Teetering on the Brink of Depression

In the aftermath of the shootings in Arizona almost every person speaking out about the shootings, and trying to figure out who Jared Loughner is and why he went on that rampage of gun violence targeting a specific Congresswoman and her aids and constituents, have pronounced him a madman, a homicidal maniac, a paranoid schizophrenic, a psychotic and more, all without a single mental health professional actually speaking with him and doing a mental health assessment.  And all this flinging of the crazy is done in a country with very poor access to mental health care.  I did hear one woman with mental health credentials (she'd been a profiler for the FBI)  call him all kinds of crazy without actually speaking with him, based solely on the tiny bits and pieces pasted together from his You Tube videos and the brief comments of a "friend" of his.  Not only is that kind of pronouncement hugely unethical, it's hugely irresponsible and prejudicial.  If there was already an impediment to seeking mental health care due to the stigma of a diagnosis that labels one "crazy," there is now the extra stigma of being labeled such a danger to society that we crazy people should all be incarcerated to protect the rest of you undiagnosed crazies from us diagnosed crazies. It makes those of us who have sought help for our mental health problems worry that we are now viewed by our friends and neighbors as a ticking time bomb of potential homicidal rage.  But these days, who isn't?  And when you look around, how many of those who seem too angry or too unstable to be out in the world are not only gun owners but packin' heat at any given moment.  Does this make you all feel safer?

Since the shooting rampage in Tucson, I've heard a great deal about the rights of all to buy a fully automatic Glock and an extended ammo clip but very little about the rights of all to receive mental health counseling.  In fact in these hard economic times most states are cutting budgets for mental health coverage just as we're ramping up the fear and loathing of the mentally ill. 

I know from my own experience with the mental health care system that it's not easy to diagnose a specific mental illness.  I have been depressed since early childhood, but my depression wasn't treated until I was in my late twenties despite two suicide attempts, one in my late teens and one in my early twenties.  I was called "moody".  And despite the many years of therapy, it took an internist to put me on an antidepressant in my late twenties.  She was smart enough to tell me that I would always need to be on an antidepressant.  In fact, the first antidepressant was so effective that it's still a great drug for me, for my specific brain chemistry, despite all the new antidepressants on the market these days.  I was in my mid-forties when I was finally diagnosed with bipolar disorder.  The reason this diagnosis took so long was that my mania was seen as unlimited drive, mercurial range, access to vast energy.  I was called high strung.  I was compared to a race horse.  My whole system was speedier than average.  I was a tightly coiled spring.  I was a disaster in the making.  But on the way to disaster I did a lot of very interesting things. I was articulate enough to get away with almost anything.  I even owned a gun.  And I almost pulled the trigger on a man in a moment of exasperation with him for not leaving me alone when I asked him to.  Luckily for me, and for all the annoying men to follow, I got rid of the gun and never replaced it.  Where is that stylish little Browning Semi-Automatic Pistol now?  Probably in the hands of someone like Jared Loughner.

Armchair Psychiatry in the Wake of Political Assassinations

Everyone seems so comfortable pronouncing Jared Loughner mentally deranged.  I've seen him called paranoid schizophrenic and/or psychotic yesterday on Facebook, and heard nearly every pundit on MSNBC or CNN  make similar pronouncements including calling him a homicidal maniac with the sole exception of Rachel Maddow.  If we can agree that anyone who commits mass murder and/or political assassinations is crazy, then we can stop calling political assassinations terrorism when the person committing mass killings with a handgun has a Middle Eastern last name. 

In the sense that Jared Loughner's had problems in school, was kicked out, tried to join the military and was not allowed to do so because he'd taken drugs or was on drugs or some other vague something about Jared Loughner and drugs is another fairly common part of his mental health assessment the armchair psychiatrists out there cite as proof that he was unhinged. (Drug use as evidence of insanity would make a high percentage of young men and women officially crazy on every single day in every place in the country at one moment or another.)  He was arrested for having drug paraphernalia, but the charges were dropped. I haven't heard how long ago that happened, but it's part of his history and I trust an arrest record and a courts dismissal of charges.  Are they determinative of his craziness?  Not in my book, but I'm just the bipolar lady living in her garage who makes little secret that she self medicates with pot and has her whole life long.  But then I believe almost all of you are self-medicating with one thing or another at any given moment.  And who didn't go through a period of experimenting with some kind of intoxicant that your parents might have called you crazy for (if they'd only known what you were doing) back when you were young and rebellious?

