Getting Government Help (Part I)

  Now that funds are so tight, government resources for the mentally ill are getting scarce on the ground. Just because you qualify doesn't mean you'll get them. So here's the beginning of my 3-part series on struggling with bureaucracies:

I have a reputation among my friends for getting the most out of the bureaucracy. Here are some tips gleaned from 20+ years in the mental health system.

First of all, don’t expect fast results. If you need housing next week, start counting up friends’ sofa-beds right now. Approaching the red-tape establishment in desperation puts you at a nasty disadvantage. Public employees often don’t listen well to the urgent or the stressed. They get very huffy about the pace at which they will move.

Expect that big benefits, like Disability, will take up to two years to achieve. Small ones, like assistance paying for your pet’s vaccinations, about six weeks. Government-sponsored benefits are always harder to get. There are more hoops to jump through. Volunteer groups have been formed strictly to help you. Government employees have been trained to safeguard the taxpayers’ money and keep out frauds – so, sadly, you are considered a fraud till proven otherwise.

So that’s the first rule: give it time.

The second is: never miss deadlines or appointments. Even if you are sick, or need an attendant, manage it or reschedule it. If you miss, you can mess up the whole works and they can deny your application on the grounds that you ‘didn’t do your part.’

The other tips follow in no particular order.

Get everything in writing – and keep the paperwork. If it’s an interview or a phone call, be sure to write down any instructions or promises made, along with the date and who told you.

Keep names and phone numbers you find helpful. If you find an employee with a surprisingly good attitude or good information, ask for that person by name next time you call that office. You may even want to call them again about more general info, or a referral. “Hi, Michael. It’s Deborah again. I just wanted to ask you: what department do I call for X situation? Do you have any numbers there?” Contacts are priceless, and might even become friends over the years. But don’t wear out your welcome.

Keep copies of everything YOU send. It is a savvy trick to send things by certified and/or registered mail, so you can prove an office got something on such-and-such a date. If the office completely loses the information you spent six weeks gathering, and you have no copies, you are S.O.L. It does happen. Horrifying but true. So be persnickety about this.

Get friendly with your phone book. When you need something and don’t know where to start, look in the city, county, and federal pages at the front. Think of other names for it if you can’t find it at once. It may be under ‘Human Resources’ instead of ‘Social Services.’ The Internet is great, but not all of us have it, or are good with it. The phone book is free.

Go in person if you can. If you want a service and you can get to the office, get presentable and go there. A friend of mine needed housing. We went together to the county office and received a 25-page handout of places to look and agencies to contact! Nobody’s going to give you that over the phone. You have to be there. And the human touch works wonders.

The above is an excerpt from the book Is There Room For Me, Too? 12 Steps & 12 Strategies to Coping with Mental Illness, copyright 2010 by Deborah Fruchey. Available on Amazon.com, Kindle, as a Apple iBook, or by request at your bookstore. See the posted link for a short video about the book, or visit www.lafruche.net

Pills

 

About the best thing you can do for yourself, if you have a major mental disorder, is take your medicine. And the best thing to do with your medicine is to take it regularly, and never run out. Here are a few tips on how.

Let your pill counting be an every-night or every-morning ritual. Never go to bed without taking the last pills of the evening, and setting out what you will need the next day. You may be fuzzy in the morning, especially before coffee; it would be easy to skip one (or double up on the wrong one) and suffer for it later. I take quite a few, so I do need to specifically count how many of each item I need for morning, lunchtime and bedtime doses. While I’m counting, I glance in each bottle to make sure I have enough to last at least 3 more days. If one of the bottles looks low, I turn it upside down on my dresser so the next morning I will notice it. When I see an upside down bottle, that’s my short-hand for “Call the pharmacy, today!”

Your morning pills belong just an arms-length away from your pillow, maybe on a little saucer by a glass of water. When you get up, you can grab them and swallow them down without even looking or thinking about it. That’s what you want: an instant, automatic action. The pills for the rest of the day should have a tiny container of their own that lives in your purse or wallet or back pocket. ALWAYS. Never be caught anywhere without your pills.  If you are on public transportation and start to hear voices, you need your antipsychotics with you, to take right now, not in some drawer at home.

In fact, I recommend you have an emergency supply of one extra days’ worth that you keep on your person at all times. This doesn’t have to take a lot of space. Mine goes in the cellphone pocket of my wallet. In even the best-ordered life, the unexpected can happen and you can be stuck somewhere overnight or caught in a disaster with no access to the pills that will keep you sane and functioning until you get to safety. How are you going to handle it without your meds? If this sounds like too much to bother with, let me put it another way: would you rather carry a few extra pills, or explain things to the police?

