Month: September 2014

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Investigating ECT

Excellent personal story, insights, and disclosure. Thanks for speaking out. We don’t hear enough about ECT. Keep on.

bi[polar] curious

Yesterday I had a consultation with a local ECT specialist.

ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) is generally considered a last resort treatment for people in severe manic or depressive states whose symptoms have not responded to medication. The procedure works by producing a controlled seizure in an anesthetized patient by means of a low controlled electric current passed through the brain.

I can probably guess what you’re thinking at this point, and yes… it is a serious procedure. Though this form of treatment has undergone significant improvements since its early usage it is still highly stigmatized, even by many of those within the mental health community. At the same time, it is one of the few “proven” (i.e. studied) treatment options for people who experience severe symptoms that do not respond to medications (like mine).

I also feel inclined to note that I have not made any solid decisions regarding this form…

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Get a clue – Community
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Get a clue – Community

community

There are some things that must be experienced to have a clue.  If  you have never had a rebellious teenager, if you have never felt a full panic attack, if you haven’t grown old, been pregnant, been fat, if you’ve never, you won’t know.

If you have never been thin and beautiful, or large and virile, if you haven’t jumped from a plane and felt the free fall before the shoot, if you have never held a graduation diploma after working harder than you ever have, if you haven’t, you will never know.

So how can you?  How do we understand, give advice, and how can we be present.

There are common thoughts and common feelings, like the air we breath.  Rejection, hope, the intersection of thought with emotion with soul, our 6 senses; sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, emotion, these we may be able to understand.  We may not be able to understand divorce but we will know rejection.

The sense of accomplishment, being the first in generations to graduate from college for example, is in each of us in our own context; picked for the team, sleep through night after days of preoccupied thought absorbing up the early morning minutes into hours, aware of self-value after chasing it over hills of bullying and comparisons.

Comparison is the thief of joy. – Roosevelt

There are going to be a lot of things that we will never understand in others.  But we will understand how to be present, stand beside someone, allow you to have your unique experience but although unique it is with commonality.   Everything we go through has commonality.  We are designed for just that point in time, for connection.  It is the pursuit of a lifetime.

Self-care tip:  Seek and engage in community.

Questions:  What is it that you feel alone in?  What do you believe is unrelatable?  Or Why not?  Please tell us your story.

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It goes in both directions

caged

Say hypothetically that you or I achieved full health, that fount of youth that our heroes pursued on their lonely journeys, persons of La Manche. Say we, like Tuck Everlasting, or the marvelous “Lucy,” as performed by Scarlett Johansson and written/directed by Luc Besson, became well. Became every bit of our potential.  Say Fortune caught us finally in her gauzy fingers and we no longer were bound by the helix of genetic vulnerability, so much as to say that we are no longer a broken fly, indeed, in a web of inevitable need for salvation.  Would God who is and who is personal be friendly to me?  Or would God who no longer sensed “need” in Her subjects lose interest and wander off into the forest of other brokenness?
That’s a pathological relationship when its function is fueled by brokenness, thinking the brokenness allows for connection and Love.

How bout Me, then?  Would we forget about the One who had tended our hurts, a gentle Giver, like a child moving from one wrapped present under the Christmas tree to another.  Would God serve no purpose in our self-care?  In fact, would there be self-care any more?  Maybe in this hypothetical scene of the perfect human, we would lose connection.  Perhaps we would become like the girl in Hawthorne’s fantastic short story, The Birthmark, who without our imperfections would die, unable to breathe the air.  Unable to receive Love without our flaws.

No.  You and I are more than this.  We are not loved by a God who keeps us in misery for the sake of Her throne, for the purpose of saving us from sickness and suffering.  We are not sought out in a personal intimacy that is, in its own design, sick.

God isn’t afraid of perfection.  Our connection to God who is and who is personal is not threatened by our healthy selves.

Salvation goes in both directions – up and down, when we are doing well and when we are unwell, to our perfect as well as our imperfect selves.

Self-Care Tip:  Let us feel very good to include God who is and who is personal, when confidence lifts.  It won’t jinx Me or my connection to God to value oneself.  Keep on.

Question:  When do you want to connect with God?  Does staying connected with God improve your self-care, even when feeling great?  Have you thought that there is value in connection with God when doing well or poorly?  Is it either-or in any way?  Please tell us your story.