Struggles as Symptoms – Realizing a Diagnosis
- Brainz Magazine
- 6 days ago
- 13 min read
Written by Justin H. Briggs, Writer
Justin H. Briggs is the author of "Insanity Comes To Mind: A Memoir on Mental Health," which was published on May 1st, 2020. He is a good writer working at being great.
The process of reaching my current diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type, was arduous and destructive not only to myself but to my relationships, community, and environment. While I was attempting to find out about myself, others, such as family, friends, and strangers, provided their valuable but irregularly informed opinions on what I needed to do to fix myself.
I kept it to myself and denied it both inwardly and outwardly for almost 25 years of self-scepticism, but I always felt off after my teen years. Weird, intense, bizarre, erratic, extreme, each word an incomplete definition, a piece of the puzzle that is Justin.
Most of these pieces, these adjectives, are part of Justin’s mental health, and Justin’s mental health area of the proverbial puzzle of Justin’s life is in fact a battlefield full of triggers and trauma. This area of Justin’s life puzzle is a warzone walking through the world for the better part of 41 years, so tread lightly.
In order to better highlight the markers I remember of mental illness, which I also wrote about in my first book, I will now explain what these chapters mean to me in hindsight, after further psychological and psychiatric evaluation and treatment.
The chapters elucidate signs, but a diagnosis would have had to be made by a professional. No one thought I had a problem, not one a psych ward should address at least, and I made sure of that more than I care to admit. I never got to the point of asking for help until it was far too late to avoid total catastrophe repeatedly. And catastrophe is always just around the block.
In recounting specific chapters below and highlighting years of analysis on the issues addressed within them, I hope to explain how the signs were rather glaring the whole roadway of life, but denial is not a river in Egypt.
Even today as I write this, I have to remind myself to take my meds with the appropriate caloric intake for them to work effectively, to double check the pharmacy before I need a refill as pharmacies and insurance companies are less than reliable, and I must always be straight up with at least my talk therapist about how fucked up I tend to feel in order to not actually fuck up whatever progress I may have made in whatever I call my life. Survival is the perpetual need, with thriving being a nice idea I hear about others achieving through their own methods.
If comparison is the thief of joy, then feel free to follow along as I recount my mental health memories from before my most recent diagnosis. You will likely feel better about your life, or at least by comparison, you can find some joy for yourself, and together we can disprove another bullshit truism, which sounds nice but is unrealistic.
Five main symptoms
As you will read, there are five main symptoms I can recall experiencing before the 2018 decision by my then nurse practitioner and administrator of medication, who decided the label which best fits my condition to be schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type.
E: Hallucination
As recounted near the end of my first title, “Insanity Comes To Mind: A Memoir On Mental Health”, my earliest memory of an experience which psychological analysis would label as a hallucination occurred when I was about 5 years old. This is discussed in Chapter E: Hallucination. Feel free to read about the experience of my past at your leisure, but psychological analysis has also revealed to me that 5 was a formative year for young Justin.
He had two younger siblings born barely over a year apart, and Justin’s life changed inexplicably. In real-world psychological terms, Justin went from being the center of his world to a distraction from his two infant siblings. So Justin began finding his own way early.
He did not know how to talk about what he was experiencing, so he developed survival or coping mechanisms at an early age, which are essentially built into 41-year-old Justin, independence, self-reliance, apathy. Powerful tools.
Justin’s hallucination of the sun talking to him, leading to a fracture in space and time from his 5 year old perspective, to which he replied, “No.”, and made the ripple in the fabric of the universe cease, could merely be the result of an over active imagination due to mental stress on a brain too young and inexperienced to objectively process the change in his life as not being his fault.
5-year-old Justin loved his siblings, adult Justin thinks, but he lost a lot of psychological support from his familial unit at an early age and has pretty much been doing whatever he has to do to survive an incomprehensible psychological reality ever since. The foundation of my support structure, my parents, family, and community, shook in a manner that at least had a lasting effect on my mental health and while this one incident could not be said to trigger 36 following years of mental health issues, it can be seen as a sign, in my opinion, that something was wrong from the jump.
