Will this lead me out of the valley of the shadow?

This is one of those times when I want to write my way out of a maze that I can barely comprehend. Having scraped through a near-death experience a year  and a half ago, and still learning to deal with compromised energy and diminished physical ability, I find that my mind is jumping back in time in a way I don't want or need, but somehow can't stop. My way out or through every difficulty I've ever had (and I have had some doozies) is to write about it. Though I was able to exorcise a couple of dire spirits that would not leave me alone, I am still left with Glen, a man I never met and never knew, and whose writings about alcoholism and mental illness enthralled me then - but they disturb me now, and I can't leave it alone - or it won't leave ME alone.

I see in now. I see deeper. I am not fooled. Being one myself, I know all the writer's tricks: writing that calls attention to itself, writing that postures, and - most of all - reporting (for isn't all writing actually just reporting, especially the kind of poetry Glen could produce at will?). I have read and re-read Glen's harrowing report on his own life and struggles with what we so delicately call, nowadays, his "mental health". In our long correspondence, we spoke mainly of alcohol addiction and bipolar disorder, but when I re-read much of what he wrote, all those self-revealing pieces from a man who seemed almost insanely private, I can see or feel conflicting threads: the need to tell the story, the need to put a good face on it, the need to open a vein in front of everyone while still  hiding out behind that facade of almost pathological shyness and introversion.

I keep thinking of this piece he wrote that appeared in a newspaper in 1999, then was reprinted when he committed suicide in 2005. At the time I felt shock - and  compassion - and I still do - but also considerable horror. I realize now that what he suffered  from could not have been bipolar disorder alone. The symptoms he speaks of, the hallucinations, the delusions, the paranoia and the voices in his head - these are the province of schizophrenia, the disease that killed my brother Arthur when he was only 30 years old. 

I used to think I could "see" schizophrenia, not just in a person but in a photograph, that "look", removed, remote, a person dwelling in an inner world that has little or nothing to do with what we roughly agree on as "reality". When I look at early photos of Glen, I see it, that look, and I realize that he didn't  stand a chance - it was going to get him in the end.

And it did. But here I sit more than twenty years after his death - not exactly in a psychiatric crisis (for once), but in a different kind of existential turn, a place of stopping, of saying, "Am I going to survive?" Will my body make the decision for me?

So I have thought of a way to try to exorcise this haunting, this obsession (call it what it is!) that I don't even want to be experiencing. Can I do this? I want to be ruthless here, I want to be a reporter, and see if I can get at this thing by offering my running commentary. It's one of the most bizarre writing projects I've ever undertaken, but why am I still here after my own sometimes monstrous experiences, except for that voracious need to FIND OUT?

I need to lay this man to rest, and as with poor Bohdan and Gabor Mate, I may need to do a sort of psychic surgery. Will it work? Can I even begin to find out  unless I go ahead and do  it?

So here is his harrowing memoir of mental illness and the equally harrowing treatments he endured to try to regain his health and his sanity, a war he ultimately lost. I don't want to be cruel here, but I have to get AT this at last, and tryto get to the truth of how I really feel.

The anesthetist, head swathed in a surgeon's fez, plunges the needle in a ready vein and leans over and says, "You'll smell the smell of garlicand then you'll be out."

And out I am in this fourth of a series of eight shock treatments on
the psychiatric wing of the Saint John Regional Hospital. While I'm
unconscious, a nurse places two electrodes on my skull and the attending
psychiatrist flips a switch, sending a powerful current of electricity
into the addled spheres of my brain.

OK then - this is Frankenstein territory! Even the "out I am" is macabre in some way - "I'm dead now", it seems to say. Electrodes, currents of electricity - all that's missing is that howling cry, "It's alive! It's ALIVE!"

Odd as it may seem - odd because no one really knows why it works - I
awake feeling refreshed in the recovery room where I am asked my name,
the date, where I am. I not only answer the questions in rapid order but
I note the clarity of the vivid colours all around, the pleasant
ticking of a clock hung on the wall, the murmur of friendly voices. 

Note from someone who has been there: a sudden boost out of a very deep depression is dangerous as hell, which is why I approach the subject of ECT with a degree of horror. Suddenly from the depths, colors spring to life, birds are twittering, and everything is beautiful again. Not so fast - the same thing happened to me, when I was ascending the most harrowing part of my worst manic episode - all the world was beautiful, it was all like a Disney cartoon surrounding me, birds were twittering and the sun was shining and colors looked unnaturally  bright - but those  supernatural sounds and colors were more dangerous than I ever realized.

