Home > Newsletters > Spring 2006 > struggles and successes with mental illness

A GW Senior discusses her struggles and successes with mental illness

by Anonymous

I can walk up and down stairs, hear my professors, take my own notes and read my books without help, but I am one of the many people who couldn't be at G.W. if not for the considerable assistance I've received from Disability Support Services.

For one thing, when I applied for re-admission after a six-year absence, I was nearly done in by the paperwork. I have so much anxiety over filling in forms that I don't think I could have gotten through the process without Ellen Woodbridge sitting next to me, just breathing calmly.  She sat with me again when I filled out the application to do the Enosinian Honors thesis. When I was accepted to that program, Ellen sat with me yet again when I had to fill out forms for the Office of Human Research Institute Review Board to get permission to conduct my research  (and when I got the OHRIRB’s permission, Ellen very graciously filled out a form for me: my survey.)  Ellen helps me schedule and strategize and, sometimes, she just sits there calmly while I complete tasks that I fear.

See, like the other students who rely on DSS, I can think. I can interpret. I can learn. But I have trouble doing some things that seem to come naturally to some other people. In my case, those things include: breaking a project down into smaller steps; understanding and following directions; filling out forms without weeping; managing time; getting out of bed in February; sitting still.

It feels funny to use the phrase "mental illness."  Not because I don't have some claim to it, but because I don't feel ill. And because, other than the occasional bouts of crushing grief, depression, anxiety, and hypomania, I love life and I have a pretty great time. Still, for people who haven't been in close contact with it, it may be hard to understand the illness component of mental illness. I'm happy to elaborate.

I have been under the care of one psychiatrist or another for thirteen years, since I was seventeen years old. I have been diagnosed with Bipolar II Disorder, Seasonal Affective Disorder, Attention Deficit/Hyperactive Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.  Clinical Depression. Anxiety.

I spent February of my senior year of high school in bed, except for the half-hour when my father would lead me on what seemed like an arduous hike around our suburban block.  After the school day ended, some of my friends called and told me my other friends said I was faking; there was nothing wrong with me. I felt inclined to agree with them, except I sometimes looked down at my arms and hands and imagined I saw huge cuts on them, and I went to sleep three or four times a day wishing only that I wouldn't wake up.  Maybe I just needed a little discipline. That's what I thought, anyway.  If you're reading this and you recognize me from the details I give (and I’ve requested to remain anonymous for the same reason that I don’t give this much detail to professors when I hand them my DSS letter: I’m a pretty private person, actually), please try not to laugh too hard at the fact that I gave serious consideration to joining the military. Then a friend in the Navy told me that a recruit in the bunk next to his had put his head through the railing on his upper bunk and flipped his body over toward the floor to break his own neck. I had a feeling I was not tougher than that recruit, and so perhaps the discipline the military offered wasn't the right thing for me.

The other reason I feel funny about the phrase mental illness is that, in my experience, mental illness does not even do one the courtesy of staying politely confined to one’s head. It upsets your stomach and aggravates small pains, and the treatment has repercussions throughout your body. When I was seventeen, my psychiatrist put me on Prozac; I was nauseated for two months. Ritalin gave me heart palpitations, until I was switched to a different formulation. When I was eighteen, I had an EKG to determine whether I was a good candidate for lithium. Once cleared, I threw up every day for three months until my otherwise very conscientious psychiatrist told me that you can't take lithium on an empty stomach.  Over the next four years, which I spent largely at G.W., I packed on forty pounds in the daily course of making sure I didn't take lithium on an empty stomach.  Every few months I'd go to a phlebotomist to have three enormous ampules of blood drawn to make sure my liver wasn't failing.  I still threw up sometimes. I often felt slow and sluggish, like gravity was a tax, and I was in the highest tax bracket (Lithium saves a lot of lives—I think it probably saved mine for a while—but I eventually was switched to another mood-stabilizing drug, and very glad about it.  Each trial, and each error, in the trial-and-error process of finding a drug that helps—and some people never do—means mastering a new vocabulary of symptoms and side-effects, and weighing those against the greater good, if any, each offers).

Because I mostly didn't take advantage of DSS in my first go-round at GW (except for panicked medical withdrawals), much of this was invisible to many professors. Maybe they saw an intermittently present student who couldn't always be bothered to be alert on those occasions she made it to class. I was anxious, insomniac, depressed, hyperactive and overwhelmed, but I imagine I mostly just looked like a jackass. If they saw me in their offices, I was probably weeping, and who knows what some of them thought about that.

Or maybe I looked the way my brother  recently told me I looked a few years later on the day he checked me out of the psychiatric emergency room at New York Hospital: like "someone in whom the very energy to be was at a complete ebb." That's certainly how I felt often enough. My transcript from the first four years I was at G.W. features a remarkable number of letters from the second half of the alphabet: NP, W, Z.  When it did stray into the first half of the alphabet, it tended to stay in the deep end: I, F, D.  When it wandered into the shallow end, it was usually because I had one of those professors who got it, and who helped, during those very dark years, to keep my "energy to be" from disappearing completely.  

Eventually I dropped out to accept a job offer (I’m oddly high-functioning in non-academic settings, and someone I’d worked for wanted me to help her start a company.  I worked there for four years, and had the start of a pretty successful career, complete with a boss who let me work from home in February). But I wanted to learn more, and so I returned to G. W.  I've been much more thorough with DSS this time around, and the result has been extremely gratifying. My professors are sympathetic and compassionate and accommodating. Of course, some of my professors have seen this stuff before, have friends and family members who suffer from similar conditions, or suffer from them themselves.  I know because they've told me. They've also spent time explaining and re-explaining things to me that I couldn't get, and working with me one on one.  They've advised me through one senior thesis and they're advising me on my Honors thesis. And they've all been remarkably understanding and generous when I bring them my letters from DSS, making sure they understand the accommodations I'm asking for:  Sometimes, I need to knit in class to keep my hands busy while I'm paying attention. Sometimes when it's been raining or overcast for a few days I can't get to classes that start before eleven.  And sometimes I nee d help figuring out how to do assignments. It's not much that I'm asking, but it's weird, and for me, that letter from DSS permits a dialogue that would be much tougher without it.  With that letter G.W. also certifies to me that it's invested in having a community with diverse abilities and experiences, and it's willing to allocate an office; Christy Willis and her caring staff's valuable time; and other resources, to ensure that it maintains such a community. And the letter certifies to my professor that I'm invested in G.W.  and my courses to the extent that I'll spend more time on campus, and work with more people, to make sure that I make the most of the academic experience they try so hard to make worthwhile.  Last year, for the first time in my entire academic career, I earned all As and one B. The B was in Chem 3 or 4, and I was as proud of it as I was of any of my As.  (Even more amazing to me was that last semester, for the first time in my entir e academic career, I had perfect attendance. I was the only one keeping track across the courses, but I was keeping track because that was a thrilling thing for me to achieve.)

One last thing about that letter: it also gives me an opportunity that I'm kind of proud of. By presenting the DSS letter to a stranger at the beginning of a course, I can broaden the scope of that stranger's understanding of the spectrum of disabilities.  It says I am one of the people who depends on the Disability Support Services: hyperactive, thirty, excited about the material, but prone to weeping, and sometimes absent in February. And, thanks in large part to DSS and the GW faculty, having a pretty great time.