A New Decade

I began this blog in 2011.  At the time our beautiful daughter, Julie -  then aged 15 - had been locked in a mental hospital for 9 months.  We were heart-broken and exhausted.  At the time we didn't know anybody else in a situation remotely like ours.

Ten years ago medical people often reassured us that the condition would burn itself out, but it never did.  Now a decade has passed and we still don't know where this journey, begun when Julie was very young, will end.

Over the years she has had several diagnoses.  At the moment she has two, possibly three, concurrent diagnostic labels.  I have lost count of the number of drugs she has been prescribed.  She has cycled round the different anti-depressants, anti-psychotics and mood-stabilisers in various dosages and combinations.  We have seen fashions in prescribing come and go.  Never a year has gone past without visits to Julie on hospital wards.  It is impossible now to say what Julie would be like as a person without these drugs and interventions.  She has spent much of her adolescence and young adulthood under their influence.

Do I think medical science will find an answer for Julie or people like her?  If I'm perfectly honest, having had such a prolonged and uncomfortable close-up window onto the reality of severe mental illness, I don't think medical science in it's current state can solve the problem.  It has barely progressed from the nineteenth century.  I don't see much evidence that the current list of possible diagnoses is much more stable than the range of hysterias diagnosed then.  The currently available drugs are much kinder than their predecessors but prescribing them is still a lottery.  They don't work for most people, and when they do work it's not always clear that it wasn't just luck, time, and good old sedation.  There has been real progress made in therapies like CBT, but they require a lot of effort and insight from patients, and don't (usually) improve the situation of those with more severe mental illness.  I think it's going to need something quite new, perhaps from fields like genetics, to shake up the whole field of mental illness and produce new ways of describing, categorising, dealing with and resolving mental distress and confusion.

But though we enter the second decade with Julie as unwell as ever - indeed, many of her symptoms have only grown more extreme over time - and though I don't expect that this decade will see some new miracle cure, still the situation feels much less bleak than it did when I began the blog.  Most of this is simply down to experience.  We have certainly survived some very challenging moments!  But the family hasn't fallen apart, we still have good times and we know how to deal with the bad.  It's not ideal, but whose life is?  As I've grown more confident talking (and writing) about Julie's situation, I've met the same response over and over again - other people confiding their stories about their own situations, their own hard times.  Who said life had to be easy?