I am climbing out of the pit of suicidal despair that sent me to the hospital -
the fifth stay in hospital in three provinces in two years - in the
first place. And for the first time in a long time, I feel healthy and I
tell myself that this is how other people, untroubled by the mania or
depression that has come out of the dark closet of my mind every decade
for the last 40 years, must feel most of the time.

This is a common one. I've seen it again and again, even in that louse Gabor Mate, taking meds for his ADHD for the first time and swearing this is what everyone else feels like all the time. It's not true, we can't jump inside someone else's head, not even an artist with words who lays his soul bare in a way I now see is frankly dangerous. And this "every decade" thing is a misnomer - he's putting more space between episodes to try to make it palatable to his readers, or to himself.

Electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), as it is properly known, is the
treatment of last resort for some psychiatric afflictions, notably
depression, and I haven't experienced it for 44 years. A frightened and deeply
depressed boy of 15 - by far the worst time in my life - I was given a
series of treatments without the benefit of anesthesia and while I don't
remember much beyond that first rude shock I felt well for 10 years, I
left home and enjoyed a successful career in the construction industry
from the far North to California until this strange and cruel malady
caught up with me once again.

Some things stand out. More minimizing:  every ten years? When you continue to read this story, you realize he never had anything like this sort of remission,  trying to frantically outrun himself as he literally moved all over the world and kept finding himself there, lethal wounds and all. That "worst time in my life" likely refers to the kind of schizophrenia that commonly manifests in young adulthood. I am all too  familiar with it, watching my brother diminish from a charming young man with a bizarre sense of humor to a shambling wreck barely able to keep his  shoelaces tied.

And that "successful career in the construction industry" was, to put it more bluntly, manual labor. He dug ditches for ten years, during which time more happened to  him which I will comment on later.

Manic depression, or bipolar disorder as it is now called in these days
of political correctness, touches the lives of one of every 100 New
Brunswickers. It is an often devastating malaise that can strike without
warning, rendering its victims subject, initially, to inexplicable
"highs" that can spin out of control. First comes "hypomania" - a time of
great busyness and well-being and then follows full-blown mania when the
afflicted persons will make great plans, sleep not at all, feel a sense
of grandiosity, spend wildly and travel widely.

OK Glen, we know you're a reporterm and there's no doubt that  this is an example of good reporting. But it's your own entrails you're reporting on here. It's  almost as if you've taken this out of a textbook. But what comes next is hardly by the book.

It can also be a time of delusion or even hallucination (hearing,
seeing or smelling things that aren't there) marked by extreme irritation
with family or friends who cannot share this experience. This condition
leads the manic persons to believe that what they are doing is
absolutely correct. They may, as I have done in the past, write floridly mad
letters to everyone but the Queen simply because it seems necessary to
alert the world to some clear and present danger, again the right thing to
do.

I'd say yes, except no. Bipolar disorder almost never pushes the brain to these extremes. I'm not saying it wasn't present - but in spite of what almost everyone seems to think, it's NOT "either-or" with psychiatric diagnoses. Human beings are complicated, mental health ebbs and flows, and yes, you CAN have any number of overlapping conditions that can blend and separate. But I think I know what I am seeing here.

But mania can go well beyond this epistolary extravagance. Earlier this
year, in the grip of mania and hospitalized in Montreal, I saw my
father - dead, lo these 35 years - in elevators and there was a constant
jabber of voices in my ear, one of them a basso profundo saying over and
over again with astonishing clarity in Chilean Spanish, "Los pobres son
dijes" (The poor are good). Prior to this, I nurtured the idea - the
same fevered idea I had had the year before - that I had to travel to
Northern Alberta's Peace River country to complete a novel my father had
written decades ago - one in which the heroine and her children seek to
make a new home there but never actually arrive. I had hitched a ride
with a trucker headed for Calgary. He insisted I leave his company
somewhere south of North Bay, Ont., and get psychiatric help. ("You're out
of it, man," I recall him saying as he reached over and opened the
passenger door.)

This isn't a joke, but it's almost presented as a funny story,  the  kind of tale you hear at AA meetings and support groups for the mentally ill.  And that brings us to Glen's absolute obsession with his father, Ralph Allen, then a well-known magazine editor who has been largely forgotten, along with that other obsolete Canadian institution, Peter Gzowski. Glen kept referring to his father obsessively in his letters, though he hated the man or at least felt the man hated him. 