The attempted mass assassination of United States Congresswoman Giffords and murder of her staffers and constituents, with a Federal Judge as collateral damage, is horrific, unspeakable.  We can only make sense of it if the angry and alienated young man who bought the gun and ammunition and went on a very targeted killing spree was insane, was a homicidal maniac.  No, he was a just another angry and alienated young white man in America in a state where the crazy seems to be in overdrive and anyone can go to the local store for guns and illegal ammunition.

 It's a pretty safe bet that money for routine screening for mental health problems is nonexistent in Arizona where money for life saving organ transplants has been cut from the state budget in favor of providing $500 million to private prisons.  Besides that, how many angry young men in America do you know who would avail themselves of the opportunity for a voluntary mental health evaluation?  I'm guessing that a lot of young men would rather lose their left nut than be diagnosed with a mental illness. But once insnared in the system and diagnosed and treated with drugs and therapy, it's almost impossible to force young men to take the drugs that would manage their illness.  Men are under served by the mental health system because they can't and won't admit they have a problem that requires medicating.  It's stigmatized like nothing else in this country. I bet it's easier to take being called a fag than a psychopath.  This has to be part of the reason that his schools, the police and courts, and the military were not willing to make treatment mandatory after coming into contact with a young man like Jared Loughner.  Either the evidence of mental illness was thought to be too flimsy to make it mandatory in any of his brushes with authorities, or we don't know anything yet.  But can anyone who targets large numbers of people for killing be considered sane?  Is there a family in this country of 90% gun ownership who doesn't have an angry, alienated young man who isn't talking about why he's so angry, why he feels so alone?

We know that Jared Loughner was trying to get an education.  He was attending a Community College and was evenually asked to leave and prohibited from coming back.  He tried to join the Military and was rejected there.  I'm sure each of these rejections fueled his alienation and anger.  And even if he hadn't been able to buy a gun and amunition legally, he could have bought one from a private seller at a gun show or out of someones trunk in the parking lot of Wall Mart.  Guns are easier to buy than antidepressants, and cheaper when you get right down to it.



Monday Rachel Maddow held up clippings for twenty or so mass shootings by young men with handguns all over the country in the past twenty years (which was a fraction of the actual number of such stories).  It's not as uncommon as it should be.  I'm not as shocked as I should be.  Yes, I'm filled with sorrow for the family's of the victims.  I'm hoping for a good recovery for Congresswoman Giffords.  I'm stunned that no amount of slaughter with a single handgun with an extended clip can make us talk sanely about gun control.  We are the most heavily armed nation on the planet. This is the one area where we are number one.  There are 90 guns for every 100 people in the United States. I know, for most of you that's just a ho hum statistic. That's a sickening statistic to me.  Because there is no way to force anyone into a taking a psych evaluation prior to buying a gun and ammunition.  I think it should be a requirement for anyone buying a gun, but I'm just the crazy lady who takes her medications and doesn't own a gun.  But I'd bet money I could go to any sporting goods store and buy a Glock drive a couple of blocks to Wall Mart and buy an extended ammo clip.  It would make committing suicide a lot easier.  The difference between a crazy old woman and an alienated young man is, he's far more likely to kill other people before killing himself.

A Crazy Mother, Death and Property Taxes: My First Economic Meltdown

There was a perfect storm of catastrophes ten years ago in my life.  I was living alone in my house, modeling, acting, and doing a bit of production work as a stylist.  My biggest client was ZCMI or Zion's Cooperative Mercantile Institute (owned by the Mormon Church) a large and successful department store that ran multiple daily ads in the two Salt Lake newspapers, the occasional ad in the big glossy fashion magazines like Vogue and Harper's Bazaar and ads on television as well as the inserts in the statements they sent out. They also provided a lot of runway work for models.  They put on some of the biggest fashion shows around and I had been for several years one of their favorites.  They accounted for 80% of my income.  I had a great agent and was doing well enough to begin investing in the stock market.  I'd been making enough money in the five years preceding 2000 to have a nice little stock portfolio.  I had five credit cards with very generous limits and very low interest rates.  I traveled (for work and for play). The Clinton years had been exceptionally good for me.  I, like many investors, was fond of tech stocks.  Then it all came crashing down.

