You and I Are Too Old Not To Take Our Lives Back From a Society That Labels Us Sick

Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Some thoughts about reclaiming the geography of our sanity

Trigger warning: this article discusses suicide. It is not intended as advice. If you are having thoughts of suicide please seek professional help.

Yesterday I posted a heartfelt note about suicidal ideation which seems to have touched a nerve. Here’s what I wrote:

Some of you, you know who you are, need to see this.

I dealt with suicidal ideation for decades. Battled it back, lost ground, gained ground, rinse repeat.

I see you. I also acknowledge that some of us aren’t going to win this battle. I did. That doesn’t make me superior. It’s a different path.

That said, again, I see you. Sometimes when you write your truth, you also give strength to others who, like many, ask what’s the point?

My brother didn’t win this battle. Too many of us don’t win this battle. In the meantime, I am reading you, your comments, thinking about you, and in every single possible way am holding a space of grace for you.

The post included this poignant meme, which inspired me to write the post in the first place:

This is deeply personal to me for a variety of reasons. I have sought answers like so many of my Boomer peeps, and for millions of Gen X and all those coming up after. Long before we laid the blame at social media and our phones, which are symptoms as opposed to the source (they ARE problematic, but let’s bypass that for the sake of this article), we had “mental health” issues.

I think it’s our society that’s mental. Bear with me.

Last night my cousin Tommy sent me photos from a collection that belonged to my cousin Wendy. Bright, beautiful Wendy has severe dementia. All of us are in our seventies these days.

Tommy related a few stories about one cousin who ended up so depressed that she didn’t move or speak for years until she died, mute.

My namesake aunt used to spit into cups all over her home in Nevada, and ended herself by walking in front of a speeding truck.

Yet here were these photos of my long-dead relatives in the early 1900s, my mother at three, others of cousins young and smiling. Hope and happiness.

What happened to them?

We are not the first generation- speaking of Boomers, that is- who tried to medicate mental illness. There was a boom of psychoanalysis around the Sixties which ushered in all kinds of “fixes” for what ailed us- along with Mother’s Little Helper, Valium.

This is just context. Today I stumbled across a relevant article which dovetails not only my note but some peoples’ responses to it.

This Guardian article nailed a great deal of what I’d experienced. Many of us were so relieved that we got a diagnosis. FINALLY, some authority tells us what’s wrong with us.

Now for a pill, another pill, a cocktail of pills and therapy and rebirthing (remember rebirthing?) and shock therapy and and and. But no relief.

Author Rose Cartwright writes:

….the euphoric moment in my 20s when I first discovered that my thoughts were typical symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and that there were others out there battling this common enemy. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Fuck. It’s OCD. I’ve got OCD!” said actor Charly Clive as she read a list of symptoms from the medical textbook in her hands, giving voice to the astonishing clarity and relief that diagnosis can bring in a bewildering mental-health landscape.*

Being able to identify the enormous snake which is squeezing the life out of you as a Burmese python does nothing to slow down the slow death. You still die, you just happen to know the species accomplishing the task.

Same here.

After incest and multiple rapes, my food OCD was so bad that I would drive forty miles round-trip every single night to buy fifteen dozen Krispy Kreme donuts, then chew them up and spit them out for hours until my mouth bled. For decades. Not making that up.

Krispy Kreme owes me a fucking gold statue at their headquarters.

Knowing I was in the grip of an OCD changed nothing. Neither did the slew of meds.

Worse, the cocktail of prescriptions pushed at me by trusted providers turned out to be toxic. Several of the very medicines which were supposed to regulate mood actually resulted in suicidal ideation.

Millions of us were told our brain chemistry was faulty. I suspect pharma companies uncorked thousands of bottles of champagne in celebration as millions more of us got misdiagnosed with bipolar and the profits rolled in.

Misdiagnoses are as high as 40%.

Forty percent.

Many times PTSD, along with Borderline Personality Disorder, is misdiagnosed as bipolar.

Photo by Olga Guryanova on Unsplash

I wonder how many men who played rough sports and got concussed are told they’re bipolar or have a mental illness?

Post-concussion syndrome also mimics some of the same symptoms.

Research has shown that women who have been beaten regularly in domestic violence have a dire increase in CTE (the brain injuries most commonly associated with football players). Choking in particular is brutal because it cuts off blood to the brain. Their injuries and concussions lead to serious changes in behavior.

Domestic violence is now the leading cause of traumatic brain injury.

I wonder how many of those women were told they were mentally ill, when in fact they had been brutalized?

How many children have been similarly beaten, choked, and end up labelled mentally ill?

That’s society, not brain chemistry.

If you’re having difficulty letting go of the chemistry piece, kindly read this.

I took myself off meds in 2017. Thirty-two symptoms that made no sense. The symptoms resolved in three months, including suicide ideation.

An overworked, overburdened VA all too often overdoses us veterans when what we need are better skills handling what was handed us during our service. Today’s healthcare system is equally troubled.

It’s overly simplistic and terribly unfair to blame caring counselors and empathetic health professionals who really are committed and want to give us relief.

That said, we still get too many wrong, rushed diagnoses. Way too many pills which can be harmful if they’re for the wrong condition.

Doctors know now that half of any pill’s efficacy is based on the expectation or placebo effect.

Pills alone don’t solve the problem of isolation or loneliness. They might anesthetize us, which is why we have such an opioid and alcohol problem.

Cartwright writes:

…Prof Allen Frances, who literally wrote the book on diagnosis as the lead editor of the fourth edition of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the handbook widely used by doctors), had said psychiatric diagnosis was “bullshit”. As he told Wired magazine in 2010, “These concepts are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the boundaries.”

