Abstract

Summary: The author tells the story of her youth, which was marked by debilitating depression, and how she now lives a fulfilling adult life, thanks to the strong support of well-chosen friends and her own determination to be happy. Though she still suffers from occasional depression, she no longer feels controlled by her condition. The author’s success in managing her condition has led her to a career as a mental health consumer advocate who promotes better public understanding of mental illness by encouraging consumers to speak up about their experiences.
Keywords: Mental health, depression, recovery, social support, patient advocacy.
Citation: Poore M. Chicken wing: a patient’s journey from depression to fulfillment. J Participat Med. 2011 Apr 11; 3:e19.
Published: April 11, 2011.
Competing Interests: The author is on the staff of the Virginia Organization of Consumers Asserting Leadership (VOCAL).
 

Last week I was invited on public radio to talk about mental health reform. The guests were a revered doctor, a lobbyist, and me. The host introduced me as an “ex-mental patient” and I didn’t even flinch. As a consumer advocate, it’s become part of my livelihood to talk about what madness feels like and what is left when the madness is over. But a few of my friends called me on the phone sounding unhappy that I would be described in such a way. It seems that the words “mental patient” bring images of hospital gowns and electroshock eyes, a land of no return.

There was a time in my life, while living in a yellow farmhouse on a thin country road, that I tried to lift a black demon from my chest, but he just kept pressing down. When I pushed up he pushed me back down and hard, with strength that was supernatural. I had tears streaming down my face and I begged the white winged angel in the doorway to envelope me and he did. The scene was something I’d seen in Mexican paintings, the little black devil that comes for the soul when one lies dying. Except I wasn’t really dying and I wasn’t really dreaming. I was trying to sleep in my bed next to my boyfriend and if he were awake he wouldn’t see what I saw. All he would see was me, lying there struggling and crying.

Earlier in my life, when I felt the eyes of street people on me, my heart would speed up. I knew they understood that I was as crazy as they were, only one misstep away from a trash bag for a dress. If we made eye contact I would have to choke back tears. It felt like looking in a mirror.

My teenage diaries were existential and raw. At this time I was living just outside a big, dying city. Never enough space for me, just houses humped up on each other, aluminum siding and barred windows. Plastic lawn furniture arranged on cement block porches where old ladies with thick ankles sat and smoked. Empty lots were peppered with trash; crumpled paper bags, junk mail, condoms, and rotting half-eaten food. Hecklers and catcallers trolled in cars and not a one kept a thought to themselves. “Jenny Craig is looking for you!” and “moooooo” were what they called out from their moving vehicles.

I felt the awful disappointment of my appearance and held the absolute certainty that looks are important in this world, possibly more important than anything else. I watched enough MTV to reinforce it. I was the sort of teenage girl who would be lovingly kissed under the bleachers and then sworn to secrecy. It was a lousy feeling but I’d take the kiss every time. It was always a kiss to remember and replay in my mind. When I looked in the mirror I saw too short/ too fat/upper arms too jiggly/skin too sallow/eyes too sunken/butt too wide/bulges where bulges should not be/ hair too frizzy/clothing not quite right…all of this staring back like an insult. It made me sweat, even shake a little, to walk past a group of boys in the hallway or on the street. They would get quiet as I walked past then erupt into laughter after I passed.

Then, during my twenties, I experienced more of the same. Crying myself to sleep night after night with no real idea of what the problem was. I had the notion that we were all doomed and there was a universal pain that I could tap into without even trying. It felt like an inherited pain, more than what made sense for just this lifetime. I would break down sobbing while listening to Democracy Now on public radio, then lie in the clawfoot tub nicking myself with a straight razor in hopes of letting some misery leak out.

The unfairness and futility of life galled me and I sank under the weight of it. I pushed myself further and further into filth in an effort to become immune. I rented a studio apartment in a neighborhood of junkies and male prostitutes where the streets smelled like urine. If I looked at this every day, I reasoned, it would lose its effect on me. I would transcend it and become enlightened. Instead I would wake to feel my heart breaking, pain as real as a punch. Sometimes I felt romantic for it, just to suffer so. It felt like the suffering of an artist, drawn from a deep, deep well.

I didn’t know what was wrong with me, so I started asking doctors and counselors what kind of crazy they thought I was. It was suggested that I was going through a phase, or I needed to be hospitalized, or I was bipolar, or I had chronic depression, or I was off-the-charts crazy, or I was not crazy enough to ask for free services, or I was damaged, or I was only human, or I was a pushover, or I was too hard on myself, or it was a problem from a past life, or I should try herbs, or I should try homeopathy, or I should try lithium, or I should eat no sugar, or I needed to find my true path and follow my bliss, or maybe I needed to stop thinking so much. It was also suggested that I cheer up or look on the bright side.

What I had going for me, through all of these phases, were friends. Artist friends and women friends who had left their own suburbs to question everything. I never had to play uptight, never had to hide. I could speak the truth of my most appalling thoughts and not shock anyone around me. There were people who loved me and made our scrappy lives more fun. We put on talent shows and danced in parades and made buckwheat pancakes with real maple syrup. Because they were artists we danced the seven stages of grief to ’70s disco and crafted lousy performance art pieces and read each other’s poems. And we laughed so much. I laughed so much.

What I’ve cobbled together as an adult life is inspired by this. Make myself a fairy tale life and step into it. A little tin-roofed house in the country with paper flowers covering the dining room walls, crinolines under skirts, two wild, blond children, a white cat, a hedgehog, some homemade raw chocolate ice cream, and Edith Piaf records. If I must weep, I’d rather weep here.

These days I do everything that I know brings health and move away from everything that is crazy-making (most especially the skipping record in my head). There is yoga and there is self-love and there is the time I make for friends. There is my absolute belief that life is no longer cruel when we leave this body. Nothing is fair but nothing is permanent and while we are here we have to accept all that comes to us. Also, I give myself absolute permission to be miserable until I’m bored with it.

As a job I talk about mental health: How to improve services, what it means to be sane in an insane world, how I get by and what inspires me. I know that people get well. I know women who have spent long stretches in the hospital and now hold positions of power and keep their families together. I know people you would never accuse of being crazy who’ve heard voices and overdosed on pills. It is my work to get these people in front of students of social work and psych nursing so they can tell their stories.

There is a shift taking place, a leaning towards humanistic philosophy and a rejection of the medical model. We were concerned about coming out as crazy people, ex-mental patients, those with lived psychiatric experiences or diagnoses. There isn’t even language that suits us or describes us well. It all sounds either too sugar coated or too damning. We were ready to defend ourselves but generally people have come to us with open arms and stories of their own. If the story isn’t in the first person then it is about a friend or a family member. Some who have conquered their demons and those who have been slayed by them.

My own past mental breakdowns were serious and debilitating. I haven’t forgotten. I vowed to myself to remember the gory details and hang onto the diary pages. But some days I feel they “ain’t no thing but a chicken wing.”[a] It’s been a big life.
 

Endnote

a. “Ain’t no thing but a chicken wing” is an American slang expression denoting something that is of little importance. ↩

Copyright: © 2011 Malaina Poore. Published here under license by The Journal of Participatory Medicine. Copyright for this article is retained by the author, with first publication rights granted to the Journal of Participatory Medicine. All journal content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. By virtue of their appearance in this open-access journal, articles are free to use, with proper attribution, in educational and other non-commercial settings.