The first catastrophic thing that happened to my happy life was the closing of ZCMI. There was no prior warning.  It happened quickly, like a beheading.  And it changed the opportunities for tens of thousands of people in so many different businesses in Salt Lake.  It was devastating for photographers and the people working with them, the TV production people who worked on those commercial shoots.  It was hard on agents and all the talent working on the shows, print ads, and TV commercials.  The people who did lights and music for shows lost major accounts.  Since I was a model in print, TV, and fashion shows as well as getting booked as a make-up artist and stylist, I was devastated.
A lot of the people who worked in the stores as buyers, department managers, sales staff, and custodial staff were in their forties and fifties, not yet old enough to retire but too old and too experienced to easily transition to other retail outlets without taking huge cuts in pay and jobs that didn't reflect their decades of work in the fashion industry. 

Then the tech bubble burst and I began to lose money in the Stock Market.  I hadn't been taking dividends out of the market but rolling them back into my investments.  At first I lost that money I'd been leaving in my accounts that could have been income.  Then I started losing capital and finally I pulled out of the Stock Market.  Work slowed to a trickle.  Bush was handed the Presidency by the Supreme Court and from that moment on my life became hell.

My mother, Maggy, went spectacularly crazy in Santa Barbara in 2000.  As her only child, I was informed she was my legal responsibility.  Part of her craziness was giving all her money to the guys running the scam called The Canadian Lottery.  The Feds and Mounties were investigating these crimes and asked for my help in finding out the name of the person Maggy was sending her money to.  I could account for only $100,000 that was taken out of her bank accounts in $25,000 chunks as cashier's checks wired to a mail drop in Canada.  But at least we had documentation that her identity had been stolen along with her life savings.  She'd started cashing checks from various secret bank accounts and hiding hundred dollar bills in books or behind photos or tucked in seemingly unrelated files in a file cabinet in her apartment in Santa Barbara. I only know this because after bringing my crazy, incontinent, mean mother to Salt Lake, I had to fly back to Santa Barbara, empty and clean her apartment and storage unit.  I had three days to do it without lights or heat or hot water in cold and rainy weather.  The utilities had been turned off before I managed to get her to Salt Lake.  I spent thousands of dollars on plane tickets between here and there, as well as car rentals and all of this was done while I hobbled on a painful freshly broken ankle and foot.  And during this time of getting her and most of her stuff from there to here, I lost thousands of dollars in bookings. My agent was frantic to get me working again.

Once I had her here, I had to be her full time caregiver because I couldn't afford to hire a skilled baby sitter to replace me,  or a nursing home.  My mother kept trying to run away, usually wearing only a skimpy sweater and not  another stitch of clothing with shit dribbling down the backs of her shriveled legs.  I changed all the locks, locked the gate, and held us both prisoner.  I had her in my care until I was bankrupt. I was so depressed and exhausted I could no longer get out of bed. I had to lock her in my room with me, since I couldn't let her out of my sight. After four years of caring for her, I was hospitalized for two and a half weeks and she went into a nursing home.

She died almost five years ago.  I'm still recovering from the financial ravages of that shit storm of misfortunes.  Taking care of my mother

Now I'm taking care of the house she left me and which I can't afford to live in.  And I'm not alone in this predicament given the current financial meltdown.

(the link is to my novella called: The End Of Life As We Know It)

I'm the Monster Here

I wrote about my abortion because I needed to tell that story and the timing seemed right. Some of you will see me as the murderer of a person. You might think I have committed the ultimate sin. I'm sure I have, and have been sinned against. There are many details I left out of it, but in so many ways, I was a monster. I was crazy. I have always been crazy. It was a crazy time, the mid-sixties. May I remind you all that there are details in that story that might have alerted you to my carelessness and reckless behavior without apology or judgement. And yet there have been so many times and ways I tried to imagine a better ending.

