RonPrice

This is my 3rd posting or instalment in this thread in relation to "my BPD story." I am not a schizophrenic, although in the 1960s I was diagnosed as having "a mild schizo-affective disorder." Thanks to you, BluUte, for filling the gap on 'What is the Baha'i Faith?' As far as your situation is concerned, dawsie, my posting here may be of use since it tells of one long BPD story over decades. You are welcome to be on the badwaggon of this thread and I hope it is of value to you even though I have BPD and not schizphrenia as is your case. Anyway, we will see how this thread develops after this 3rd post or instalment of mine on my BPD. Thanking you both for your responses. -Ron Price, Tasmania, Australia.
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2.3 My history to that point(to 1980 and the age of 36) had been far from smooth and linear as my remarks above indicate. Those thirty-six years had often been bisected, polarised and traumatised. Perhaps at a future time I will attempt a more detailed account of those years but, for now, this outline(see instalment #2 and this instalment #3)), this brief sketch of particular episodes and the periods between episodes will suffice. My experience of these highly diverse emotional and psychological swings of mood in everyday experience away form the norm, from my norm, is only part of my story. But it is a crucial part. Everyone has their story for everyone experiences all sorts of abnormal eccentricities and health problems in life, some people of course more than others and some more traumatic and intense than others.


My account of those years from 1943 to 1980 follows. I try in writing about and in summarizing these first 37 years of my life, not to overstate my case, nor to understate it, but give an account of those first 37 years which I refer to here in this general statement as phase one of my bi-polar life.

2.4 In some ways the inclusion of the names of those doctors who treated me over the years in this first phase and in later phases would personalise this account, but names are not that important and to include them here in this narrative causes confidentiality problems for some readers and for people in my own past who might not want to be mentioned. This question of confidentiality is especially true at some internet sites where posts are rejected if names are included in any posting at the site concerned---and so I leave names out. Those whose names I could mention would not be troubled by their inclusion here, not now, not in 2007 after an extensive destigmatization of the disorder in recent years and after so much of my experience and so many of the people concerned are now, what you might call, ancient history.


2.4.1 I certainly appreciate the medical and clinical work of: (a) several of the doctors I went to in my childhood, adolescence and adulthood, (b) the psychiatrists who have treated me since June of 1968, nearly four decades ago and (c) many family members, friends, colleagues and associations, some known well and others hardly at all, who have helped me ride the waves when the disorder raised its head yet again along the way, the road of life.
2.5. Comments on My Ante-Natal, Neo-Natal, Childhood & Adolescent Life: 1943-1963


2.5.1 As I refer to above, I had some experience of what may well have been BPD in childhood as far back as infancy and at the toddler stage, all of the pre-school years, 0-5, of early childhood development. My mother nearly died in the first month after my birth, the implications of which it is not my intention to go into here, indeed, if there are any significant implications at all. The ante-natal and neo-natal phases of my life I do not examine here, but I am inclined to think they may be important in the aetiology of this illness. Before the age of five there is evidence that my behaviour had some of the features of what is now called Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Perhaps in a later edition of this essay I will attempt a more detailed outline of what I recall from these years of early childhood, but my recollections are minimal and it is not my intention to comment further on these early years.


Through middle and late childhood into the puberty cusp of 12/13 in 1956/7, I did exhibit personality features, behaviours or symptoms that had bipolar aspects, at least to a limited degree, or so it could be argued if not proved: (a) a lack of control of my emotions, impetuosity, lack of emotional restraint and (b) a far too intense activity threshold what is now called hyperactivity, mild mania or hypomania. I recall at the age of 12/13 exhibiting inappropriate or precocious sexual behaviour, although the particular manifestations only involved one groping episode and attempt to kiss that same girl who did not want to be kissed.


It was not until much later in life, though, that I began to see these aberrant childhood behaviours and new aberrations at puberty and during adolescence as possibly having a link with my future mental illness. It was not until I was 19 in 1963 that any characteristics of this illness became quite clearly apparent and, in retrospect, could be called part of a BPD and given that medical diagnosis. At the time no doctor would have given or at least gave me that diagnosis. Looking back to the age of 19 in October of 1963, I recall feeling a depression so deep it was like ‘a sickness unto death,’ never before experienced, like death not warmed over, as one could say colloquially. The desire to die was overwhelming. But I did not talk to anyone about it, except perhaps my mother, although I honestly can not recall. She knew I was depressed, but neither she nor I really understood its dynamics or its intensity. I think it was assumed that I would grow out of it. And I did. By December the depression began to lift and I continued with my first year university studies.


2.5.2 These behaviours, this depression, at the age of 19 or any of my behaviour before that last year of my teenage life(1963-1964), did not result in my receiving any medical attention. The first formal diagnosis of my illness was labelled a schizo-affective disorder(SAD); BPD and/or D did not take place medically until the autumn of 1968 when I was 24. At the age of 19, though, I was given lots of advice from religious to common-sensical: diet, exercise, prayer, vitamins, interesting leisure distractions/interests like horse-riding, watching TV, music, et cetera. After several months to several years, 1963 to 1968, the emotional aberrations disappeared or could be said to be sub-threshold at least for a time. My episodes over those years and in the years December 1977 to June 1980 seemed to exhibit quite separate and distinct tendencies and patterns.


2.5.3 Hypomania(H) was always characterized by elation and D was always characterized by varying degrees of very low moods. Such an observation seems now to be so obvious as hardly requiring a mention, but at the core of my experience of this problem was either D or H and the impact of their various symptoms. Within those five years 1963 to 1968, though, the permutations and combinations of emotional variation were enough to being tears to the eyes of a brass monkey, as my mother used to say and, as I say, looking back in retrospect. It was a miracle I ever got my degree and my teaching qualifications labouring under such emotional chaos from time to time and often, week after continuous week.


