ruin it for you because the whole point in bringing it up is that it portrays an incredibly accurate depiction of a compulsive gambler. I myself was a compulsive gambler for some time, and not only was I totally sure I suffered from this affliction, I also understood that it comes along with the manic side of my bipolar disorder, which is a part of my schizoaffective disorder diagnosis. I could abstain for long stretches, then all at once I would have a severe compulsion and an almost unfailing faith that I would walk out of the casino with more money than I walked in with. Despite making my own computer programs to test my winning strategies and being something of a former math whiz, I would put money in, perhaps win a little at first and then chase my losses until I had nothing. But this hasn’t been my only addiction.

As a young kid, I had an addiction to comic books. I would work myself to death to try and accumulate as many as I could, and even when I got older and stopped reading them, I would often have dreams about still having the literature hidden in my parent’s closet. I simply could not get enough, even when my parents told me no more comics. Then at 14, I started to smoke cigarettes. That was an addiction that took me 18 years to quit.

Perhaps one of the most damaging of my addictions was alcohol. I found it was that magic elixir that would loosen the chains of my anxiety and remove inhibitions. When I was drunk I could meet girls, dance, do whatever I wanted and even if I got into a fight or got beat up for my stupidity while drinking it didn’t hurt that much.

And now I am trying something new, something that is on the edges of anything I ever tried. I want to take all of my possessions and minimize them and somehow stop fixating on getting better clothes, better furniture, better video games. Even though I am 47 I am finding that there are some professional development courses I would love to take but the money just isn’t there and the rules of having the government sponsor a person for part-time learning have changed.

With all of these addictions, I am trying very hard to find a way to not just cope with the ones I have, but to try and avoid getting any more. I met a young man of 33 yesterday who was homeless and addicted to Fentynal. He likely won’t survive the winter unless he can get lucky enough to be put in jail. That is a very scary thing for me to consider, especially when I consider that there isn’t that much difference between him and I other than that I am much older and less able to bounce back from something of that nature.

When I was in a 12-step program years ago, my now-departed sponsor told me once that when you apply the steps of abstinence in your life, you don’t have a cure for your addiction, you have a daily reprieve based on the maintenance of your spiritual condition. He also said that when we abstain, if we don’t deal with whatever personality trait or flaws that caused us to become addicted to something, our illness can manifest itself in other ways.

Clean and purge is all I can manage for now. I do plan to keep a bible and a few books that have meaning for me, but I would like to get to the stage of relying on the library instead of buying and accumulating more and more books. Maybe when I get myself down to the bare bones and can focus on the thing I love the most (writing) I will have enough to not just deal with my addictions, but to really turn myself into a better person all around. I have so little control of my mental health situation. All I can really do is take my medications as prescribed and talk to my nurse and doctor as often as they want me to. I know for a fact that on a fixed income if I can slow down consumption of things such as diet pop (one of my new addictions), purchase of comic books (an affliction that has come back to me) and buying books, I will likely be more able to take care of myself. One of the best things I have found when I want to make an effort to stop a habit is simply to not allow myself to think of the subject. If I have to get off the bus a stop early to walk around a bar that has gambling machines I will. If I have to not go near the mall to not be tempted to buy new clothes, I will do it. And the one thing, the one magical thing that I can always do for myself is as simple as picking up a book, just an interesting book. Reading is such magic, it takes a person to another world, it takes a person inside the mind of the author, it gives a writer a whole new world to create with total omnipresence. Thanks for reading my blog, I couldn’t be a writer if people out there in the world didn’t read my work.

Are There Alternatives to Psychiatric Medication?

 

What a beautiful summer day to lie in the grass and watch a soccer game. When I was younger, I really didn’t factor in the fact that your body decays (in most people) as you get older. I had read a few articles about people in their 80s running marathons, and athletes having comebacks at 50. I started to decline a long time ago, and it likely had to do a lot more with my bull-headedness not wanting to listen to advice like not running in excess of 5 miles, not running on pavement, getting proper shoes for every type of exercise. That was the beginning, I destroyed my knees at the age of 20 years old. But what really got to me was not just this disability, it was also the medications I took. They made me drowsy, lazy. They made my hands shake and messed with my balance. Getting through this was one of the more difficult times of my life. I was good at a few sports as a youngster, I was a decent basketball player, but for all of my teen years I was a smoker which made this nearly impossible. I also loved to play pool, going to the pool hall every morning instead of the second half of my Law 30 class. I dreamed about one day having a pool table at home, and I think I could have been on my way. But medications derailed me. What could I do?