By the time I was twenty-three I was clearly nuts. I was a magnet for the wrong men, every bit as damaged as I, men who wanted to manipulate and own me. I had not been loved as a child and had no idea how to love. Almost every man in my family had sexually abused me as a child. I trusted no one. I looked picture perfect but I was batshit crazy, coiled too tightly, barely able to breath. It was said of me I was high strung. That was an understatement. I worked every second to hold myself together, to appear calm and in control of myself, but I was an anxious mess. I was a monster. I aborted my only pregnancy. I knew I'd be a terrible mother. I had never been around a good mother.

I hated myself so profoundly I knew I carried a monster just like me, just like my mother, or worse, just like my father. I did not want to spend the rest of my life continuing that tradition or connected in any way to the man who impregnated me. He was delighted when I told him I was pregnant. But I was so furious at that moment because I also had to tell him he needed to get tested for a sexually transmitted disease. And in the end when we both knew that he hadn't given me syphilis, I still didn't want to have that profound connection with him.

One of the Indian women who worked in the sewing room at Satpurush asked me one day as we were all having lunch together, "Why don't you do what you're supposed to do? You're swimming against the current of your life." I was stunned by the question. I've been pondering that one all my life.

This isn't an excuse for my careless desperate foolish life, but I was emotionally damaged by it all. I was depressed and reclusive, living in a life that always seemed to put me in intimate contact with people I'd rather not have known. Nothing was planned or thought out. I was also bipolar. But if you believe in God then God has been testing me. Have I failed the test?

I don't believe in God. This in and of itself does not make me a monster. But it does let me see that the agenda of all Abrahamic religions is the subjugation of women. So this makes religious strictures completely political to me. And I set my jaw against it. I will not be chattel. I will not be dominated.

And in the end I might be liked; I do have friends. But it will be hard for a man to love me. I'll always need to live alone.

In many ways I am still my dreadful mother. I look like her, I sound like her, I have her taste in so many things and a such a bad track record with men. You probably wouldn't like me. I barely like myself.

Economic Support for Mental Health Facilities Falls As Local Governments Make Budget Cuts

I've written about my great mental healthcare facility called Valley Mental Health. Both my psychiatrist and my therapist work there. It's a beautiful building and contains many programs to both treat and educate those over 50 with serious mental health issues. There is a computer lab, large rooms for group therapy, and an incredibly good staff. In Utah like most states there are not enough rooms for inpatient treatment for those in extreme crisis, but Valley Mental Health offers all day care as an alternative to hospitalization for those suffering a temporary crisis.

Last month there were two articles in the Salt Lake Tribune about the budget cuts that will be affecting the staffing and services offered at Valley Mental Health. They are devastating cuts. I've called to see if my psychiatrist and therapist will still be there, and yes, they will, but it will be harder to get in to see them since they'll be taking on more patients as other professional staff will be laid off. Before the cuts it took two months to get an appointment with my psychiatrist. I have my therapists cell phone number so I can talk through a mini crisis over the phone. But these cuts will drastically effect so many just coming into the system or who live in assisted living facilities but come to Valley Mental Health for group therapy. This will effect the money for transportation for these patients as well as cut the staff of facilitators who run the group therapy sessions. It's going to be a rough winter for the mentally ill seniors who depend on Valley Mental health.

In My Travels

Yesterday when I was visiting sites I've missed napping as I adjusting to my bipolar drug change, while looking in on Franiam I found her post dedicated to this site and this post. It really resonates for me because I could so easily be homeless. Had I not taken care of my mother in her descent into dementia, and inherited her house, I very well might be homeless. Thanks to what began with the Reagan "revolution," we now have no facilities to care for those who cannot care for themselves. It will get worse. The mortgage meltdown, bank failures, a falling dollar, rising costs and gas prices rising almost daily, we are in deep dodo. I know this isn't news to any of you, but I am old enough to know that prior to Reagan we did not have a "homeless problem." I've talked about this before and not that long ago, but thanks to Franiam, we now have this site to educate us, and make it real in a way nothing else does, short of being homeless yourself. Please read this: Under the Overpass