2.5.4 In the years 1969 to December 1977 my BPD was sub-threshold, non-existent or not as extreme. I coped and my behaviour did not require or even suggest medical intervention. In the 1977 to 1980 episode, the next major episode, H and its various symptoms like elation and good feelings, were rare and varying intensities of D were common. The episode lasted from December 1977 to June 1980, some two-and-one-half years. The first episode had lasted off-and-on from October 1963 to December 1968, a little more than five years. This 2nd major episodic-period only lasted half the length of time as the 1st, but this was only due to the lithium treatment that put an end to my symptoms quick-smart. Without the lithium which I began to taker in the first week of May 1980—who knows what the BPD symptoms would have been?


2.5.5 In early December 1968 I had left the mental hospital in Whitby Ontario on a mild sedative. I think it was called valergan; but I’m not sure; I have forgotten its name after nearly 40 years. In the nine years from 1968 to 1977 I tried: exercise, diet, giving up smoking, sex, radiesthetics and hair analysis, jogging and play therapy, among a range of treatments to prevent or alleviate any incipient symptoms reoccurring.


2.5.6 In the episodes from 1977 through 1980 the constellation of: fear, paranoia(P) and the extremes of D were often as low as I had experienced in the sixties, in those chaotic years of that episode from 1963 to 1968. I experienced in those years 1977-1980 a range of emotional swings, but they were largely, at least as I recall looking back a quarter century later, at the D and P end of things. A psychiatrist in Ballarat prescribed stelazine or trifluoperazine, an antipsychotic drug. It was at first administered in early 1978 and it seemed to make things worse. In December 1978 I moved to Launceston with my wife and three children and, after a series of two or three quite severe emotional swings at both the H and the D end from January to May 1979, a psychiatrist at the Launceston General Hospital prescribed lithium. After just two or three days my symptoms were relieved never to return in the same form.


2.5.7 I include the above observations and comments on this second major episode because they throw some light on the first episode and place my childhood and adolescent experience of BPD, if indeed I had that disorder at all in those years, in a helpful perspective. It is helpful to me to express my disorder this way, that is in longitudinal terms as far back as my childhood, since this may be helpful to BPD sufferers. My account here may appear somewhat complex and labyrinthine for general readers and I would advise such readers not to try and follow all the permutations and combinations of my description of this disorder. My description is quite difficult for some to follow and for me to outline in detail and to understand in general. As I go about relating this story, I go about trying to place this narrative into some coherent form. It has taken this third edition, now in its seventeenth draft, to get some sense of coherence, some sense of continuity, into what some biographers and autobiographers sometimes call a ‘chaos narrative.’


2.6 From My First Episode of MD in 1963
To My First Institutionalized Care in 1968:

2.6.1 The episode in 1963 continued in a complex series of forms up to and including 1968, as I have outlined above. This episode was not diagnosed as either MD or BPD in those years. This episode, part of my first phase of BPD as I see it in retrospect, did not receive any professional psychiatric diagnosis until June of 1968. From June 1968 to November of that year I received institutional care in: the Frobisher Bay, now Iqaluit, General Hospital; the Verdun Psychiatric Hospital in Montreal; the Scarborough General Hospital in a Toronto suburb and the Whitby Psychiatric Hospital about a 30 minute drive from Toronto. The story of those years from 1963 to 1968 and those four psychiatric units and hospitals were my years of university study and the first year of full employment. The story of these years is long, stony and tortuous and I will not write the account of these five years in any more detail since no medical diagnosis was given to me in writing or verbally. I did receive a great deal of advice and types of treatment: (a) more exercise and prayer, (b) a better diet and sex, (c) 8 ECTs and types of therapy from talk to art and manual activities. I do write of these six months in these several facilities in my memoirs in much more detail than I do here. To write of it here would result in prolixity.


2.6.2 In June or July of 1968, though, one member of a battery of doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists and other care givers who were then providing my treatment program in Montreal Canada at the Verdun Psychiatric Hospital took a personal interest in my case. He was the first attending psychiatrist in my life about whom I remember anything at all. He was a Baha’i, a religion that had its origins in Iran in 1844; he was one of perhaps 4000 Baha’is in Canada at the time and perhaps its only psychiatrist. He was himself at the outset of his own career in psychiatry. I had been serendipitously institutionalized here after the onset in late May of 1968 of an episode of BPD which was given no name at the time, although colloquially I recall it being said I had become "bushed" or, as they say in Australia, "gone tropo."


2.6.3 I had been working with the Inuit at the time in Canada’s high Arctic as a grade three classroom teacher. Looking back it seems highly fortuitous that this first institutionalized care that I received was, in part, from a psychiatrist who shared the same belief system as I did, the Baha’i Faith. I remember him taking me out into the community to meet some of the Montreal Baha’is and their friends. Such an exercise, I assume, he felt was a normalizing experience.


2.6.4 I appreciate, as I say above, the interest, care and assistance shown by a long series of individuals, particularly the relatives and friends in my life, who over the years and as far back as 1963. In that year what I now see as the first clear episode of MD or BPD began to manifest itself. The professional work of those doctors and the personal assistance of those family members and friends has been invaluable and I want readers to appreciate the primacy I give to the work of these special people for their help and support, their saving me from what in any previous age and time period would have been a horrific, virtually end-of-normal-life experience. I want, too, to particularly emphasise the personal care-givers in my consanguineal and affinal families, that is my family of birth and marriage, especially my mother, my first wife and my second wife. These three people were there to help inspite of the difficulties they experienced as a result of their care-giving attitudes and supporting activities. They were absolutely critical and significant others in that wider social context of family, friends and doctors over the years.-Ron Price, Tasmania.
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