‘Nuff said.

About pharmacies: pick a national chain if you can, one that will hold your computer records even if you are traveling to another state. It’s a good idea to check, before a vacation, that you have enough of each medication to see you through, including a couple of days’ worth for after  you get home. Try to give your pharmacy two days’ notice at least for refills. Things go wrong with distressing regularity. What if you have no more refills, and they need special authorization? What if they have to call your doctor or your insurance and don’t get an answer right away? Lots of things can go wrong with your order. For instance, maybe you’ve needed a little more medicine than usual – so now you’ve used up your prescription early, and the insurance company says it won’t pay for replacements till some time next week. Twice I was held up because the pharmacy was faxing the old office number of a doctor I hadn't seen for years! Naturally, he didn’t bother answering them. Or what if they’ve simply run out of supplies? Give your pharmacy a little lead time to sort things out. They will appreciate that you don’t breathe down their necks and rush them – and when there really is a special hurry, the people behind the counter will be more likely to be helpful and understanding if you’re usually not a pain.

But what if, despite everything, you do run out?

If you always go to the same pharmacy, and they know you, they will probably help you out. Explain that you need X days of emergency supply. Tell them why (in as few words as possible – they don’t need a long sob story). Be sure to show them the bottle you just emptied so they can verify that you really do have this prescription in this exact dosage. They will probably give you the small supply you need – possibly without charge. It really pays to be a regular customer. But even if you are new in town, if you show the bottle, you may be able to get help; especially if you can say “I’m seeing Dr. So-and-so in 5 days.” Give them the doctor’s number so they can verify that, too. Psychotropic drugs are very powerful and can be dangerous to the wrong person, so they’re right to be cautious in giving these things out to strangers.

Don’t put new pills into old bottles, though. I did this by mistake once. The old bottle read “one refill remaining”, so I thought I was alright. But it was actually time for a new prescription, and I didn’t have any refills left! I had to make a rush appointment and get an emergency supply. So when you get your medicines refilled, any leftovers should go into the NEW pill bottle. Throw the old one away.

One last tip: If you give them a list of your usual meds, Walgreen’s is capable of making out a comparison chart of the various Medicare Part D plans in your area, including a cost comparison. It pays to do this each December, during the time when patients are eligible to switch coverage.

Be serious, disciplined and reliable in the way you handle your prescriptions, so they can give you serious and reliable results.

Deborah Fruchey is the author of a general self-help book for psychiatric patients. Entitled  Is There Room For Me, Too?, it is available on Amazon.com and other online bookstores. It is also available as an ebook on Kindle and in Apple's iBookstore. Or you can request a copy from your local book vendor. See the attached link for an explanatory video, or visit Deborah at www.lafruche.net.

Defining Normal

It happens sometimes that people get sidetracked into the swamp of defining what 'sanity' is, what ‘normal’ is. Usually they just leave the question hanging. If we are going to accurately monitor ourselves, however, we need a benchmark for sanity. We need to have some way to know when we have gone off the rails, when it is time to curb our behavior. We can’t decide what to do about psychosis, if we don’t know we are psychotic! The real question is, what does sanity feel like to YOU?

A lot depends on the age at which we became mentally ill. Obviously, if disease struck you at age 26, you have some kind of memory of what ‘sanity’ felt like, however you may define sanity. The world felt different. Perceptions were different. You can remember. You can compare. But what about those of us who started early? Some of us have never experienced adult ‘sanity’. We were kids, and then we were insane. No ‘before’ picture to measure by. Some of us were even insane as kids. What do you do then? How can you tell that things have gone further south than usual?

Well, if you’re lucky, at some point your medications will stabilize you – even if only for a little while – and that can become your measure of what adult normal feels like. I had to wait until I was 34, myself. But once I knew, I had a reliable way of telling when I had got too far from the beaten path. We have to pay attention to our bodies as well as our minds. There are certain sensations I associate with mental illness – a sort of tight, closed-in feeling, as if only my mind exists and my body is locked in a box, and I literally CANNOT notice what is around me, or change the topic my brain is stuck on, no matter how hard I try. I feel overwhelmed, over-stimulated, a little panicked, a little trapped. I cannot listen – the words inside me must be spewed out. I cannot calm down – there is a firestorm in my head that often turns into a very real physical headache. I certainly am not breathing very deeply. The irritation and tightness that accompany this are clues that I am losing it, and should go lie down.

