Recovery from Myself: The "Journey" I am.

At 42, after many years of difficulty and challenge culminating in a psychotic episode involving religious mania – to be recognised at last by the American DSM psychiatric manual – I self-diagnosed myself with bipolar disorder, confirmed shortly by a psychiatrist. The person I had been until my “breakdown” – more, as is often the case, a “break up” of my mind – no longer existed, replaced by a medicated, treated, new Jeremy. I went from being “moody” to “mentally ill”. Once we are diagnosed we begin to call on our societal, conditioned and borrowed contexts of madness and mental illness and apply them to ourselves, but it takes years to get to grips with how much of a factor this is in holding us back from recovery and reintegration. We stigmatise and redefine ourselves as sick, thereby co-operating with those whose jobs depend on characterising us as such, and contribute to the assumption that we are not “normal”, as though somewhere out there someone definitively is. In a society sick with stress and depression, anxiety and anger, we mentally ill are supposed to be “mad”, but there is little conclusive evidence that mental illness is more than a matter of separation from sanity by degrees, not some dramatic departure. And what happens when, statistically, the “mentally ill”, “disordered”, “dysfunctional” and other mind barbarians breach the gates are constitute more than half the population?

To really recover from mental illness we need to do more than get better and accept ourselves. We need to take everything “in my head” as real, stop stigmatising our symptoms and see them as natural and acceptable, even inevitable. This does not signify a descent into comfortable denial, it means a conscious and deliberate retaking of identity in the face of enormous inner and outer resistance. The place where the lines converge is where “normal” is synonymous with “disordered”, where it is recognised that the sick society is all of us, not just those with a diagnosis.

After seven years as a “service user” – a classic example of lopsided language used in this area: does anybody ever ask how much the service uses and needs the user? – with needs met for the most part caringly, if unconsciously, I see that to really recover I need more than anything else to turn away from conventional thinking and doing, be sensible but sensitive to alternatives in being and doing, and most of all never turn back on the road upon which I am set and which I have fought so hard to travel, and that will return me to myself whole if, despite all the competing and contradictory voices within and without, I can only stay strong, centred and defiant.

My “journey” – jargon, but at least relatively benign and intelligent – has taken me in wider and wider circles; I am not pretending that I have broken free yet of the various prisons constructed out of my illness by and for me. However, I have written two books on the impact on my life of bipolar disorder, one a memoir and the other focused on recovery, I work in the voluntary mental health sector, continue to be highly creative as a writer and musician, and although I experience the routine lulls and reversals of my condition – there I go doing it again! Of life – I am realistic and hopeful at once, seeing that who and what I am is normal, natural and able to be healed, and if that means deconstructing accepted contexts or, as Emerson put it, “disturbing all things sacred”, then so be it.

The experience of being mentally ill can be frightening and alienate you from yourself. The discovery that the pain, disappointment and difficulties of living with a mental illness have to be dealt with not only by drugs and endless talking but by a resolve to acknowledge the reality of your situation and thereby reintegrate it can seem daunting. The illness can deny much to us, but not the creativity and vitality to question, explore and find novel solutions to its problems. Being mentally ill means that there is more than one of me – if I am bipolar, at least two, and if I hear voices perhaps a half dozen or more – and that I am able to harness, hear and help my many selves to know, respect and work with each other. It may sound implausible but it is far from impossible. Hope and healing are words I often disparage. The truth is, though, that they are synonymous and indispensable. And for each of my recovering friends I wish both in plenitude.