Complete a novel his father wrote? When, where? How do you "complete a novel" anyway? I've written five (well, five and a half), published three, and I cannot imagine trying to complete anyone else's unfinished thought. And I don't think his father wrote novels, none that was ever published anyway. Was he trying to correct that situation or what?

I made my way to Montreal where I ended up in St. Luc Hospital and
later a halfway house where a barrage of drugs including lithium
established a calmer state of mind. After two months of recuperation, I returned
to Saint John where my truly enlightened employer gave me yet another
chance to ply my trade as a reporter. But within weeks, mania had come
full circle: its sinister cousin, clinical depression had set in. I felt
a blackness of mood, a sense of dread and despair and a longing to end
my hopeless life I hadn't felt since an earlier suicide attempt and
once more entered the hospital where, this time, ECT was the indicated
treatment.

I have to say now, if ECT is still used at all, it should be an absolute last resort, and my feeling is that it is a dangerous practice which can briefly propel a depressed person straight upward - it can act as a sort of catapult, bringing all that Disney goodness back for a brief time. But the brain was never meant to receive those mysterious ("no one knows how this works") Frankensteinian shocks. If there is any benefit at all, the returns are diminishing. Carrie Fisher is an example of  a celebrity whose brain was basically turned to jelly with multiple rounds of ECT, eventually leading to her death by drug overdose -  one of those cases where they  found 15 different drugs in her system at once.

Looking back on it all now, I might have known something was amiss when
I was yet a small child. My father was off at war and my saintly
mother, I was convinced in my five-year-old mind, was a German spy. When that
war ended and the Cold War began, I was sure that the Soviet Union, our
latest enemy, would invade the leafy precincts of my Toronto
neighbourhood. I remember staring at the Disney decals on my bedroom wall and
believing that taken together they were a bizarre scroll of destiny: the
world would end in fire.

Shortly after that, my parents split up and I was seized with a sense
of power - perhaps my first "manic" episode - when I became their
go-between. Each would have me memorize messages for the other and when my
father - a man deeply hurt by the war - came to pick me up for Sunday
outings in his 1947 navy Pontiac, I would do my best to heal the breach,
subtly altering their second-hand messages so as to ensure that each
knew the other was loved and deeply missed. In hindsight, it was the wrong
course to take. They lived together in a stormy alcoholic marriage
until both died of cancer in their mid-fifties.

I can't begin to wrap my head around the kind of child  abuse that was going on here, and I have other ideas about what happened to Glen when he was 15 years old and working with a crew of drunken men in their 30s on a remote Northern highway. He was, to put it bluntly, a sitting duck, and the sexual assault I am virtually certain he endured rendered his innate fragility into something that was eventually terminal. 

But once this feat of wishful thinking was accomplished, I fell into
the deepest of depressions, a malaise that was to last for years. Alone
in my room for days at a time, I wept incessantly and wished for
release. One desperate day, I cut across a wrist with a broken bottle and an
alert doctor in a hospital emergency ward recognized the act for what it
was, a cry for help, and recommended to my bewildered mother that my
mental state be assessed. My parents shared society's distaste for
anything that smacked of mental illness and had a deeply felt distrust of
mental-health practitioners. They had already taken me out of school, read
the angry and despairing poems I had fixed to my wall; they had watched
as I refused food and the attentions of my friends, but they were

reluctant to place me in the hands of the shrinks as if once there, there

would be no turning back. But there was no alternative: I was taken to

see the good Dr. Grant who clapped me in hospital and after rest and
conventional therapies of the day failed, suggested ECT.

And so it went. I would have eight or nine trouble-free years until the
monster reappeared and I would be swept up in the rising and falling
tide of mood. Indeed, in the sixties I spent time in a hospital in
Chicago and 10 years later in Montreal, I jumped in front of a moving bus. In
the mid-eighties, a full two years were blighted by bipolar illness.
That was a time of sheer terror and misadventure. Among other things, I
had concluded that the big banks were to blame for all of society's
ills. I hired a video camera crew and forayed into one of the major bank's
headquarters in downtown Montreal, shooting footage of executives at
their desks. I was also convinced at one point that the Mafia was after
me.

