A History of My Mental Illness 2/16/2013

I guess that I first noticed that I was having problems was in 8^th grade.  Yes, I was bullied in 8^th grade, but that wasn’t the problem.  I stood up to the bully in 8^th grade and he backed off from harassing me.  However, this year was the first year I really noticed that my sexual inclinations were greater than my peers.  In fact, they were probably greater than my peers going back to 7^th grade, when I dated a high school sophomore.  However, by 8^th grade I was too fast for love.  In 8^th grade, I can remember dumping a new girlfriend on the first night because she wouldn’t have sex with me.  Lucky her, because even if she had, it wouldn’t have lasted for much longer.

8^th grade was a hard fought year for me.  At school, I waged a tremendous war with my evil inclinations, which were the result of powerful opiates that enter my blood through my digestive tract when I consume gluten or casein.  I also had acne too.  Part of it was due to my allergic reaction to milk and milk products, but it was also due to the soap I was using, which was something I didn’t figure out until my first year of marriage with my wife.  So here I was as an 8^th grader with my hormones on overload, and when asked to write about what paradise would be for a class assignment, I wrote how I thought death would be paradise.  Obviously, I was very depressed, and in fact depression followed me all the way until I stopped consuming gluten and casein, but that wasn’t until I was about 22 or23 years old.  So, this wasn’t a usual depression, as I was both depressed and hypersexual.  Despite this, and probably because my teachers may have been able to see how hard I waged war with my evil inclinations, I was picked to be the cross bearer at my 8^th grade graduation ceremony.

High school had its ups and its downs.  My senior year was actually really fun, even though I had tremendous sleeping problems again due to opiates, but also probably due to sleep apnea.  It seemed like I was always very tired, and in fact, most mornings in high school I wanted to cry because I was so tired, but the tears wouldn’t come.  I often thought of finding a way to skip school because every day I was so tired I wanted to cry.  Yet, I had plenty of friends in high school.  Most of them probably just thought that I was quiet, but inside my greatest dreams at the time were to have a girlfriend and to be able to be a third party in a conversation, a listener to two different people talking, but this is something that I could not do because of the opiates in my system.

High school was also a time where I played in a church band with the woman who eventually became my wife about 7 years ago.  I also worked for Windstar Farm (picking veggies), The Cape Cod Times (as a newspaper hawker), and at the age of 15 or 16, I started at McDonald’s Restaurant in Bourne, back before 9-11, when anyone could travel through Otis Air Force Base.  Most notably I was elected Deputy Speaker of the House of the Cape and Islands Youth Congress, yet it came back to my dad that the girls from Bourne High School voted for me because they thought I was cute.  I was also good at music.  I played in the Academy of Music High School Jazz Combo my Senior year of high school, which was a band that acted as an opening act for local jazz bands.  Though I felt my peers were better than me, the instructor said that I was the most improved musician that year, while another young man was also said by the instructor to be the most accomplished.  He went on to play in the New York Philharmonic.

What struck me most about my sexuality is that I wanted a dirty woman, and the reason for that is that I knew that I would probably just screw up the life of a woman that I deemed as good, so when it came to relations with the opposite sex, I sought the gutter, because I couldn’t live with hurting someone who I cared about.  I also knew that I was emotionally unsteady and childlike and that would not be acceptable for me to be like that with the women who I cared about.  By college, my sexual urges were too great, when left alone I would masturbate to orgasm 35 days a week, which works out to 5 times a day.  I needed to masturbate before I went to class in order to keep myself in composure.

Through high school I got fairly decent grades and got accepted to Rutgers University.  I wanted to go there because Jersey, NYC, and Philadelphia where all close by where I would have access to the most violent mosh pits.  Probably, one reason I liked moshing so much is that the opiates in me prevented me from feeling pain when I hit people.  This was my time.  This is when I could let my evil inclination run amuck for I knew that I had to keep it under wraps when I was in professional settings, such as college, but also in high school as well.

By my junior year at Rutgers, I was a disaster.  I tried as hard as I could to get good grades.  And, I also tried so hard to find the sexual gutter, and the gutter of music, that I had a psychotic episode that changed my life.  I believed that I talked Gd.  Gd told me that He didn’t know that I would get, “So far,” that He was, “Punishing me,” and when I heard that, as an atheist, I instantly believed in Gd, and demanded of him, “Why are you punishing me?”  He said, “I get everyone sooner or later.”  This immediately gave me hope that I could evade the punishment of Gd through pursuing a righteous life.  I repented.  Suddenly, I thought I was being poisoned by carbon monoxide, so I called 9-11.  I was taken away in an ambulance and told, “The best thing you can do now is to tell the truth.”  After that hospitalization for some reason I said I was the Messiah, so that is something I will try to be, but don’t get all excited by it because I am but one person and I don’t believe that I can be the cheering section of the whole world.  What does being the Messiah mean?  I couldn’t really give you a very accurate answer other than it is something that you feel in your soul, and it is a reason to motivate one to achieve a higher level of righteousness.