Medications have gotten better since then, and I even know of a few people who take what I do and it works for them and also their hands don’t shake at all. I really don’t ever want to recommend people to go off medication, but there are instances where a person can be on too much, a Doctor can usually spot this in a moment. This is why sometimes it is useful to get a second opinion, especially when you find your medication side effects debilitating. My mom, near the end of her life, was on a lot of medications, but my parents put a lot of faith in her psychiatrist. It hurts to think she could have had a better mental state or a better quality of life if she had been on less. One thing I want to emphasize is that in her final years, she would never miss a psychologist’s appointment because in her mind and my dad’s, that was the only treatment that helped anything.

There are two sides to this coin, one is that I have encountered (and I am no therapist or doctor) studies that said therapy alone is better than medication alone. Of course as I said, I don’t recommend going off meds, but if you can somehow combine your treatment there are chances of feeling better than you are now and any time healthy means you are headed towards a time when new and ‘better’ medication can be developed. My former Psychiatrist, an amazing man named Bishop, whenever I asked about a new medication he would say that what I had was working well, he didn’t like tinkering with people who were doing well, but left it up to me, emphasizing the question, “do you want to take a chance at going back where you were?” Well, for me that was no option. Last time before I saw that doctor that I had been in the hospital I was in a terrible state, being beligerent and abusive, deluded into thinking the world revolved around me and having people respond in kind with everything from flat out insults and threats to a severe beating from a guy who didn’t like the way I crossed the street. No, I did not want to go back there.

Some time later, with a doctor that my old doctor recommended, a decision was made to try a newer medication, and I got very ill and spent a month in the hospital–after I had worked so incredibly hard to build my life back and show stability and such. All at once I was delusional and paranoid to the extreme again. Sadly, this is something anyone with a mental illness must come to expect and prepare for. For more information, look into something called “The Wellness Recovery Action Plan” or WRAP. They have an app for phones that allow you to outline things like trigger warnings, ways to help with symptoms and more. The app is based on a course that I found very helpful, and attribute my quick recovery from the relapse of my condition too. It also helped that I had gained a great deal of knowledge about my condition, perhaps mostly by being a part of the Schizophrenia Society.

So, today’s blog is getting pretty long, I will sum things up and try to explain more in a future blog. First off, look into funding or affordable therapy. In Edmonton there are even free therapists as I am sure you can find in any major Canadian city. You drop in, fill out a form, and wait and see someone confidentially who is qualified. But this is a quick fix. When you find you care stable enough, I recommend things like the WRAP course and others, but I also recommend Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Just as a warning though, I believe they state that it takes a commitment of around 16 (if I remember correctly) sessions to read benefits. If you are having any problems finding resources, please email me and I will see if I can help connect you. Look for services you are insured for, and also for services operated on a sliding scale. I once spoke to a hospital counsellor after my mom passed and she wanted me to pay $20 or $30 a session, not so much because she needed the money, but she wanted to make sure I was able to commit and consider my treatment a priority.

I will just sum up and say, if you are having mental health difficulties, first try and contact your psychiatrist, then any psychiatrist, then a medical doctor, learn all you can about your illness, get active in learning (books) and groups (Wrap and many others). Find out all you can about your medications, then find out about counselling. And don’t worry if you seem to take one step forward and two back in your mental health journey, we all have good days and bad days.

Leif Gregersen

viking3082000@yahoo.com

Link to my first memoir:

Through the Withering Storm

 

Growing Up With Illnesses Like Bipolar and Also Having Severe Anxiety

This is a shot I took of a soccer field near my house. When I look at this photo, I tend to notice that though an exciting game of soccer is going on, the bleachers are empty. It takes me back to the one year I played organized sports in my home town of St.Albert. There was a rep team made up of hand-picked players, one for boys and another for girls. Both of them beat us royally, which was not considered a fair match, so when, in our final game–in overtime–we beat the only team that had ever beat us in a fair match, for a few brief moments we were on top of the world.

Soccer is a wonderful experience, and I suggest any parent should encourage their kids to participate. For a long time I used to try and encourage parents to put their kids in cadets, but few have ever done it. With all the training, the sports, the friends, and the travel you get from it, it seems almost ridiculous that anyone would not want their kids to join. Air cadets was something that taught me skills that got me through a lot of very difficult times, and still to this day, 31 years after I left, I rely on a lot of those skills to make my living and get along in the world.