Schizophrenia, friends. Not just bipolar. This was grave mental illness of the most intractible sort. And the "eight or nine trouble-free years" is, to put it bluntly, bullshit. It's the kind of minimizing we do when we need to convince ourselves it's not REALLY that bad. 

But it is. It's worse than that. It kills.

Then came last year and this - two botched trips out West, time in a
hospital in Thunder Bay, then Montreal and three stays in the facility in
Saint John, one of them in a coma following a suicide attempt.

This is hardly an illness that moves out of the way for a decade, then lands in again like a hurricane out of nowhere. This is a horror show, an ordeal that I can barely wrap my head around. 

And all that time, the tone, the even reporter's tone that seems oddly detached and unemotional, creeps me out in a way I can't even describe.

All this time, all through these years I had been told by professionals
that I had to take medication - namely, lithium - to ward off the
depredations of an illness that is of the brain, not of the mind, an illness
that is largely due to faulty genes and biochemistry being grievously
out of whack.

But for years, especially when I felt well, I denied to myself and to
the world at large that I had bipolar disorder. I wanted badly to be
like other people, even given the fact that members of my immediate family
had been stricken in the same way resulting in hospitalizations and
suicide.

Instead of taking my pills, I would attempt to cope in other ways.
Sadly, until the bottom fell out of my world in 1984, I drank heavily, just
as my father had done before me. I also moved constantly. I always felt
better for a time when I changed location. I have lived and worked in
England, Italy, Algeria, three American states and seven Canadian
provinces. After I married, I trucked my little family around, bag and
baggage, as far afield as Chile and China.

Until I read this account, I had no idea just how "restless, irritable and discontented" Glen really was (to use AA parlance). This is extreme - incessant moving, ending in hospital here and there and everywhere. And in my experience, it's actually very hard to get yourself admitted to a psych ward. Usually, I was sent home to cope with my misery alone, with no support at all. But this kind of chaos seems to imply extremes, even the kinds of brushes with the law that Geoff Pevere wrote about, or at least being so deeply sunk that hospitalization is the only recourse.

.

But there were no cures, only palliatives. One of them - alcohol - was
ruinous. As for travel...well, as someone wiser once said, when you get
off the bus you're always there waiting for yourself. Depression, my
lone outrider, would inevitably close in just as a ship spotted as a tiny
smudge on the horizon inevitably comes to shore, looming larger than
life itself.

Manic depression is a mood disorder as opposed to schizophrenia, which
is a disorder of the thought process itself. In it, there is a
disruption of a person's normal emotional states, such as happiness or sadness.
The moods of manic depression include at one end, utter melancholy,
passivity and fatigue and thoughts of suicide and at the other, elation,
grandiosity, agitation and, when extreme, delusions and hallucinations.
Delusions can include grandiose beliefs: a person may think she or he
has special talents or is related to a special person. A manic might
also believe that he or she is the subject of whispers of friends and
strangers alike, or that Lloyd Robertson is sending special messages during
his newscast. Hallucinations are usually imagined sights or sounds.
Auditory hallucinations are more common (although all senses may be
affected) and may have a religious overtone, such as the voice of God or
angels and may sound like commands.

OK then Glen, you're denying again, and you just finished telling us how  chaotic your thoughts were and how  extreme your delusions were. These were thoughts, not just  feelings, and you acted on them. The voice of God or angels? That's schizophrenia. I don't know if he was never diagnosed, or was just underdiagnosed, or if it was just too much for him to bear to face the possibility.

Most people go through many more bouts of depression than mania, though
to be considered "bipolar" a person must have gone through at least one
manic episode. For some, it is a chronic illness that becomes more
pronounced with age but a manic depressive typically goes through long
periods of remission in his or her life. A person may be relatively
symptom-free with only mild mood swings for years, then for any number of
reasons (the primary one being discontinuing prescribed medication) the
cycle returns.

There are manic depressives who experience only one cycle in their
lives and others in whom the illness disappears at an early age. But
complicating things is the fact that depression and mania can exist at the
same time. As writers Diane and Lisa Berger state in their excellent
primer on manic depression called We Heard the Angels of Madness, the term
"bipolar disorder" deceives because the mania and depression "do not
occur in even opposition. It is not like the North Pole and the South
Pole; instead, it more closely resembles two points on the equator.
They're side by side, sharing a border and overlapping.