If you observe yourself for a while, you will learn your own cues.

If your meds have never graced you with adult ‘normal’, it is trickier. You have to judge by lesser or greater, with no absolute benchmark. And you have to depend a lot on the reactions of other people. If everybody around you is concerned or hostile or telling you to stop or shut up, chances are real good you’ve crossed the line. You might want to set up a verbal or visual signal with someone you trust, a simple phrase like, “Honey, you don’t seem like your usual self today.” Something simple and inoffensive that will not set you off all by itself. And you will have to surround yourself with people that you trust.

This can be tricky, too. It is to easy for those who are not sick to label anything they do not like or understand as ‘insanity.’  Holding dissenting opinions is not insanity. Having an unusual idea is not insanity. Insanity is operating from a non-standard reality, and not knowing you are doing so. That doesn’t happen every day, for most of us. We need intimates who allow us to be our disparate selves, and this can be a challenge. New Year's Resolution: surround yourself with people you can trust.

It is difficult to be mentally ill partly because of the way it messes with our fundamental belief that we are right. A person with a mental disorder has to be ready to concede, at any given moment, that they may be wrong about virtually anything, even the smells wafting into their nostrils! The least we can do for ourselves is make sure those around us can be trusted to have a sense of what is our illness, and what is simple idiosyncrasy on our part.

There are individuals like that out there. Go and find them, and happy hunting.

Deborah Fruchey

Deborah's new book, Is There Room For Me, Too? 12 Steps & 12 Strategies for Coping with Mental Illness, is now available on Amazon.com, Kindle Editions, and Apple's iBookstore. See the above link for an introductory video.

Top Ten Tips for Surviving the Hoidays

Everywhere we go at this time of year, people are insisting that we be happy, have good cheer, and enjoy the holidays. For the mentally ill, this can be a problem. Some of us become more depressed than usual. Some of us come apart due to the stress. Some of us, living poverty-stricken or isolated lives, will feel more alone and broke than ever. It’s not easy to give neat presents on the fixed income of Disability, or the pittance of SSI.

Holiday blues can happen to anybody, but for the mentally ill, who live so close to their emotions and the negative critics inside their heads, it can be enough to bring on a whole slew of symptoms we’d rather do without. So here are some of the tricks I’ve learned to make it through. Apply as needed.

1. You do not have to break the bank buying presents. Try out a flea market or thrift shop for gifts. The chief thing a gift is supposed to do is show someone you thought about them. If you buy thoughtfully, fitting gift to personality, you can come out on top without a lot of bucks. Remind yourself that it is retailers who have made Christmas into a shoppers feeding frenzy; the season, whatever your religion, is actually not about gifts but connecting to loved ones at this dark time of year and showing them we care. (In January, you can start setting aside a small amount every month so you won’t be caught flatfooted by the next ‘season of giving’.)

2. Or you can make things, write things, hand-paint cards – use whatever creativity you have to manufacture your own gifts. I know a woman who buys ugly bead necklaces at flea markets, takes them apart, and then puts together her own stunning necklaces in much better combinations, choosing the best colors for the individual she’s giving to. She has an eye, and people love her personal jewelry gifts. The money investment is tiny. Besides, it is illegal in most parts of the world to criticize a handcrafted gift made with obvious care. ; )

3. Stay out of the malls and stores. Mass crowds at Christmas can get absolutely rabid, growling and elbowing and making for long lines and grouchy sales clerks. If your sanity is fragile at the best of times, you do NOT need to be in places like this. (The parking alone is enough to give me spontaneous attacks of rage).

4. If you do have some money, or an accommodating charge account, a good bet is buying from offbeat catalogs. If you sign up for just one, they will propagate and you will have dozens to choose from next year. Some of the best buys can come from organizations such as SERV, which gathers fair-trade items that are handmade and relatively inexpensive, from needy economies all over the world. The advantages here are staying out of the stores (see above), finding unique items that nobody else in your family has seen, and if you can afford it, even having them gift-wrapped and mailed straight from the merchant to your family members. All of this adds up to a very low-stress holiday season. The downside: these catalogue items tend to be not-so- cheap, and you will get nailed on the shipping. Also, you must order early enough for on-time delivery.

