A story of recovery that bears repeating

This is the first recovery story I read and then in turn published that made me believe I could get well. I published it the first time in the first week or two that I started this blog. I am reprinting it now because I don’t think people really know how powerful and total recovery can be. I have been mentored by the same woman that mentored Kim and owe much of my journey to this woman. Kim’s story, also, at times is much like mine. Complete with horrible illness and weakness that I am now going through. I have to remember this story and others like it to remember that I can come through this too.

Here, again, is Kim’s story. I’m editing the very beginning as a couple of years have passed.

This post has basically been written for me. I “met” Kimberly Denise on the “Withdrawal and Recovery” email group I am part of. The story is part of the files of this group. It is powerful and compelling. She wrote it over 4 years ago and is at this point over 7 years drug free. She is working full-time and has a art career as well. She has had solo art gallery shows.

After we discussed publication in emails, she asked that her story be prefaced with the below comments:

Bipolar disorder is a label that has been created for any symptoms that don’t fit more narrow categorization, such as depression, anxiety, or psychosis. The vast majority of symptoms to which this label is applied are caused by nutritional deficits and/or blood sugar issues.In some cases, the symptoms are actually caused by the drugs given to treat existing emotional symptoms like depression or anxiety(again, symptoms usually rooted in nutritional problems and/or blood sugar issues). When the patient doesn’t improve with drug treatment, but instead gets worse and/or develops new and more alarming symptoms, they are diagnosed with bipolar disorder and given more of the drugs that are causing the problems.

In other situations, the symptoms that get called bipolar disorder are actually caused by drug withdrawal, because the patient’s lack of response to drug treatment results in frequent, abrupt med changes and cessations.

My belief is that as long as we aren’t acknowledging the roots of the problems and creating names like bipolar disorder for adverse reactions to drugs and/or nutritional deficits and unstable blood sugar, we mask the truth and unwittingly contribute to the ongoing manipulations and deceit of the drug companies that use that label to justify the lifelong drugging of people — including
children.

Below is the text of her awesome testimony of recovery:

I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself and tell some of my “story”. It is a familiar one, I am sure. I took psychotropic drugs for 14 years, starting at age 21, and have been off of them for about three years now.When I was a senior in college, I went to the university’s health center for some help with my overwhelming depression and anxiety. I was dealing with impending graduation and relocation, a brand-new marriage, a complete lack of coping skills, a warped perspective on life from the dysfunctional family I grew up in, and the physiological results of four years of very active bulimia. (Who wouldn’t have been depressed and anxious, lol?)

What I needed at the time was some counseling and nutritional support. What I received was Trazadone. I’m still angry about that. Nobody explained to me that it was perfectly normal for me to be miserable, given my circumstances. Nobody told me that I had destroyed my enzyme and electrolyte balances by vomiting three, four, and five times a day for years, or that it made perfect sense for me to be an emotional wreck with my system so deranged and my life in transition. After all, I didn’t have any physical symptoms. It was all in my head.

So I took the Trazadone as prescribed–one each morning–and discovered that it made me too sleepy to function. After missing several days of classes, I stopped taking the drug. It certainly wasn’t helping my academic performance as I had hoped! I wish I could say that that was the end of my experience with these drugs. Unfortunately, it was only the beginning.

Soon after graduation, I came upon a book about a wonderful new cure for depression. It lauded a revolutionary new field of medicine called “biopsychiatry” and introduced the idea that anxiety, depression and other mental disorders were simply caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. This was great news! I wasn’t weak, or lazy, or hysterical. I didn’t have some shameful character defect. I just had a chemical imbalance! All I had to do was take some pills and I would be cured!

I located one of the psychiatrists listed in the back of my book and made an appointment. When he prescribed a combination of two drugs, I accepted them gratefully and followed his instructions to the letter. One month later, I was admitted for my first psychiatric hospitalization.

I did not see this as a failure of the drugs. Instead, I embraced the explanation that it sometimes takes a while to find the “correct” combination of drugs to treat a serious illness like depression. I learned to regard my condition as something akin to diabetes, which could be maintained with daily drug treatment but could never really be cured. At that point, I really didn’t care that I would have to take drugs for the rest of my life. I was willing to tolerate the side effects. I was going to do whatever it took to find that magical combination of chemicals which would allow me to have a “normal”, “happy” life.

Prozac appeared on the market not long after that first hospitalization. I felt a surge of hope. This new “wonder drug” was going to be the one to save me. And oh, it really seemed to work! For about a month, I felt better than I’d ever felt in my life. I was on top of the world. My husband said I was hyper. If that was hyper, I liked it. But it didn’t last.

I kept taking the Prozac for a long time after it stopped “working”. I was afraid to stop. If I felt this miserable while taking the “wonder drug”, the drug that had made me feel so good, how unbelievably awful would I feel without it?