Researchers don't yet have a definitive cause of manic depression but
they do know that it runs in families and that defective genes must, in
part, be at fault.

Reporting, reporting. I don't  know how he does this, scribbling on a pad and then almost casually opening his guts. It's very strange, very disturbing to me. I see what he was doing here, but these kinds of raw and horrifying revelations seem in total opposition to how private the man was - actually, almost pathologically shy and introverted, finding it hard to even talk to another person.

But all that said, why tell this tawdry story at all? I have lost all
appetite for the confessional and take no pleasure in this exercise. But
there are two points I would like to make in passing. One relates to
stigma. The mentally ill, however much society has changed in recent
years, are prey to an abundance of myth and misinformation that is, quite
simply, astonishing.

Victims of major mental illness - schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and
clinical depression - are still often shunned and tucked away, even
though their maladies, most experts would now agree, are physical in
nature, just like diabetes or heart disease. And the most serious of these
diseases, schizophrenia, has disabled many of the 300,000 Canadians
affected by it, many of them young people in their prime. They are our sons
and daughters, wives and husbands, our neighbours and we have all too
often tended to see them as a tribe apart, spoken of in whispers. They
are no more "violent" than the population at large and their illnesses
are, for the most part, episodic in nature. Most enjoy great islands -
even archipelagos - of calm and productivity between short-lived bouts
of illness. And they are much with us: one of five New Brunswickers, at
some point in their lives will, like me, go beyond the brink and need
the attentions of the mental-health-care system.

The other point worth making is that there is help out there. Each of
13 regions in the province has a community mental-health-care centre
staffed by a psychiatrist or two, nurses, social workers and
psychologists. There are problems: there is a dire shortage of child and adolescent
psychiatrists and public money is short indeed for the chronically ill.
But for the most part, the work of this corps of professionals is
largely unsung. While they may be too few for the demands placed upon them,
in my experience - a view confirmed recently by an Ontario study - New
Brunswick has one of the best mental health-care systems in the nation.

Meanwhile I have come through once again feel eminently sane. If the
demons come calling again it won't be for many years hence. I have hope,
I have met some interesting people along the way and am very glad to be
alive.

Many years hence? Within five, he would be dead from all this. He simply could not endure the chaos any more, or the "treatments" that likely contributed to his eventual death. His safe reporting tone begins to seem like a form of whistling in the dark.  Glad to be alive? I don't think his respite lasted long at all, and having jolts of electricity fired through your brain seems like an extreme way to get a little peace.

For these blessings I thank the God of my understanding. Without Him by
my side would I have been here to tell this sometimes sorry tale?

He refers to it as a "sorry tale" and even uses the word "tawdry", but this is at odds with his insistence that mental illness not be stigmatized and that he feels no shame in it. He did. I read it in his letters. I don't blame him, I felt the same way about my own disasters, but this stepping away from it is an eerie form of distancing that ultimately isn't helpful at all.

Was there help  for Glen? His own denial was one of the obstacles, though it's understandable given how extreme his case was. One of his colleagues mentioned that it was remarkable "how long he was able to park that pain". True, it was heroic in a sense, but the denial that pushes reality away eventually comes around and bites you in the ass. 

He got sicker and sicker, the treatments more and more desperate, and they continued to damage the part of his  brain that might have ultimately saved him, had there been something - anything -  that would have actually helped him. We still throw drugs at it, we still shock the brain like  those cattle prods used to humanely kill livestock.

So what is the answer? There isn't one, and I want to put all this in the past. I have no idea if this is going to help  me or not. I have no idea if I have ten years left to live or ten months, and I don't  want any of that time blighted by depression or mania. But trying to put a good face on it, while it seems brave, ultimately works against you. 

I read about a very grotesque suicide once in a memoir written by a doctor. Another doctor he knew committed suicide literally by doing surgery on himself - injecting local anaesthetic in his neck, making an incision in his own throat with a scalpel and tying off the veins with surgical skill. His last therapeutic act. Freezing to death by the railroad tracks is horrifying, and I can't and won't minimize the horror of it. No, I have to finally let Glen go, the way I had to let my dear brother go. 

Whatever the quality of it, I have more living to do. I am not finished yet, and I hope mental illness does not swallow me the way it did Glen. But it's beyond ironic that the coping devices we resort to (cool-headed reporting on horrifying situations) can work against real recovery. Black is black, and calling it white or even grey does not alter the reality of tbe total absence of light.