By Emalee Gillis, NAMI Spokane Blog Editor.
My journey with mental illness began with a commitment to an unsafe insane asylum in Africa where medicine men were encouraged to practice. My journey has spanned almost 40 years and has included seven psychotic breaks. During that same period, I earned two 4.0 Master’s Degree, had a professional career in community development and freelance writing, successfully adopted and parented two children, and have enjoyed 35 years of a happy marriage.
When I was growing up in rural Pennsylvania, I didn’t have any symptoms of a mental health condition. I had a normal childhood. Early adulthood started well, too. I graduated from college and spent two years in Washington DC working with a student aid coalition. I then became a Peace Corps volunteer in Gabon, Africa. At the end of that two year experience, I shared with the Peace Corps nurse that I had always been afraid I would have bipolar disorder like one of my brothers. She said, “If you made it through the trials of Peace Corps without incident, I don’t think you will ever experience bipolar.” She was wrong.
After I closed my service with the Peace Corps, I decided to travel by land across the Sahara desert with another Peace Corps volunteer, so I could have more adventures on the way home. I had planned to wait in Togo for my friend to finish her service. In Togo, I stayed with another fellow Peace Corps volunteer. While staying with this friend, I couldn’t sleep one night and I felt that during the night my thinking became more expansive and I could think globally better than I ever could. Near dawn, for the first time in my life, I heard a voice in my head. The man’s voice said, “I want to teach you more.” I followed the meditation instructions the voice gave me and fell into a catatonic state. While I was catatonic, the voice talked with me about the needs of Africa compared to the West and the importance of sharing the strengths of Africa like community, music, and appreciation of life with the West.
After five days, I suddenly woke up fully lucid in Bingerville, Ivory Coast, an institution similar to the institutions in the US back in the 1940s. Patients, with paint on their arms and legs from medicine men, spent most of their time in a large cage-like enclosure with a blacktop and wire fencing around it. It was unsafe. Staff was nowhere to be found. I was the only white person there. One woman started beating the ground around me with a mat. A man approached me waving his hands.
Because Africans value family so much and also to keep their family members safe, all the other patients in Bingerville had a family member staying there with them except me. The family member of another patient expressed shock that I had been committed there alone and took me under her wing and helped me stay safe.
At that time, I didn’t think I had a mental health condition. I thought I had had a profound spiritual experience.
The embassy in the Ivory Coast eventually facilitated my way back to the States, but not before the Ambassador molested me in his office. I think he felt completely safe doing that. Who believes a woman, let alone a certifiably insane one?
Two weeks after I arrived back in Pennsylvania, I had another psychotic break. This one had no spiritual dimensions. I slowly and terrifyingly lost my ability to think. At the low point, I could no longer understand English and was completely lost in my internal world.
I was committed to a psychiatric hospital in Pennsylvania and was given medications that brought me out of psychosis. Since I had just come out of the Peace Corps, I had no health insurance or money to seek care. I was depressed and suicidal. Who wants to live when the future is a revolving door at psych wards? My sister and brother-in-law, whom I was living with at the time, kept me with them 24/7. They saved my life.
Even though I wasn’t able to get any treatment, I stabilized. In a few months, I decided to go to graduate school and did well. However, a year later I had another break. This one had spiritual dimensions. The voice appeared again and told me he wanted to teach me more. I asked him, who are you? He said, “I am God.” So, I decided to listen and again lost my ability to understand English and became lost in my internal world. I recovered in a psych ward,. After that point, I never had psychosis that involved spirituality. As soon as I came out of that psychosis, I went back to school.
I still didn’t have insurance so couldn’t see a psychiatrist, but I was symptom free for seven years. A year into that period I saw an outpatient psychiatrist for the first time. Because of how unusually abrupt my symptoms were, he thought I might be suffering from some kind of brain fever that I may have picked up in Africa or I had bipolar. During the following six years, I finished graduate school, married the love of my life and worked in the rural development field. We moved to Washington in that period.
The next time I had a psychotic break, I was not alone. My husband was with me. We were living in a rural town, Washtucna, when this happened. I had been slightly off the night before, but in the middle of the night I woke up and couldn’t speak or recognize my husband. I was admitted to a small 12 bed rural hospital in Ritzville. There was only one other patient in the hospital. Because of that, the staff let my husband stay with me in my room, similar to the practice in Bingerville. My husband, Bill, saw how helpful it was to have him with me. For example, when a nurse came to take my blood pressure, I thought she was coming to suck the life force out of me and became very frightened. Bill told the nurse I didn’t need my blood pressure taken for a mental health diagnosis. She left and I became more calm. The next morning I was lucid again.
That has been my pattern over the past thirty years. I am full functioning with no symptoms at all followed by a sudden and completely debilitating break. I have gone through four more breaks that last about a week. My husband has taken care of me at home for each of them. That is possible because he can get me to take medications that my psychiatrist prescribes when I’m psychotic. I’m also quiet and just want to sit in a chair and think. I’m not violent or acting out at all, unlike the way the disease manifests itself in other people.
Keys to my success has been the support of family. In addition, I have a psychiatrist who prescribes me medications that I can take more of if I feel I am getting off balance. I’m convinced I have staved off numerous rounds of psychosis with those medications. I am very aware of my thinking patterns and nip any unhealthy thinking pattern in the bud before it can turn into psychosis. However, sometimes it happens suddenly in the middle of the night when it is too late to take preventative medication. I’ve always been medication compliant, but have break through psychosis.
In addition, I am very proactive in taking care of my brain. Our brains are pliable and conscious action can improve them and reduce conditions like depression. I exercise almost every day. I do yoga and daily meditation. I wrote a memoir and found that my writing transformed my view toward my illness as one of anger at having such an illness to becoming filled with gratitude for all the people who helped me along the way. I’ve had years of counseling. Medications have taken a lot of trial and error to find out what works. I enhance the meaning of my life by volunteering with NAMI Spokane as a writer and speaker.
Perhaps the thing I am most grateful for in my journey is I was able to raise my kids who are both wonderful people. I’m also grateful that my journey hasn’t stopped me from having a full and wonderful life.
People who are newly diagnosed with bipolar often feel doomed to a marginal life. I’m here to say that isn’t necessarily the case. It is possible to live well with bipolar disorder. I hope that someone reading this who is suffering now can someday join me when I say, “I have a mental illness and I am well.”
Emalee Gillis is a writer and blog editor for NAMI Spokane. She is the author of the memoir Adventures on the Path to Living Well with a Mental Illness and has a related TEDx Talk.