But to try and keep more on the topic I wanted to speak most about, I would like to try and discuss anxiety. Because I was never given any kind of diagnosis, and it is even unclear today at the ripe old age of 46 what exactly the doctors think is wrong, I missed out on a lot of opportunities in my life. I don’t know if there really was any good treatments for anxiety when mine was at its’ worst. I can try and describe what it was like though.

I was 14. I had been taken out of school for an assessment at the General Hospital in Edmonton for two weeks, and during that time I was allowed to attend cadets. On one of those two nights, I had been assigned to get in front of a class of my peers and give a talk about my hobby-which was collecting military combat uniforms. Now, I will digress for just a moment. When I gave that talk, I hadn’t interacted with anyone my age for quite a few days. I felt that my social skills had just gotten rusty, when it was actually a diagnosable illness I had that wasn’t being treated. I got up in front of the room, and I felt a strong pull taking my gaze away from the audience and looking down at the floor. I also became aware of my looks, my acne, and I blushed crimson red. Maybe what hurt the most was walking past a person who was in the class having a laugh with a friend about how horrible my performance had been.

All through my younger days I drowned in anxiety. I would sit out every single song of every single dance the cadets held. The idea that someone could like me or find me attractive was seemingly out of the question. There were a few times I can recall though that I clearly had bipolar disorder as well (I also have a third diagnosis, of schizoaffective disorder). A friend gave me a ride home from the cadet hall where we had been dropped off after a weekend camp at a base near Red Deer. I can’t even describe it. Maybe the tiredness set me off, I really don’t know. But it was the first time I can remember feeling elated, talking way too fast about too many things, and not having a clue that this was something very out of character for me.

All through my teen years I struggled with insomnia, and a good part of it was my own fault. I would stay up late, eat hot dogs or muffins I had brought home from work, then for some reason as time for school approached, I would get this idea in my head that I could be a superior student like I had once been if I studied every word of a textbook. So many times I got these big ideas, then ended up sleeping, and also sleeping in for class. Skipping breakfast, I would race off to school. When the day ended, I would go home and take a nap. This was not only a bad idea that made it harder for me to sleep properly at night, but I would get these nightmares that were just horrible. This was one of the few times that I started to realize that something was going very wrong with my mind. I told my mom about the bad dreams, and she basically responded by asking me what I thought she could do about it. As problems piled up with me, the loneliness, the social anxiety, the insomnia, the depression, and poor sense of self piled up, I almost went to see a psychiatrist but instead waited until I was forced to see one. I really hope anyone who reads this doesn’t tread down that path, especially the young people.

Back at that time, along with anxiety, I had severe depression. I often say that I wasn’t really sure if I was experiencing depression because I had no real close friends, or if my severe depression made it hard for me to open up to and form solid friendships with people. It may apply to a lot of people, but when I think back now to the three or four really close friends I had, I regret ever meeting them.

One of them was a clear alcoholic who was overweight and wore thick glasses and somehow thought he was the coolest and most attractive person ever. Sometimes I am taken back to the odd fun times we had, and I think it would be neat to look him up. Years ago I tried to do so and he really seemed to feel the need to compete with me over anything I said and look for ways to humiliate me. Him and the people he hung around with never really left my home town. There was one guy who I actually really liked and has always been a friend, though a casual friend, and he became a University Professor and moved out of province.

Come to think of it, a lot of the people I knew in school were alcoholics. I was desperately trying to quit back then, but was encouraged into binging a few times with another fair weather friend. Drinking in some ways was magic. It lifted my depression, relaxed me, helped me overcome my social anxiety. The only bad effects was that it was killing me, I was leading an extremely dangerous and risky lifestyle while I was drinking, some of the hangovers I had were epic, and as I drank I watched my family fall apart from similar and different addiction issues. I hate the term ‘self medicate’. I drank because, like many people, I had a subconscious connection with booze and the rarer and rarer good times I would have when using it. Now the very idea of what I used to do as a teen seems ridiculous. Ego contests to see who could drink the most, drinking parties in a delivery car while delivering pizza. Turning into some kind of monster, picking fights with friends or making moves on females that only a 15-year-old could ever get away with.

Getting over those depressions and anxiety was a long road. It was nearly impossible while I was adjusting to medications my doctor prescribed me to try and deal with my fractured social skills. Finding the Schizophrenia Society has been so key in getting me healthy again. I work a few days a week, I earn a little extra money for groceries. I have some solid friends and a lot of self respect from finding a way I can help others even when I am kind of broken myself. Of course having an incredible, intelligent and caring father means a great deal as well.