5. Consider buying your tree, if you need one, the night before Christmas. If the local tree lot is trying to get rid of the last stragglers, they might give you a hell of a deal. These won’t be the shapeliest or best trees, but if you’ve collected enough ornaments or have bushy garlands, it may not matter. Or consider a mini-sized, tabletop tree, which will be in a low price range. Lots of people make trimming the tree on Christmas eve part of their yearly ritual, even opening their presents the night before, and wouldn’t have it any other way.

6. Spend time with your friends. If everybody is busy, or far away, spend time with them on the phone. This is especially important if you don’t have family any more. It is supposed to be a season of love, and if you have had some contact with everyone you love, you will not feel so deprived.

7. Be sure you take in plenty of music that makes you feel good. That does not always mean Christmas music – some of us abominate carols – and it doesn’t always even mean cheerful music. Maybe melancholy classical pieces give you a sense of order in the world. Music does not have to cost a lot. You can pick up any number of old vinyl records and cassette tapes for pennies on the dollar. Music is one of the best and easiest mood-altering substances known to mankind.

8. Establish special rituals for the season, so you can feel festive even if you are alone and sick. Drinking hot chocolate, for instance; decorating the house if you like that; taping up any Christmas cards you receive into a tree-shape on the back of a door. Or have a festival of old holiday movies that you borrow for free from the library. Read The Night Before Christmas out loud to yourself (by a fire if possible).  These are things that will help you feel connected to the mood, or just make you feel it is a special time. (Conversely, if you do not celebrate Christmas, some special non-Christmas rituals will help buttress you against skepticism, disgust, or too much of a left-out feeling).

9. Make sure you have plenty of all your medicines. This is not the time to run out and start spiraling down. Don’t wind up spending Christmas or New Year’s in the hospital. Add extra therapy visits if things are tough. If you can stay connected to even one person who listens to and accepts your icky, non-festive feelings, you will probably be able to squeak through. 

10. Remember that Christmas is ultimately a man-made made holiday, one that the Catholic Church frankly appropriated and reframed to help increase conversion rates. Even if you believe in the story of Christ's birth, historians are pretty sure he was not born on Christmas day proper. This holiday is not ordained by God - there is nothing you have to accomplish and no reason to feel you have not "measured up" if you do things differently from the mainstream. You can choose to celebrate, or you can choose to retreat into your own quiet space. There is nothing wrong with that.

And if you get tired of all that insistence that you should be having a joyous time, remember that at least 50% of the people who are telling you that are faking it, even to themselves. You have plenty of company.

Compared to What?

Self-esteem is a perennial problem for the mentally ill. We have to live our lives at a different pace from the mainstream, with generally scaled-down goals, and sometimes it is impossible not to feel “less than.”  In addition, it’s my sneaking suspicion that we just have to spend more time than most people with the critical voice in our heads, and it’s a louder, more insistent voice. Especially if we are surrounded by “normies”, we can wind up feeling inadequate, to say the least.

It is a truism to say, “you shouldn’t  compare  yourself to others,” and it’s silly. People are going to compare. They are supposed to compare! This is how the human mind works! The brain takes any image or concept, scans through the memory banks to find something similar, and says, “Ah, this is like such-and-such, only bigger or smaller or more colorful.” It lists the differences. That’s how it operates. That is why a good teacher will go at a new concept from several angles and maybe with a couple of stories or similes, looking for the ‘hook’ to previous ideas which will allow students to process something new.

The thing we need to understand is that we are no longer measurable by the old rules.  By definition, we are not part of the mainstream.

We are dealing with tremendous extra pressures and challenges they could not conceive. We are carrying a heavier load, every day. We are going to perform differently. So we will do a lot better if we compare ourselves to our peers, or just to our own levels of functioning. (And anyway, let’s be real – is that mainstream, with its frenzied ideas of materialism and power trips, so totally sane and admirable that we want to copy it?)

Here’s an example. I sometimes pick at myself for taking so much medicine every night. It’s uncool. It’s like being an elderly woman, or an invalid. Then I remind myself that over the years I have cut down on my meds by about half.  I am actually getting better. Another self-critical issue for me is work and earnings. I used to feel bad that I could only work 15 hours a week. Then my doctor told me that at my level of severity, 90% of people could not hold a job – any job – for more than 6 months. I had been working at the library about 5 years by then. Instantly, that 15 hours looked better. And as for money, it takes a lot of skill to live on the miniature amounts you get from the government. It takes a lot of skill even to get them. Can you congratulate yourself on making that work? I’ll bet most of your salaried friends could not do it.