Now, this is an analysis of one chapter of my book, over five years after publication, and 15 years of psychological work to understand myself. I have other memories of childhood which would prove I had an otherwise average upbringing, but 41-year-old Justin writing this article chooses to believe he kept his cards real close to the vest as a child.
He wishes he still had that discretion as an adult. He would probably have a lot more friends. Or a writing career that is not constantly starting and stopping. Or the ability to trust anyone in his real life with his problems more than he trusts complete strangers on the internet who read these rather raw and intimate revelations of his experience.
But little Justin was always fucking weird, 41-year-old Justin knows. And little Justin was born in the 1980s. If little Justin had been born in the 1880s, 41-year-old Justin would at this time be a lobotomized vegetable, a circus freak, or most likely dead by his own or someone else's hand.
41-year-old Justin can admit that a permanent disability in the 21st century is better than any problems he has heard of with regard to mental health before the internet allowed for the current inundated reality of answers and suggestions readily available via the World Wide Web concerning symptoms, diagnoses, treatment suggestions, and innumerable rabbit holes of the mind and wallet.
D: Paranoia
As Chapter D: Paranoia recounts in the memoir, as a child, I experienced paranoia in regular, profound, and personally damaging ways. As the chapter goes, I am a young child, about 9 or 10 years old, and I am unable to feel clean. I recall sleeping irregularly at best as a child, and my parents can recount anecdotal evidence to this effect concerning finding my childhood self sleepwalking or crunched up on a piece of furniture upon which I had managed to find reprieve from restlessness somewhere in the house other than my bed.
In the account in the memoir, specifically, I recall experiencing symptoms of paranoia, feeling ill at ease, feeling hostile to those closest to my life, and making ridiculous logical conclusions about the outside world being against me alone. Paranoia at any age is a dangerous state of mind, but for a child, it is unimaginably impossible to explain, and it haunts me still at 41 years old to think of how many decisions I have made over the course of my life from a place of paranoia, not simply fear. To be driven by fear is destructive enough, paranoia as a compass leads to insanity.
Imagine if, in 1992, Justin, at 9 years old, could have spoken to a counselor about his feelings of paranoia, his irrational fear of not just the world but those people in his life who are supposed to protect and support him from the dangers, real or perceived, which the world presents to any child.
Then imagine teenage Justin’s surprise when, upon first feeling paranoid after having consumed cannabis, to be told that paranoia is a perfectly normal thing which everyone experiences from time to time, whether they are stoned or not. Teenage Justin was not merely confused about what paranoia really means, he was and remains resentful that it took his breaking the law in smoking weed to first hear someone explain what paranoia was to him in the real world.
A couple of decades after the above-referenced smoke session, a medical professional informed adult Justin that paranoia is our nervous system’s response to not feeling safe. Threats to life, comfort, and health can each make any human feel paranoia. Stress is the primary factor. Too much stress can turn taking a shower into a paranoid, existential crisis as described in Chapter D: Paranoia.
C: Depression
By the time of puberty I was changing from a boy to a man, what a time. Not only was I unsure of who I was or what I wanted to be, as most experiencing puberty tend to feel, I felt responsible for more than myself. I felt I needed to change things, to help others, to be important. Not arrogantly, of course, as I humbly prayed to god to give me the power to change the world, kind of a big ask. When my prayers were not answered, I began to pray for death. By 13 years old, I was affirmatively suicidal.
There are suicidal feelings and there are suicidal ideations. These are two general realities of suicide, some people just do not feel like they want to be alive, and others actively plan their own death. Prayer after unanswered prayer came and went. Life did not seem to get better for anyone and only more complicated for everyone. By 1997, the internet was a shiny new toy, with the world available at your fingertips, and all the problems the world has to offer as well.
