Alfredo's Journey (eBook)

This book is written for mental health professionals, such as psychologists and psychiatrists, and also for people who suffer with a mental disorder. It is good for mental health professionals to understand the point of view of the client/patient. It is good for people with similar experiences to be able to identify with someone else who is in the same situation, and yet has built a good life with great satisfaction.

The book is about my experiences, or to be precise, my journey with Bipolar Disorder. Very seldom do sufferers write honestly about their experiences with mental disorders, mostly because of the stigma associated with disclosure. I have come to understand that if we don’t come out of the closet and speak of our experiences, stigma will continue to affect our lives. The best way to fight stigma is adopting complete honesty and transparency so that people learn about us, our feelings, our abilities, and our hopes for the future.

I had a troubled childhood; I have experienced homelessness, have been in a psychiatric hospital—not because of suffering with some serious mental disorder, but because of being homeless—and became a friend to many people with psychoses, such as schizophrenia. I later started to study psychology at a university so that I could better help people with mental disorders online.

Now I have created an online monthly journal. The Anti Stigma Crusaders Journal (ASC) attempts to give an inside view into mental disorders from the perspective of those who suffer from them. Bipolar Disorder can be either a positive force in society or a negative one. It is up to all of us to help sufferers with Bipolar Disorder and other mental disorders as well, so that they may feel included and motivated to contribute to their society.

Many famous people are known to have behaved in ways consistent with a diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder. It would be difficult to include the many names here, but Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Beethoven, Michelangelo, van Gogh, and many other geniuses appear to have had symptoms and moods consistent with Bipolar Disorder. Research has shown a clear link between genius and madness. I here include a quote, which is from an advertisement made for Apple Computers, written by Rob Siltanen and Ken Segall and narrated by Richard Dreyfuss, who suffers with Bipolar Disorder. I really like the words. If only politicians and affluent people understood the message of the advertisement, the world would be a much better place. It goes like this:

This book is divided into two sections: in the first part (my personal story), I write about my past experiences, particularly as an inpatient of Rozelle Hospital in a suburb of Sydney, Australia, and my struggle with mental illness; in the second part (current knowledge of the disorder), I look at my voluntary work in my attempt to help people and myself. What is this thing that we call mental illness? This is what I attempt to answer in the second part of this book.

This is my story and I emphasize “story,” because all humans are storied beings. This means that we make sense of our lives by telling ourselves a story about ourselves. The best that humanity has to offer, in terms of emotions, feelings, hopes, and struggles can be found by reading stories of those who have left us books like To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee), A Room of One’s Own (Virginia Woolf), and Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Paolo Freire). Literature, especially novels and personal stories, can tell us a lot about what it is like to be human. Indeed, I believe that there is a strong connection between good novelists and psychologists and in the future, I would like to see better communication and cooperation between these two professions.

While all of the information presented here is real and accurate, I have introduced in the story the fictional character of “Stella,” who in part represents my mother, whom I lost to bowel cancer when I was 18. She was just 40 years of age and died a few months after surgery, in the early 1980s. She also represents my spirit—that part of me that has become self-critical and that tries very hard to control the child in me, the child that has been so hurt in the past that complete development has not been possible until recently. Stella also represents the best therapists that I have met in my life. Altogether, she is a complex ensemble of help—both self-help and the help of mental health professionals and other good people I have found on my journey.

Stella features in many parts of this first section, and while some readers may find her presence strange or out of place, given that this character is part of my imagination, it is nevertheless important in that it helps me personify that part of my spirit that watches over me and guides me as in the mind watching over itself. I still have a long way to go to fully recover. Indeed, many people do not fully develop and remain slaves of their child selves, which very often causes problems because of runaway emotions, uncontrolled moods, and related problems.

In the story, Stella is my imaginary therapist, a beautiful and intelligent middle-aged woman, who is very compassionate and who, in my mind, can make up for that void inside of me that was created when my parents, especially my mother, abandoned me. They travelled throughout Europe, to work, leaving me behind with various relatives, sometimes for years.

It is true to say that while we all have many different aspects to our personalities, we also have a parent, a child, and a self personality. These aspects of personality are sometimes well-integrated to make a person really whole and these people often find happiness and stability in life. But for many of us, who suffer with a mental disorder, these three aspects of personality are not well integrated and are sometimes detached from each other. In Dr. Thomas Harris‘ book I’m OK, You’re OK: A Practical Guide to Transactional Analysis (1969), he wrote extensively about the child-parent-self aspects of personalities. I think that this book is still very relevant to those who suffer with Bipolar Disorder or depression and probably all mental disorders.

What I can say, after writing this book, which is an account of my journey as someone who suffers with Bipolar II Disorder1, is that I am learning to cope with the disorder. Indeed, my portrait is not on page vi because of vanity, but because it indicated an attempt to look at my spirit closely, just like someone looks at one’s face in the mirror. Not only am I learning to cope with Bipolar Disorder, but I also use it to fuel my creativity and to help others.

I help other sufferers by writing on many websites. However, I am not always received well by the members of self-help websites who suffer with mental disorders, such as Bipolar Disorder, Major Depression, Dysthymia, Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), or Schizophrenia, to name a few. I think that I have the tendency to expose very difficult and sensitive issues that many sufferers like to avoid. I know that the only way to develop, to integrate our child personality with the rest of us, and to become able to control our disorder is by being completely transparent with ourselves, to have courage and to have the ability to be self-critical, the kind of self-criticism that Paolo Freire, the famous Brazilian educator, called “Critical Consciousness.” I don’t necessarily help people on websites by agreeing with them and by trying to make them feel better. Of course, I try to do this whenever possible; but my real intention is to awaken the critical consciousness so that a sufferer can start to liberate their soul and possibly begin to find their way in the Universe. Some become annoyed and distance themselves from me. That is fine; but others continue the dialogue with me, and together we often make good progress in terms of understanding our mental disorder.

What I am trying to answer in this book is this: What is Bipolar Disorder? I can only answer (and I will answer it at the end of the book) by relying on my personal experience, knowing that it may not apply to everyone’s story: I was just a very sensitive and creative child. This is not a genetic defect but a genetic gift. Because of being sensitive, when my parents abandoned me, Bipolar was triggered. For me, it is not a genetic problem, unless being talented and sensitive is a problem. In my case, it is an emotional problem, a kind of anguish that never goes away. This anguish causes symptoms that very often accompany us throughout life.

People like me may need medication to deal with the emotional problems, symptoms, and moods; but the fact remains that we have no proof that mental disorders, even the most serious ones, are purely genetic or biological. There will always be genetic, biological, and environmental factors at work and, for this reason, we need to treat mental disorders...