Awake: Shake Off the Awful Chains (Part 1 of 3)

"'Doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith.' ...Doubt my doubts... doubt my doubts, (sobs) doubt my doubts," Jake repeated obsessively as if those words - what he reasoned only moments before, would now, somehow help guide him back into intelligible conversation with his therapist.

"I don't know, he's never done this before." Josie manages to sputter out between her own tears in fear. "Jake, you just keep repeating yourself...  Jake? Jake?? Jake!! Breathe! Breathe Jake!! Breath... That's good take some deep breaths."

"I stand on the edge of a chasm..." his voice rises, eyes closed, gripping his wife's hand, still seated right next to him " ...a great chain... ...four dark figures behind me, pulling me back into a pit...  Twelve ancestors before me - fighting for me with bright shining chords...  Twelve in front.... four behind... pulling...  Four behind... twelve in front... four behind..."

"You're not making any sense, Jake." The therapist verbalizes.

Jake didn't mean to scare anyone. He felt... trapped. The debilitating depression came out of absolutely nowhere this time, or if there was a cause he couldn't remember it. In point of fact - things were going great! Better than they had been for a very long time. A job he loved. Time to himself engaged in reading good book after good book. A healed/healing friendship! Well, there wasn't any fainting or anything, hello Ammon, but there was plenty of joy to be had in reunion. He had even been called to serve in the Lord's Church as a Ward Choir Director - a particularly long desired calling!! All was right in his world!

Little did he know, having perpetually felt well rested, that working swing shift had cut his nightly sleep to five or less hours a night for months. Not uncommon, but detrimental for some people with specific mental illnesses.

He had ignored the occasional prompts that went off in his head to have his mood stabilizer levels checked like he'd learned from the book that he had read, among other sources.

Why was it that when he went off of the anti-psychotic drugs in search for a more compatible set that a mood stabilizer was kept and anti-psychotic dropped?

This is bipolar and psychosis we're dealing with, but though he had, at some level registered these things at one point in time or another, they were all far from his mind now. He was spent.

All he was trying to do, was communicate. To keep fighting, but when he realized his efforts were fruitless, and... bag of cats crazy sounding... it was his last straw.

"That! What just happened in your eyes!" the therapist noted in surprise. Jake, now calm and feeling destitute, turns to look at Josie. "Where did you go, Jake? This isn't you. It's like you're not there when I look at you." Josie says with a hint of sadness. He looks away.

"Jake's not here. Come back later..." He says flatly.

Jake had given up. If all was going so well in life, and this illness still had the power to rob him of every happiness in a moment... what was the point? The cycle was set. All the books and knowledge on the topic said it. There is no end; no cure to the cycles - only hope for stability for a year, two years, maybe 10, and then it would strike again. But hope never lasted more than a couple weeks at a time. An even deeper depression would come eventually. He had fought to the very end of this battle, and he was at the point of amotivation - when motivation slumbers. It was time to seek help from a behavioral hospital... again.

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Hello. My name is Jake and I struggle with bipolar two accompanied by psychosis. This is my story of how I shook off my depression, awoke to hope in myself and expanded my empathy on a wide spectrum of mild to severe cases of mental illnesses. Stay tuned. We've got this!