Teenage Justin believed in himself so much that he decided that if god would not answer his prayer to give Justin the ability to change the world, then Justin would no longer like to be in the world. Apathy turned to despair, despair to suicidal ideation. I lived in the basement of our house alone at the time.
The gun safe was right out in the garage. I recount one experience in the memoir in which I put a loaded shotgun in my mouth and chickened out by not pulling the trigger.
This failed suicide attempt actually occurred many times over many years. I would pray, I would lose faith, I would give up on hope, I would pray for death, and then, with a loaded weapon in my mouth, I would pray for the strength to pull the trigger. I never did. And now you know that if you ever did that too, you are not alone living with the pain that drove you to those lengths. If you are one of those who choose to pull the trigger, best of luck.
After primary school education, I attended my hometown’s public high school. It was told to me early and often that by the time I graduated high school, I would be the craziest kid in my class because I was coming from the local private Catholic school, and Catholic kids are the craziest. This proved to be an accurate description of what I recall from high school.
B: Mania
By the time high school rolled around, I was cool enough with myself that I thought little of suicide. I was cool enough with the world and my insignificant place within it that I gave up the notion of changing anything. It was time to live. Public school, football, preparing for college, a future to look forward to as a child yearning to be an adult. High school passed, and frankly, I cannot remember much of anything but thinking I had to be really cool with the fact that I did not feel cool. Alcohol and narcotics helped encourage my individuality, as they can.
In high school, I became the guy at every party by senior year, and I also managed to become a varsity athlete and maintain straight A’s. I had no problems, or so I thought. But by college, the mold was melting. Semester after semester, when the only social requirement was being willing to crush beer after beer. America is a service economy built for consumers. Get me a 30-pack of beer and watch how Uhmerican I can be.
By college, however, my coping mechanism of having a good time all the time was wearing thin, as was my friends’ patience with my behavior. In the chapter on mania discussed in the memoir, I recount long, sleepless nights when I would sweat out my emotions, become unable to rationalize my thoughts, and inevitably stay up all night so that by the time the real world was moving, I was too worn out to keep up. The chapter ends with an example of me attempting to cry for help. But even today I can admit that in that memory college aged Justin did not know how to ask for help.
By junior year of college, an old friend from grade school through high school had broken down and written me a note concerning my life. For her privacy, I will leave her name out of this, and for the sake of our friendship I threw the note away as soon as I read it, but we did talk about it on the steps of her sorority.
I have problems, I admitted. “The Man” shows up sometimes when I drink, kind of a Jekyll/Hyde thing I have about me, but I keep it in check. She tried to tell me that she thought I was dealing with what I was saying to her, bipolar disorder. “Fuck psychiatry,” I believe, was my direct response at 22 years of age.
Almost two decades later, this friend is no longer in my life, and I am mentally disabled due to a condition similar to bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type. I feel a fool merely admitting my own blindness to myself, and anger at my self-righteous rebuke of a friend who was truly just concerned for my well-being.
A: Delusion
They have always been listening. “They”, perpetually a threat to sanity, are real, and they do not just work for the government. Thanks to the Patriot Act and the fall of American civility post 9/11, I am likely on several lists merely by nature of my condition. I am medically predisposed to be a criminal, at least according to the statistics of incarcerated individuals with mental health conditions.
Chapter A discusses a very real, matter-of-fact aspect of American life, they can listen to us whenever they choose. Thanks, Bush. Thanks, Military Industrial Complex. Thanks, Apple. Thanks, Osama. Not only do I have to choose how to survive the post 9/11 geopolitical landscape, I have to do so knowing I can never say anything to anyone in full, unadulterated confidence again unless we are without our cell phones and have locked ourselves in a Faraday cage. I would still not trust that hypothetical rendezvous.
They have proven to me time and time again that they love to fuck with me. Cops have said as much to my face while we waited in line at a gas station. They serve and protect, so long as you bend the knee, and they serve the powers that be and protect the money with which those powers control established society.