At first, I really didn’t know what to expect from the Schizophrenia Society. I figured if any students I was going to speak to were anything like I was in my teens it would be hell. But 98% of the students I present to are incredibly interested and responsive to what I have to say. I worked my way up and have given presentations to police recruits, student nurses, criminology classes. It isn’t all that uncommon for me to speak to lecture halls with 200 students. The difference in my anxiety and social skills have been massive.

Well, dear readers, that is all I think I have to say about bipolar and anxiety for now. If you want to know more, or ask a questions, please contact me. If you think you are experiencing symptoms of mental illness, talk to your family doctor about a referral. And if you are in crisis or feel suicidal, please go to your nearest emergency room. Best,

Leif G

 

Poetry, Mental Health Talk and a Dragonfly

 

 

(Scroll past today’s Poem for Today’s Blog Post)

Travel Through the Circle

By: Leif Gregersen

 

As a child life was so simple

Simply laugh and play and run

I was under God’s protection

And cared for by everyone

 

Then I got a little older

Suddenly the world was not so nice

Everyone seems to want a robot worker

To just pay tax and sacrifice

 

And then I met a woman

I loved her dearly; she was fond of me

I made my first commitment

And within that love-bond I felt so free

 

Love at first seems to be the great redeemer

That finally makes your soul complete

But now even that is all behind me

As into loneliness and middle age I retreat

 

Life is not so simple

Once you travel through the years

But there is one thing I know for certain

For self-love you need to face your fears

 

I was scared of being hurt by my partner

So I hurt her before she could hurt break my heart

If I had only told her that I loved her

I wouldn’t have this pain of being torn apart

 

But you have to keep on living

For those you will one day leave behind

Always care for the children

And a new kind of love you’ll find

 

May 28, 2018

 

Well, I started my day by boarding a bus and heading to the blood clinic. I was given a blood sugar level test and the clinic people decided they were able to proceed with the further test for diabetes since my blood sugar level was below 7.8 but they wouldn’t tell me how far below. I was given a drink that was almost syrup and then had to sit and wait for two hours then was given another blood test. The second test was to see how well my body handles sugar. Two days ago I was given the word that I have diabetes. This was a little hard to take. I have worked in senior’s homes where people with diabetes have had multiple amputations because of the illness, and when I was a kid I was deathly afraid of diabetes, so much so that I greatly limit my sugar intake and exercise as much as I can. But it is a cold, hard fact that I am going to need to change my diet even further. The hard part about that has to do possibly with the medications I am on. I crave fatty foods, I get hungry in the middle of the night and get up to eat small snacks. I don’t recall in the past five years if I have ever felt that my blood sugar level was low, but there certainly have been many times where I indulged in fatty foods to excess. I kind of feel that this is an illness that many people with a mental illness face, if not for the medication, for the simple reason that their lives are so devoid of normal pleasures, eating becomes the only thing they can do to feel good.

All in all I feel fairly supported by family and friends. I have decided to begin a vegetarian diet where I eat a lot more fruits and vegetables, but occasionally indulge in small amounts of white meat such as chicken and fish.

As far as my life in general goes, I am facing what could work out to be a tough month. I have signed a contract to teach poetry classes at a homeless agency with the hopes of teaching street people enough about poetry to compose poems for a special booklet that is being published to help deal with opiod abuse. This is actually a fascinating subject, I have been reading up what I can about it, but the funny thing is even at the biggest book store (actually the only new book store in Edmonton that has many branches-Chapters/Coles/Indigo) there are books available to order, but none at all on the shelves. Even at the library I was only able to get two short books with just facts about drugs that were aimed at teenagers.

Something I don’t like to admit is that in a small way I have an addiction of my own. I have a very hard time sleeping and often stay up all night (writing blogs and stuff) but if I have something important to do, I may take a sedative or sleeping pill to help me rest. I would prefer to do without these completely, but often it comes down to taking something or being out of it or even sleeping right through something I really want to do.

I am also having some worries about my mental health because I am going to see my Doctor on Tuesday and he is going to try me out on a new medication, either ability or invega, I don’t remember which. On the lighter side, I used to have a roommate who has been put on one of these two drugs and he has gone through a noticeable change. I am just nervous that if I try this new drug and there are any problems, it will mess up my opportunity to teach that poetry workshop that runs all through June. Anyhow dear readers, thanks for joining me on my journey. I see there are comments from my previous blog entry, I look forward to reading them and encourage anyone who reads this to send me mail or messages. Best,

LG