That semester of my Junior year, I withdrew from all my classes.  My mom nursed me back to health like I was a little baby.  I had grown thin because I couldn’t remember to eat.  I also couldn’t remember to bathe.  When I went back to work, I was so depressed that one of my coworkers said that he thought I was the, “Tiredest human being on earth.”  I was also no longer able to masturbate to orgasm as I had done, and this was one reason for my depression.  Honestly, I had prided myself in my ability to masturbate to orgasm so much, and when I was no longer able to, it was as if I had nothing that I could pride myself in that I did well at.

I was a mess and despite all of it I believed in Gd, and eventually found my way home, which I call Torah, otherwise known as the first 5 books of the Bible.  On the other hand it was my mom that found the doctor who could mostly cure me from my misery, Dr. Greenblatt.  One verse in the Psalms really stuck out, “Delight in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.”  Though I was hardly delighting, I took the step of faith that if I put one foot in front of the other and surrendered myself to Gd, he would see to it that I would experience healing beyond my wildest dreams, and that turned out to be true.  Gd has blessed me with a wife that is second to none, and the best booble, as I call him, my son, on earth, as a result of my surrender to Him, I think.

About the time I first started seeing Dr. Greenblatt, I got a professionally done intelligence assessment.  It came out that my IQ was 120, but that there were severe gaps in my learning.  For example, when it came of short term memory or working memory, I scored so low that I was told that if my scores were like that across the board I probably wouldn’t have even graduated high school.  That is a really outstanding fact, if you consider that 120 is an IQ level where most folk start to be able to get a Ph.D.  Likewise, on most IQ subjects, I scored 95^th percentile, which is only the greatest degree of sensitivity that the test has.  However, more importantly was that my auditory comprehension scored in the bottom 1% of people.  That means as a listener, it was as if I were retarded.  I know folks don’t like that word, but I would not call myself special for having a low auditory comprehension ability, no, rather call me retarded, and that was one of the things that drastically changed when I stopped consumption of gluten and casein, and also started taking an enzyme daily in case something got into my food.  That is, with some dietary changes, my auditory comprehension isn’t half bad.

Another change I was able to make is adding a manganese supplement to my diet.  It has really worked wonders in preventing me from having paranoid delusions.  For me, taking manganese meant things such as no longer feeling that I had to hold my breath in bathrooms because I feared that poisonous gases would come through the ventilation shaft, or that next door the government was spying on me, which used to freak me out back when I was smoking cigarettes.  By now it has been a few years since I have had one.  Sometimes at South Bay it has been very hard not to ask for one.  I can often feel my inner gut crumble, as I think about reaching out my hand to ask for a cigarette, but by now I have been at South Bay for about a half a year, and not asked for one, so perhaps the most difficult challenges have passed.

Lastly, I got a sleep test.  Because the lady giving it asked me not to take my medication that night I was almost unable to get to sleep.  That is because without medication I grow more and more manic very quickly, and I am also given to hallucinations when I am manic.  However, once she could see that I would be unable to sleep without my pills, I took them, and she asked me not to take anymore because she feared that the ambulance would have to be called because I needed so much to fall asleep.  That night I slept only 45min and recorded 54 apneas in those 45min.  Finally, I would be able to wake up almost every morning and not be tired through getting a CPAP machine to help me breath.  This also helped me make a major step forward with respect to mood stability.  However, by then through all the turmoil of changes and various things, I had been out of work, meaning a paying job, for some time.  And, I knew very well that if a business saw the gap in my employment record, they wouldn’t hire me.  All that work to get healthy, and I would not be able to get a job it seemed.  However, I have some hope for employment via volunteering at the MSPCA, finally a place that wasn’t going to turn me down for lack of experience, recommendations, or employment gaps.  My goal is to find a Vet who will employ me through demonstrating an excellent reputation.

True, sometimes I may get hospitalized, and I need a heck of a strong medication regimen, that is constantly changing as pills effectiveness wear off, but really for the most part I am okay.  Since, finding a higher Power, taking anti-psychotic medication, cutting out gluten and casein, taking a manganese supplement, and getting a CPAP, I have experienced a radical change where I went from a nobody to someone who might well not only turn out to be a somebody, but also someone who leads a life of love with my beautiful wife and son.

I would also like to add that I spent a year off medication before my child was born.  This may be why he is such a healthy boy.  However, that year off medication was a very dangerous year.  I was very psychotic, and hallucinations and delusions were very common to my life.  Despite spending a year off of medication, and the setbacks that I incurred from that, I learned something very important and that is that pills will probably always be a very important part of my recovery.  Before I hated the pills.  I thought of them as a crutch, but now I embrace them and consider them as a part of G-d’s plan for me.