Prozac led to Paxil led to Zoloft led to Wellbutrin led to Effexor. None of these really seemed to help, so I took other drugs along with them. I tried lithium, Depakote, Tegretol, Neurontin in an attempt to stabilize my moods. I tried Haldol, Navane, Risperdol, Seroquel, Zyprexa to address the derealization, strange sensations and occasional hallucinations. I took Ativan, Valium, Klonopin to help manage the agitation and restlessness. I took other drugs along with these to help treat the side effects. I was on as many as five drugs at a time. I made two serious suicide attempts. I was hospitalized two or three times each year. I lost or quit a series of jobs due to absenteeism and an inability to cope. Our lives revolved around my “illness”, my “meds”, my violent mood swings, my side effects and symptoms. I was a whiny, tantrum-ing, self-absorbed, self-pitying, brain-damaged, befogged and befuddled brat. I couldn’t stand me and neither could anyone else. But I WANTED to be HAPPY! So I kept taking those pills.

I ‘knew’ I needed the drugs. On several occasions, I had stopped them abruptly, and the overwhelming increase in symptoms put me in the hospital every time. I didn’t know about any withdrawal syndrome. I just thought I was crazy. The time my therapist found me huddled in the bushes outside his building, a week after flushing my Paxil down the toilet, confirmed this for me. No, the drugs didn’t work, but I thought I was even worse off without them.

After ten years of coping gallantly with this madness, my husband left. He took our 3 1/2 year old son with him, and retains primary custody to this day. I see my son on alternate weekends and school vacations. While it is painful to spend so little time with my child, I see how well he is doing and I thank his father for saving him from growing up in the midst of my craziness.

I continued to take an assortment of drugs for several more years, with psychiatric admissions every few months. I attempted another committed relationship, and ended up in a domestic violence shelter. This was a clear wake-up call for me.

From the shelter, I moved to Maine and rented a cottage near the beach with my housing subsidy. I was going to start a new life. My goals were modest: to make ends meet on my disability income, enjoy the weekends with my son, attempt to work part-time, and stay out of the hospital. I no longer hoped for a new “miracle drug” to come along and cure me. I was resigned to a life of chronic mental illness. All my dreams were dead.

I met Catherine Creel through a neighbor. She was the first person ever to say to me that I was not mentally ill, that my situation was not hopeless, that the medications I depended upon to maintain my sanity were actually making me sick and insane. These extraordinary statements resounded deep within me. Somehow, despite all my experience, I knew she spoke the truth.

Slowly, I began cutting down on the drugs I was taking. I worked on one drug at a time, reducing the dose very, very carefully. To support the withdrawal process, I completely changed my diet overnight. I stopped eating all packaged foods, anything with sugar, and most refined carbohydrates as well. (I had been living on Diet Coke and chocolate cookies, so this was quite an improvement!) I ate protein and lots and lots of veggies. I supplemented with fish oil, a high-quality liquid multi-vitamin, and colloidal minerals (SupraLife). I am convinced that these supplements are what enabled me to come through this process successfully.

Each reduction in dose was accompanied by about a ten-day period of acute withdrawal, during which Catherine reminded me a thousand times, “Everything you are feeling is from the withdrawal.” That phrase became my mantra. I’ll say it again: “Everything you are feeling is from the withdrawal.” I was so accustomed to feeling so many weird physical symptoms and so many turbulent emotions while on the drugs that I had a hard time believing all the withdrawal was actually due to withdrawal. I kept thinking it was me. I had been told for years that there was something fundamentally wrong with my brain. During the year I worked at getting off the drugs, I learned that there was something fundamentally wrong with the drugs. The brain I was born with was fine, albeit terribly battered.

When I got through the acute withdrawals, I thought I was home free. I fired my therapist and my psychiatrist and got down to the business of living. Then I started to get sick. The first time, I didn’t recognize what was happening. I developed what seemed like some kind of flu-like virus, and I couldn’t seem to recover. The flu symptoms subsided quickly, but I was left with an overwhelming fatigue that was like nothing I had ever known. I was frighteningly weak, dizzy, uncoordinated. My limbs felt like blocks of wood, with the muscles tightly contracted and the joints aching fiercely (dystonia). I experienced a terrible, racy restlessness which kept me from lying comfortably to rest (akathesia), even though I was too weak and exhausted to do more than walk across the room. There were brief periods when it became difficult to breathe. My temperature went up and down, with afternoon fevers followed by chills and sweats at night. My emotions fluctuated between extreme irritability, irrational screaming, and profound sadness. This dragged on for weeks. I feared that I would die.

Throughout this period, we were constantly fine-tuning my supplement regimen to support my changing chemistry as my body struggled to return to normal. I continued to take my SupraLife liquid vitamins and colloidal minerals religiously, and I give them a tremendous amount of credit for supporting my body through the arduous process of healing. Homeopathy, flower essences, and liberal doses of a few particular supplements worked to take the edge off when symptoms became unbearable. The homeopathic remedies, essences and supplements were my survival kit, and there is no way I would attempt to go through this process without them.