Never mind how the up-and-comers are doing. How are your colleagues doing? Go to a support group and see what is realistically going on for the people there. Maybe you are well off because you are the only one who sleeps through the whole night. Maybe you are on top of your paperwork, or have a more reasonable social life or romantic relationship than half the people in the circle. But you won’t know that until you look at others like you. At least read about them, if there are no groups nearby. You don’t need to reach the upper limits of human achievement! You just have to do okay on one or two items that matter today.

Take time out from your self-flagellation to tot up your small achievements. Anything can count, from taking your medicine more regularly to getting out of bed during a depression. Little things are important. I do not have to be Tolstoy. You do not have to be Steve Jobs. Just pat your bruised self on the back for the things you did right today. You deserve the appreciation.

Deborah Fruchey

You can get her book, Is There Room for Me, Too? 12 Steps &12 Strategies to Coping with Mentally Illness, at Amazon.com, Createspace.com, Kindle Editions, Apple's iBookstore, and Lulu.com. Those last three sources will download a free chapter or two to you!

Grateful

            There’s never been a better time to be insane.

            No, I am not kidding. In 2010, I can live a life indistinguishable from that of the average American. I have a husband, and if I wish to, I can have children. I can go to college, and if I wish to work, and am able to, I am protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act. I do not need to fear being hospitalized against my will, or even being forced to take medicine, unless I am actively dangerous to myself or someone else. And my pills protect me from the worst of my symptoms 90% of the time.              

            And now, because of what President Obama has done, I can even get insurance, for the first time since I was diagnosed in 1985.

            It is a really, really good time to be one of us. Any other time in history, it would have been unspeakably harder.

            In the old days, they would just stone you on the streets during the day and lock you outside the village gates at night, to starve or be eaten.

            In the slightly-less-old days, You could be chained, tortured by water ‘therapies’ that could involve near drowning or smashing you with a wall of water the equivalent of  firehose force till you were compliant. There were numerous other hideous treatments, which I gather worked in that they left people cowed and silent, or dazed and half dead. Your jailers could also bring parties of rich young gentlemen and ladies in for a fee, to view you for amusement, like a zoo. ‘Bedlam’ – Bethlehem Hospital – was famous for this.

            But that was a long time ago, right? Wait, there’s more. In the 1940’s, a science called Eugenics justified Hitler in gassing the mentally unstable residents of a facility called Hadamar. This was long before Auschwitz – we were his early experiments. Think Eugenics was just for Nazis? Wrong again. There were laws passed in the United States, and upheld by the Supreme Court as recently as 1927, that forbad the mentally ill to marry each other and caused 60,000 Americans to be forcibly sterilized so they could not pass on their ‘weakness’.

            As recently as 38 years ago, when I was in my teens and already ill, there were no medicines that could have helped me. None. I would have lived in the hell of my extreme moods and depression and psychosis and nobody could have done a thing except made up theories as to what in my childhood had caused it. I don’t think, frankly, that I would have lived long. They could have warehoused me. They could, in time, have put me on Thorazine, that dreadful drug that sedates patients so much that they walk like zombies, with a Frankenstein automation. And you don’t want to know how easy it used to be to put people away for life.

            We are fabulously lucky to have our disorders at a time when so much can be done to alleviate them. Incredibly lucky just to know that they are medical disorders, no more than that, which we can explain and be treated for. So even though there is stigma, even though I have symptoms, even though I will never be able to work a 40 hour week again, I am tremendously lucky and grateful today.

            I can drive like anybody else, with my husband who accepts me exactly as I am, to see my family, who may think I am a little weird but know that they have no reason to fear me or jail me or hide me or sterilize me. And we will have a good day, eating all the food we are so lucky to have, in the country we are so lucky to live in.

            There are many reasons to be thankful – so many! And I am sure my family will be concentrating on them. But my deepest gratitude goes to simple things: that my medicines allow me the use of my own mind, 90% of the time. And that those medicines were invented and sold before it was too late for me.

            Stigma? Side effects? Bah humbug. The worst is definitely over.

Deborah Fruchey
Is There Room for Me, Too? 12 Steps and 12 Strategies for Coping with Mental Illness,
 is available on Amazon.com, Creatspace.com, Lulu.com, and many other online sources; it is also published as an ebook on Kindle Editions and in Apple's iBookstore.

