Kathryn Cohan Who am I now?

My interest in identity has emerged from my own struggle to grow and to change and to incorporate my life's experience into some sense of cohesive whole that I and others recognize as "me."

This recognition, for me, is, at times, complicated by the having of "extreme states," what has been labeled bipolar disorder with rapid cycling and psychosis. My mood is unpredictable, with high energy states and low energy states shaping what I "feel like" on any given day. Additionally, I hear music and voices absent stimuli to really hear anything several times per week, and experience fear and suspicion absent stimuli to really feel anything several times per week as well. These are things that come along with the territory of being "me," and the way that I experience myself. I no longer remember, nor do I really care, what it was like to not have my inner landscape affected by these experiences.

This recognition of "me" for others is also complicated by the label, not only because of the shifts in awareness and interactivity contained in the extreme states themselves, but also because the others in my life must contend with the fact of my disability. Looking at me you would not guess I am crazy; I am not marked in some way as to reveal this fact. I guess the extent to which that might be viewed as good thing is partially determined by the readers' views on disability in general. For me, the invisibility of mental illness or psychiatric disability has been both blessing and curse. It has made it easier to obtain the trappings of a "normal" life and it has made it doubly hard to feel authentically in need of accommodation. It has made it easier to "get along" in society in a public way, and made it harder to place myself in society in a personally meaningful way.

As I talk about identity here, I am really talking about three things. I am talking about my experience of myself as a unique individual; a human being in the process of becoming. I am talking about the impact of "mental illness" on the process of that process in a very personal way. And, finally, I am talking about the public perception of me as a member of a "class" of persons who share the experience of living with mental illness. In this chapter I hope to enunciate how the "me" in the first sentence of this paragraph mediates between the second and third parts. I don't think my experience is unique.

I do admit to several areas of privilege right up front:

I am white.

I come from an upper-middle class background that placed a lot of emphasis on formal and informal education.

I did not experience the poverty associated with disability until mid life.

I have a background as a provider and manager in the mental health field, therefore I have "insider information."

I benefited from an extraordinary baccalaureate program tailored to adult continuing education students that afforded a lasting integrated perspective on "knowing."

Those confessions made, I'll go on to tell my story and use it to frame what I know of identity.

At nineteen and as a freshman at George Washington University where I shared a dorm suite with five other young women, I went mad.

It was 1974 and nobody noticed.

I had been feeling increasingly estranged and lost that spring. The energy I had burst into college with had dissipated by the end of my first semester. I wasn't easily getting A's anymore; something I depended upon to help me know who I was. I wasn't easily making friends anymore, another of the truths about myself I held as self-evident. I had lost a lot of weight, but I thought that was a good thing; I had battled with my weight off and on since my mid-teens and was of the "thinner is better" school of body-image.

It got increasingly hard to leave the dorm. I just wanted to sleep all the time, no small feat as my bed was in the "living room" of the six-woman suite that used to be a four- woman suite. But, in fact, it didn't matter how much I slept as no amount of sleep could make me feel rested. At some point, several weeks into this not-leaving-the-dorm, not- exactly-sleeping-but-not-rested state, I began to feel really, terribly, all-consumingly afraid.

I called my parents at 4:30 one morning. I didn't know what else to do.

They picked me up early the next morning and brought me home. They were concerned; they had never seen me like I was. I saw their concern and grew more afraid; it seemed to me that I could not recognize myself and now it seemed to that my parents could not recognize me. I did not know what had happened to me; I wasn't even sure something had happened to me; but I sure was afraid.

I remember waiting six days for my interview at the local Mental Health Center.

I spent the nights in the downstairs part of the house, on the alert for something. Not sleeping, not eating, being reminded to bathe by my mother. Sometimes my father would keep me company during those nights. The days blended together in reality as they do in memory. I was adrift in a reality that -- although it was contained within the bricks of the old colonial house in suburban Maryland -- I have a very hard time describing for you here. It was, and occasionally still is, as if all time and all knowledge and all states of being run together to form a new way of existing that is so seductive and all- encompassing that it replaces the "consensus reality" that other people occupy.

I remember the interviewer at the Mental Health Center telling my mother that her family history of schizophrenia made it quite likely that I had the same illness.

I don't remember the precise sequence of events that led me to the neurologist, but I do remember being told that I did not have schizophrenia, but that I did have temporal lobe epilepsy, and that I would have to take medication for the rest of my life. I was prescribed dilantin and valium and referred to a psychiatrist who specialized in neuropsychiatry, and who enjoyed doing insight-oriented psychotherapy with young adults. I was relieved that I wasn't crazy, and thought taking medication for temporal lobe epilepsy for the rest of my life was a small price to pay for not being a schizophrenic, even if it meant that I was "damaged goods" in another sense.
I spent the early years of that therapy adjusting to being handicapped.

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[Who am I now?] [Strategies for Self-Determination] [Talking Points]
[Inner Science] [The Hard Questions] [Provider Psychopathologies]
[Inviting In The Wolf] [Recovering Self Esteem] [The ECT Suite]
[Consumer Satisfaction Surveys] [The Therapeutic Value of Cyberspace]
[The Self-Help Lens] [The Language Barrier] [Waves of Change]

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© 1999, 2000 Kathryn Cohan