If you do not bend the knee to this Uhmerican, or capitalist, reality, then they have ways and means to drive you to self-destruction. Call me paranoid. That is one of my diagnoses, anyway. The delusion is believing that I have to fight them at all. I might as well put a bullseye on my forehead and declare total war on reality. It is surreal to live this way, trust that.
I have been told via teleconference with recruiters for roles in countries outside of the United States that, due to my mental health reality, or mental illness, I would not be allowed an opportunity to work internationally on more than one occasion and from more than one country. I have smuggled controlled substances in the form of my prescription medications in every way a human being can internationally, simply in order to avoid being unmedicated, a personal reality which brings about social chaos, medical attention, legal attention, or all of the above. I break the law to avoid returning to the legal system. Or the mental health system. Globally.
I have to ignore them, cover my ass, take my meds, and be really fucking direct right now, police officers have no place managing wellness checks. The government facilities that treat mental illness either in a criminal manner or a medical manner are underfunded, understaffed, and underserved by policy design over the last century, and they would rather each of us sit in a little box like Rhesus monkeys, consuming our swill and pushing buttons. They want us afraid, and I know more about that fear than I ever hope to have to tell.
Is hindsight 20/20?
It is a great thought to believe that after the crisis, one can piece together the clues that led to the disaster. Michael Crichton discussed this in “Airframe”, a fictional account of a plane crash. The book sold well and illuminated the reality of any catastrophe, things break down systematically.
A plane, a society, a mind, one failure leads to a new problem which creates another failure, and so forth, until all systems nominal is an impossible endeavor and you are about to crash. Cascading failures, the idea that one problem leads to another worse problem, and so on until disaster, can be applied to the psyche.
And believe you me it can be conducted upon the psyche from external factors. To be specific, you are reading this on one such avenue of influence, whether you like it or not, the digital avenue. Might as well just embed the wires into our frontal cortex with how dependent we all are on our devices for telling us what to do, who to be, and how to think.
Survival is important, yes. But no one builds a plane to crash. No one builds a society to collapse. And I can confirm that at least my brain did not ever decide that, yes, Justin wants to be disabled in a way that drives people out of his life and lands him in government institutions or a coffin.
Justin did everything he could to avoid all labels, and disabled is a label that takes more time than any career I have ever attempted in terms of my 24 hours of a day. Thanks for the welfare checks. Really raking it in with this reality I cling to faster than mother’s teat or to any known form of escapism I have yet indulged.
Now I escape my past by managing my present as if on point. The day I began drafting this piece, I proactively checked the status of my medications at the local pharmacy. Upon review of my profile, the attending pharmacist informed me that three prescriptions from two separate providers, one for mental health and the other two for physical health, were removed by said providers. They had, in fact, been removed weeks before this check-in at the pharmacy.
That cannot be, I refuted, as my providers would have informed me of revoking medications I have to take to live, both in the mental and physical senses. I had just met with both of them. What can you do? It was not their problem at that point, they informed me, that it was my doctor’s fault, or rather, specifically, my problem. I had all the necessary medications moved to a much more capable pharmacy before finishing this piece on point.
We have to keep pushing forward, right? A good piece of advice I recently received from my current talk therapist was, “You always have the choice to do nothing.” I wish that were the case. If I start thinking of doing nothing, however, I will find a way to do something destructive, or destruction will occur naturally as a result of my pretending everything is alright. It is not alright. I am not alright. And I am not alone.
Read more from Justin H. Briggs
Justin H. Briggs, Writer
Justin H. Briggs is a writer located in Manhattan, Kansas, USA. He is more than his diagnosis and less than his potential for success, in his opinion, but he is working on that. His diagnosis of schizoaffective bipolar disorder manifests symptoms of depression, mania, delusions, paranoia, and hallucinations. He is in no way medically certified beyond the occasional CPR certification, but he has been there and done that, so to speak.