I recovered, finally, and started feeling better than I had ever felt in my life. I started working a full-time salaried position doing work I loved. I almost lost this job several times when I experienced a return of the chronic fatigue-like symptoms described above, causing me to miss weeks of work. Fortunately, my employers were understanding and I was determined to succeed. I continued using homeopathy, flower essences, and carefully-chosen supplements to mitigate symptoms and to support my damaged bodily systems as they passed through phase after phase of healing and adjustment.

It began to occur to me that recovery is not a linear process. I would struggle through an acute stage and emerge feeling so much better, only to find myself knocked off my feet again a few weeks or months later. This “one step forward, two steps back” progress was terribly discouraging, until I started to understand that I was healing in phases. Each positive change in one bodily system would knock all the others out of whack, and it took time for everything to start to work together again. I did notice, however, that after each setback had run its course, I felt better and was more resilient than before.

I began to notice the intimate connection between what I ate and how I felt. If I let myself get too hungry and grabbed some kind of packaged food at a convenience store, I would have a dramatic emotional flare-up, often accompanied by physical symptoms. (We still talk about the “Pop-Tart Incident”….)

I started to view food not just as something to drop into my belly when I was hungry, and not just as something to be rigorously watched because Catherine said so, but for what it really is: the chemical compositions we put into our bodies to maintain our chemical balance.

All of our bodily processes are basically chemical reactions. The raw materials for these chemical reactions come from the things we ingest. Brain chemistry is not separate from body chemistry. They are parts of a single system. During my journey through the mental health system, I’d heard all kinds of rhetoric about brain chemistry and how it mysteriously goes awry. I’d ingested all sorts of pharmaceutical compounds in a vain attempt to “correct” some undefined dysfunction that made me “mentally ill”. By eating properly and taking supplements religiously, I was using the chemicals Nature intended us to use to keep our brains and bodies functioning properly. The opposite is also true: I had to carefully avoid ingesting chemicals that Nature didn’t intend us to use; things like sugar, Nutrasweet, MSG, other chemicals hidden in foods under the guise of “natural flavors”, and for me, chocolate. These things are hard enough for a healthy body to handle, but for a body compromised by pharmaceuticals, they can be devastating.

And so my recovery continues. I am basically healthy and able to work a full-time job, but I am very delicately balanced. The brain I was born with was, indeed, perfectly fine at birth, but that brain has been ravaged by years of pharmaceuticals and poor dietary habits. It no longer works the way Nature intended. Like most people who have taken psychotropic drugs, my body was, and to a lesser degree, still is in great need of repair, so I continue to use supplements regularly. It is important to keep adjusting them in response to the changes that are occurring as I heal.

I am profoundly pleased with my recovery. While I do have some long term damage, it doesn’t significantly interfere with my quality of life. However, I have to be very careful. If I get sloppy with my diet (like those chocolates I ate yesterday), I pay for it with akathesia, dystonia, derealization and black-hole depression (yup, I was a barrel of laughs yesterday evening). I suffer from mild dystonia–with symptoms similar to “restless leg syndrome”–nearly every night, to varying degrees. Gingko biloba tincture is helpful in managing those symptoms, but I have to be careful not to take it too often or I start experiencing symptoms of too-little seratonin. It is a constant balancing act, requiring careful attention to what I do and how it makes me feel. I’m still learning every day.

I’ve gotten better at recognizing what is causing my symptoms, so I don’t buy into them as much as I used to do. I try to be calm, treat myself with supplements, and wait for it to pass. I can’t ever get too tired or too stressed or too overstimulated. I can’t exercise too hard or I end up with the whole chronic-fatigue thing all over again. Every time I get overconfident and think I can be a little careless, I make myself sick. Still, I am so pleased to be free from those toxic, mind-numbing, spirit-destroying drugs that I can live with the trade-off.

It is a constant learning process. I am learning to pay attention to my body and the cues it gives me. I am learning about all the elements that came together during my childhood to lead me into the pharmaceutical underworld, and I am slowly undoing those processes. I am learning to be patient. I am learning to be accepting and grateful for everything that comes along.

Catherine saved my life, not once but many times over. I want to pass some of that along by offering support on this list. I have tremendous respect and compassion for all of you who are going through this, and I am pleased and honored to be here with you.

copyright 2007 Kimberly Denise. All rights reserved. No reproduction in any form without permission of the author.

I see the power of lifestyle changes–in particular, diet and nutrition, helping people in this group every day. Kim for a long time continued to support the group, not simply with her story, but with a wisdom acquired in the process. She has made critical psychological and attitude changes as suggested at the end of her story. She helped teach the group members how to think differently with cognitive behavioral like ideas. She now has moved on to live her life after giving much to all of us.

Catherine, the woman she mentions, still offers expert advice on nutritional and lifestyle changes as well as the withdrawal process. The group is sometimes closed to new members but one should check back from time to time should that be the case.