Call Me Crazy

Welcome MaxedOutMama readers! Take a look around. You might enjoy my take on the autistic Basketball Savant that has made the news rounds recently. Or perhaps my rant on studying evil, i.e. getting down to the motive behind the badness of mankind.

This post will be a series of confessions. Confessions can be exciting, so pay attention.

Sometimes the high-decibel yelling of my children causes me to get jittery.

When jittery, my patience dwindles.

When my patience dwindles, I sometimes scream, threaten, rant and rave. For example, "Stop looking at your sister! Do NOT MOUTH WORDS! I can SEE THAT! Okay, folks, no book before bed tonight. And get your finger out of your nose for heavens sake. It's gross!"

People hearing these rants may leap to the conclusion that I am unstable. Sometimes I leap to that conclusion.

When I start to hear little voices saying things like, "Travelocity had plane tickets to Miami for $125. No one would know I was gone. A few weeks at the beach would be cheaper than a week in the funny farm. Or I could just listen to Rush Limbaugh."

Instead, seeking momentary solitude, I go to the bathroom. Sometimes I go A LOT.

I surreptitiously vanish from the kitchen, skulk into the bedroom, ever so quietly shut the bathroom door after swiping a really good book and vanish into the laveratory. Some days I get five minutes. These days, even the little one can almost overtake me on my way to my mental health minute, he crawls so fast.

Am I like totally mental? If my clients are any indication, yes. Psychopathology is positively in vogue. Normal is O-U-T!

Good grief: you go through a divorce and are furious and loudly so that your husband is shtupping your best friend. What do you need? A friend to kvetch to? Why no! You need a diagnosis: bipolar, I mean Borderline Personality Disorder, I mean OCD, I mean Anxiety.

Everyone, it seems, is crazy these days.

"How often do you see psychotics?" I aked a Psychiatrist friend of mine.

"None really," he said.

"In all your twenty five years in the profession you haven't seen a psychotic?" I pressed.

"Not since working outside the mental institution," he said.

Hmmmmm..... Me neither.

I've worked with a really angry guy who said he was suicidal, but when the facts came out really wanted to "kill his wife" because she took all his money.

I've worked with multiple post-divorce people grief-stricken and enraged at the injustice of the court system, the antics of their ex, their own stupidity for not seeing what was patently obvious to everyone, etc.

I've worked with people shock and despairing after the loss of a child.

I've worked with people terrified of flying after 9/11.

These all seem like rational responses to really horrible stresses. Yet they all receive exotic diagnosis. Worse, they all receive multiple medications that mask, delay, and subvert the healing process.

Then the people have another problem to deal with: withdrawal. And after off the stuff they still have to deal with the undealt-with issues.

Can nobody have a bad day, bad month, bad year anymore? I mean really, I've had bad, no HORRIBLE, decades. Perhaps I should have been medicated. Perhaps I should still be, but then I might be so zoned out blogging my frustrations would hold no allure. I'd have no frustrations.

A friend, we'll call her, Brenda (I know no Brendas in my current life, none.), who went on a popular anti-depressant because "I was yelling at the kids all the time" (her kids are beasts worthy of a good birching, she possesses amazing restraint not beating them). When she took the drug "I yelled a little less, but not that much less." The drug had a nasty little side-effect: "I couldn't 'O'" she mouthed orgasm to me and continued "that was a much bigger problem". Her husband, eager to please, couldn't get it that "it" was not happening--ever. She went off the medication in three weeks. "I yell a lot again," she said. Her husband doesn't complain.

Oh well! Our mothers didn't yell, they beat us senseless. Every kid's parents did. Today, enraged parents stifle it and then suffer psychic breaks because they implode. Diagnosis: crazy lady. Drug of choice: SSRI. Anti-seizure meds are popular too--freaking out at your kids looks a lot like an epileptic seizure. You think I'm kidding?

All this medication is madness. Out of one side of their mouths, mental health professionals encourage "feeling your feelings" and when people really, really do, the professional gets a wee bit nervous and prescribes a nice widdle Wellbutrin to calm things down a bit.

Call me crazy, but the crazy business is what is really crazy.