Déjà vu
It’s almost déjà vu. It’s this time of year again, and the same things just seem to be happening again. My father moves out of his place to stay with us, mother goes into relapse, me just feeling horrible inside without having the slightest clue about what to do with it.
Yup, today was yet another episode of mommy blues for me. I kind of hoped that she wouldn’t go into a full relapse, but I guess that wish didn’t come true. She’s in a more argumentative mood than ever. From taking half of her medicine, she has now insisted that she needs only a quarter. I don’t know if she has indeed been skipping on her medication, but I have tried to monitor her for the pass few days, making her swallow her tablets in front of me. But she doesn’t like it. She says that its poison and that its killing her.
In my absence, she has been up to all sorts of things. She went through the things in my room, taking this and that, leaving her things here and there. She took down our cloths hanging line, and stuffed the washed cloths in between the window grill. Needless to say, the cloths became dirtier than before. She doesn’t bother to cover up herself, and when I make a big fuss about it, she says I am being difficult.On no less than 2 occasions, I came home to a house with the doors wide ajar, with my mother not in the living room, but day dreaming or minding her own business in her room, literally lost in her thoughts. The last time it happened, I had enough. I came back, door ajar and she had a back facing me in her room. I snuck into the house, creep behind her and grabbed her from the back, pushing her onto the bed. Thinking there was some real intruder, she shouted. But she burst out in laughter when she saw it was just me. Under normal circumstances, I would have laughed too, but I wasn’t in the mood, and I did it for a very specific purpose, to make her realise just how dangerous her actions were. I asked her “What if I was a real burglar? Now do you realise why I warned you to never leave the door ajar unattended?” I told her to find the pad lock and lock the door. She got defensive after seeing that I was in no playing mood and babbled something about my father taking the key and the lock. I told him that my father had not been around the whole day, what more take the lock.
She said it was lost and she didn’t know where it is. I found it on her bed. So I took the lock and locked the grill, and I refused to return her key. Yes, I did it again. I told her plainly that she had been reckless with her house key, irresponsible in taking care of the house, lost in her own world. To give her the key would be putting herself as well as everything else in the house at risk of danger. Of course, she wasn’t happy about it at all, and for the past 2 days, she has been chasing me for it, giving me all sorts of funny reasons. I told her that i would return her key once I see that she is fit enough to handle the responsibility again. So all the attacks of being treated like a prisoner comes flying at me again. I passed the message to my brother, but he said nothing. I know he doesn’t really agree with my methods, but not being here himself, I guess he didn’t want to dictate too much.
In all honestly, I strongly feel that she needs treatment. She needs to be brought to the hospital, but put on the needed drugs to calm her nerves and soothe her emotional turmoil. But she is against it (naturally) as well as my brother. His point is that we shouldn’t bring her to the hospital at every incident, since it our ultimate responsibility to care for her the best we can, and not just keep her when she is behaving and sent her off when she’s not. Medically, a patient should always be brought in for treatment when the signs and symptoms return, and not left untreated, else it becomes worse. Something my girlfriend feels strongly about. They need to be treated, I agree.
But there is something nagging at me about the matter. The symptoms can be treated using medication. But the symptoms aren’t the real problem. The real problem is the illness. In reality, just like any other disease, even when there are no symptoms, it doesn’t mean the illness isn’t there. When you take an aspirin, it takes the pain away, but the pain isn’t the problem. Pain is just our body’s faithful way of telling us that something is not right. Without pain, we’d never know something is wrong. For most illnesses, there is always a cure. But sadly, in my mother’s case, there is no straightforward cure to psychiatric illness; it is a sickness of the heart and of the mind. So even though I feel the need to treat her with medication, I still get that nagging feeling that we aren’t really solving the problem; just a stop gap measure. There have been accusations (mostly from Tom Cruise and his bunch of Scientology freak friends) that psychiatry is just a pseudo-science. I would go that far to say its fake, but I do feel that we have yet to reach the point where we truly understand the human brain and human mind enough to try manipulating it through medication effectively. In fact, I’m not sure if we will ever be able to. After all, our brains are all made of the same stuff, but we all think and feel so differently. Can we really study our brain the same way we study our digestive system or reproductive system? The fact is, psychiatry is never an exact science. We can only catalogue and guess, but not even the best psychiatric would dare claim to know why people become the way they are, or what is the cure for it. For now, we just cure the symptoms. Take this to stop that, take that to stop this etc.
Of course, another problem is the side effects. Anyone who has had contact with psychiatry would know that the side effects are one of the biggest problems that patients face. It’s crazy really. We make them take the medicine to control the symptoms of their illness, doing crazy stuff like talking to themselves etc. The symptoms are in fact a side effect of their underlying illness, which is in the mind. The medication in turn causes different side effects altogether, like rolling eyes or twitching their necks. To counter these side effects, other preventive medicines are prescribed along with the original psychiatric medicine. But the crazy part of it all is, these preventive medicines have side effects of their own too! (I hope you can catch what I mean, I know it’s confusing)
It’s tough for me now. I really feel the strain in needing to deal with it all. The emotional turmoil is hard to describe sometimes. You try to put on a brave face, try to handle the situation as best you can. But you do it so well, if feels plastic and fake in a way, as if you’re lying to your self. You walk and talk as if everything is fine, but in your heart, everything’s jumbled up. When someone asks me “How are you, is everything ok?”, I feel like just blurting out “No I’m not ok. My mother is in a relapse and giving me hell, my father is unemployed, recently divorced and had to ask money from me to take the train, my brother abuses his poor dog, my girlfriend can’t get along with my entire family, and I really really need a friend to talk to and someone to hug. But never mind me, how are you?” Instead I just smile and say “I’m fine thank you.” The fear of overloading their fragile ears keeps me at bay.
posted by Compulsive Blogger @ 4:08 pm
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