That last line perfectly explains our conundrum.

Western society shames us for not being happy. We shame victims for getting raped, and shame our men for showing feelings.

You and I have every right to go through genuinely shit times, to want to plink the bluebird of happiness right off her fucking branch. I’ve been there.

Perhaps what’s mental is our society. For some that grind becomes relentless, as it did for my brother and nearly did for me.

We are desperate for community.

I’ve spent a great deal of time in Africa. I learned a great deal about community there, which leads to this NIH article which compares African “ubuntu” culture with Western society and how that affects rates of suicide.

There’s a lot to that discussion when it comes to our attachment to individuality. Listen to this description of the greeting Sawubona and ask yourself if we might learn something from that. It’s profound and speaks to what we’re missing.

Here’s where Cartwright’s journey got personal:

…evidence that exposure to environmental stress is the leading determinant of common mental health problems like anxiety, depression and OCD, seemed to be overwhelming, whereas evidence that organic brain dysfunction or genetics are the leading causes of such conditions seemed to be comparatively scant. I put down my laptop, lay down on the sofa and cried. This felt like an attack on my identity, like I was being told my suffering wasn’t serious. If my thoughts weren’t illness, did that mean they were “me”? Did I want the shit in my head? Did I choose this?

Right through the heart, that last bit.

You and I are Way Too Old to believe that we chose to be miserable, that we chose mental illness, OCDs and the like.

Our society loves to blame victims. If we get sick as a result of society, then it’s our fault. We eat our young and despise our old and then brutalize everyone in the middle for never being perfect enough.

Cartwright gave psilocybin a try. Here’s what she came up with:

The insight my ego had been protecting me from was that my mental health was not separate from my family’s.

My mother had a rough time. Her doctor said she was “bipolar.”

She was dealing with a shitty life, an alcoholic husband, being isolated on a southern chicken farm, light years away from the cotillions and high-society promise of her youth. She had no intellectual or social outlets, was crushingly lonely and Dad treated her horribly.

When I dug more deeply and heard the stories behind how the other members of my family ended up in such distress, it wasn’t mental illness. It was trying to bloody well cope.

It’s not our brain chemistry.

Some readers don’t care for Dr. Gabor Maté; still, this quote is from Cartright’s article and deserves mention:

“I’m troubled that we’re telling people who’ve got genuinely difficult lives that the problem is inside their brain rather than outside in the world,” I said to Canadian doctor Gabor Maté when I interviewed him.

“It’s poor kids and kids of colour who are most likely to be diagnosed and medicated,” he replied. “This is trying to deal pharmacologically with what is essentially a social problem … All those years, when you were told that you had a biological disorder, did anybody ever tell you that your brain is shaped by the environment?”

“No,” I replied.

“That’s what the science has shown for decades.”

Cartright adds:

My disorder was not a disease or an enemy to be fought, but it was real. It was the part of me who always knew I was worth protecting.

Readers of No Bad Parts will recognize this.

And this:

I wasn’t going to find out by tripping or reading books or having therapy, but by stepping away from it all and living. The medical model had taught me everything about being ill, and almost nothing about being a healthy, well-adjusted grownup, who has a sense of agency and accomplishment, whose relationships are infused with trust that reaches right down to the bones, heart, lungs, tummy.

I started to feel like that grownup only after I’d brought the youngest, most vulnerable parts of my psyche into the light.

I’m not convinced we’re ill. I do think we’re terribly lonely and overworked and abused and traumatized. I also believe that every single one of us has the potential agency to deal with all those parts.

We might want to say Sawubona to all our parts.

I also believe that the more time we focus on being mentally ill, the more ill we get. The more time we focus on being in community, the healthier we can be.

Doesn’t make me right, but it pulled me back from the ledge.

I wasn’t going to find out by tripping or reading books or having therapy, but by stepping away from it all and living.- Cartwright

I chose life. I nearly didn’t.

Should you do something similar?

Kindly, shit on the shoulds.

Learning how to live better, experiencing ourselves as worthy of love and laughter, eating well and moving more and socializing, might be part of the RX.

And, learning how to set boundaries, knowing when to give a f*ck (please see

Sarah Knight

).

Of course it’s hard. That’s why too many of us don’t make it. It’s incredibly difficult to eat well, move more, and socialize when whale shit looks like up.

That’s why it took me until I was 58 to stop the eating disorders. It’s damned bloody hard.

Still, the more I’ve lived better, the better I have lived.

I am not mentally ill. Society might be, but I’m not.

This article isn’t advice. If what you’re doing is working for you, keep doing it.

I have so often, so badly wanted to die every time I made that Krispy Kreme run. I know hopelessness all too well.

Ultimately it’s our sacred choice.

None of this is easy.

Wherever you are, you are held in grace. I absolutely, positively do see you. I’ve been there. Sometimes I still have very dark thoughts, but I’m better at navigating them.

I hope we all learn to play. I did. It was worth it.

Photo by Wes Hicks on Unsplash

This was a very difficult piece to write. I want to honor the sensibilities of Dear Reader, most especially those of us who have and still are grappling with being grateful for another day. What I do know is that by sharing your story, you touch others; by touching others you might save a life. When you realize that your words, actions and attention can transform someone, and they can, perhaps then another day becomes worthwhile.

If this was valuable to you, please consider

If you know someone who might benefit from this message, please consider

Above all, thank you for reading. I hope this landed where it could do the most good.

*All quotes in bold by this author for emphasis.