Like a Real Person

This weekend just past, I got to attend a writer’s conference. It was a rare opportunity for me, and I have my agents – Elizabeth Pomada & Michael Larsen -  to thank for giving me a guest pass to something I could not otherwise afford. It was a great chance to find out new things, and I was profoundly grateful to be invited. I learned scads of important things.

Any person with a mental illness will recognize that it was also an amazing challenge. How was I to pass myself off as a normal person for two days straight? There were some real difficulties involved, starting with getting through my morning depression in record time so I could be functional and in San Francisco at 8:30 in the morning. Then, the trick was to stay at least apparently functional from 8:30 till the last class at 5 p.m., and still handle the 2-hour commute, plus not bite off my husband’s head when I got home. Kind of a tall order.

I handled the first hurdle – the early morning – by going to bed at 8 p.m. the night before with my clothes and everything else all laid out ready. Then I woke – more or less – at 5 a.m. and allowed myself the usual two hours of fardling and fumbling around and whining in my journal about how hard waking up is. Lots of coffee.  Plenty of time for mistakes and false starts and changes of mind. The trick here was to automate as much as possible, so I used BART (the local commute train) instead of trying to drive to the City myself, arriving frazzled, and trying to find parking. That would have finished me before I began! After I arrived downtown, I took a taxi, something I rarely do,  from the station to the Kearney street Hilton. Another thing that works is to arrive early and scope out the territory, so you don’t get overwhelmed by rush and impressions and information. By the time the conference started, I knew where all the session rooms and the bathrooms were, had found the coffee shop downstairs, and had spent a peaceful half hour in a cushy leather chair at a secluded nook behind the stairs.

Surviving the conference itself was something else. For seven straight hours there was one class after another, with a speaker shoehorned in at lunch. This meant a constant barrage of sights, sounds, information, and faking normal in public for hour after hour. I don’t know about your condition; but I am easily overwhelmed by too much stimulation. This was way up there on my stress-o-meter. A year or two ago, I had tried to attend a conference like this. The first day I had caved a couple hours early and run home. The second day I couldn’t go at all. I had to stay home, in bed, with the curtains shut, and sleep it off. It was completely exhausting, and I didn’t acquit myself well.

This year I got through both days. The secret was frequent breaks. Every couple hours, I would go downstairs and sit in that quiet lobby corner with my favorite iced latte and a good book, and just completely shut the whole thing off for twenty minutes. Luckily the sessions were short, and I had time between each workshop – but I would have done the same thing even if it meant missing a session here and there.  I expect those breaks between sessions were meant for schmoozing, but that was beyond me. I could retreat to a dark quiet space, or go crazy. That was the choice.  In fact, the first day I skipped the paid-for lunch altogether and slunk off to the café downstairs, which was nearly deserted. I missed lunch with my agents, but I had a blessed hour of speaking to no one and taking in no sort of information or stimulation. Did I offend my agents? I don’t know. I doubt it. They’re busy and important. I don’t think it mattered to them much either way. And at the end of the conference, I skipped the final hour and sat where I could see the bright sky outside, hear street noises just faintly, and recover my equilibrium before I started the two-hour trek home. There was an entire celebratory dinner that I missed that evening. It would have been fun, but it would also have been way too much. I don’t know about you, but when I have pushed myself too far, I start doing and saying things that make people unhappy I’m around.

So now you know my recipe for those normal-world activities: take a time out whenever you can. It just doesn’t pay to pretend you can handle things when you can’t. Take time to be quiet somewhere, take a pill if you have to, check out of the action, and check in with yourself. This strategy works on the job too. That’s how I got through twelve years of part time work in public libraries: long quiet lie-downs in the lounge. Did people think I was weird? Or lazy? Yeah, probably. But it would have been worse for everybody if I had faked it till I came unglued and had a psychotic episode right there at the customer counter.

There’s a good reason “modified breaks” and “flexible hours” are listed as  ‘reasonable job accommodation’ for people with mental illnesses. Check out this and other information at http://askjan.org/media/Psychiatric.html.

By the way, I may take a number of days to debrief and get back to my version of 'normal'. The first day, that included sleeping till 1:30 in the afternoon. And you know what? That's perfectly OK. I don't claim to run as smoothly as every other car on the road.Those of us with psychiatric disorders are definitely high maintenance. The point is to stay ON the road, however slowly you have to drive - and don't smash into the other drivers. If you can do that, you've won.


Deborah's book on coping with mental illness, Is There Room For Me, Too?, is available on Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com, Createspace.com, on Kindle editions, and at the Apple iBookstore.