I live with mental health challenges.

That is not easy for a person to write. And I am not referring to difficulty due to a sense of pride or shame; rather, what I mean is that it is a difficult journey to come to know one has mental health challenges in the first place. Most of us don’t even know, or it takes a major crisis to become fully aware of what is going on in our minds.

Often it takes going into a mental health facility or addiction treatment centre, being arrested by law enforcement, becoming un-homed, attempting suicide, etc. for a person to make the shift in thinking that entails maybe it’s not society—maybe it’s me.

This shift in self-perception is complicated by the matter of what society normalizes as healthy mental states and where it draws the line between those states and those deemed unhealthy. Many persons with mental health challenges understand that the invisible line between health and illness, normal and abnormal, is a social construct propped-up by medical research, big pharma, and the legal system. Mental health is an industry, captured by capital. (To those who wish to go down that particular rabbit hole, I suggest Foucault’s Madness and Civilization and Szasz’ The Myth of Mental Illness, both published in 1961.)

What does it mean to be disabled by being alive, to be a person who experiences their disability with every thought?

I still struggle to this day, asking myself questions like:

Am I mentally ill or am I simply atypical?
If society is insane then isn’t it healthy to escape reality?
Am I, like the mental health industry, also ‘captured by capital’?

There is a folk saying that if you question whether or not you are insane, then you are most certainly not insane. But what if you know you have mental health challenges and yet still wonder if you have been assigned the wrong label? Are we being pigeon-holed into a compartment because we are inconvenient to society?

In Twelve Step groups, we call such questions ‘struggles with Step One’ because they shift our focus away from reflecting on our own personal journey of change and onto the things we cannot change—society, public perception, industry norms, etc.

But aren’t such questions natural? As Johann Hari said, “The opposite of addiction is not sobriety—it is human connection.” As a recovering addict, my primary goal is how to live life on life’s terms and rejoin human society. But because I am an addict, a person living with mental health challenges, I feel like this goal demands forcing a square peg (me) into a round hole (society). Yes, I can shave down my edges and become ‘rounder’ through the labour of programmed recovery, but I will always be an addict. On one hand, I crave human connection; on the other, society marks me as a person with mental health challenges. There is a constant push-and-pull going on between me and society.

This is why peer support in recovery is essential. Peers understand the push-and-pull and the square peg/round hole dilemmas. By virtue of sharing that understanding, addicts like myself find comfort and connection with peers. We speak each other’s language. We can locate each other in the spaces on the edge of mainstream society. And as society spins and the force of inertia pushes us away, we can grab onto each other to avoid being thrown off. Say what you want about 12-Step and other recovery peer support groups, but they are responsible for saving lives.

So why did I leave my 12-Step fellowship nine years ago, and why have I returned? I will address this in a future blogpost, but first I want to discuss my history of struggle with mental health challenges, especially those I experienced long before ever taking that first drink.

As I have written in an earlier blogpost, I was hit by a car at the age of five, and relived that trauma through narrative re-telling of the event and its aftermath throughout my childhood. I believe this process fostered a belief that I was ‘saved for a purpose’, and this belief impacted how I saw myself as an individual and also in relation to others and society.

The following is going to be hard for me to write about, because I intend to share in a public forum certain aspects of my mind and how I perceive myself that I have kept secret. I hope that, in being transparent, that someone may read these words and think, “Hey, I experience(d) that too. I am not alone in my suffering.” Shared humanity is a primary component of compassion.

Alone in Mind

I struggled with an idea that I could not jettison from my imagination: What if my mind was the only thing sure to exist? The world, and the people inhabiting it, could be projections of my mind or they could simply be ‘the environment around me’ and a few billion NPCs running around within it. This wasn’t mere philosophical musing or a leap of imagination—this was a real and intrusive existential predicament.

I first believed this could be true at around the age of 8. My understanding of this did not begin with the belief itself. The belief came to me following the feelings, the experience. It was like one day I knew that I was the centre of my own perception, and I found it disturbing that I could not directly verify the same in others. This made me feel very alone in the world. Like I was self-aware and everything and everyone else was part of a simulation. I remember asking one or two peers about this. “Do you ever wonder if, because you see the world through only your eyes, that maybe others aren’t alive and aware in the same way—that maybe they weren’t real?”. I stopped asking that question after the first couple of ‘WTF?’ looks I got in response.

Turns out there is a label (of course there is) for this belief: solipsism obsessive-compulsive disorder. It’s not in the DSM and is not formally recognized as a sub-order of OCD. But there is much written on it, and there are countless anecdotes online from those who suffer from this condition.

I did not want this feeling! I desperately wanted to verify that anyone I talked to also had a mind just like me, was a person just like me, and that everyone else was just like me. For that would mean I was just like everyone else. And that I was not alone in the universe, like some sort of god squeezed into a human body. I was raised agnostic and had no beliefs concerning a capital-G ‘God’, so at my young age I didn’t deify my singular, strange existence. Nevertheless, this intrusive thought of being alone and unique would not leave me. After the initial reactions from mentioning it to a couple of others, I felt very insecure about sharing this further, so I buried it.

As I grew older, the solipsism OCD became less and less intrusive, and it eventually transformed into a memory rather than an existential threat. On an unconscious level, however, it must have remained an aspect of my subjective identity.

Alice in Wonderland

Another experience that occurred at around the same time was something I called a ‘far away look’. Like the solipsism OCD, this phenomenon was mine alone. No one else I knew had ever suffered it. It would strike me without warning—I would experience a radical shift in depth perception accompanied by a distortion in distances. Often, I would be still and staring mindlessly into space, although it would sometimes occur when I was watching TV.

It would feel like I was shrinking back into the back of my head, my eyes would shift from focus on a particular point in space and my perception would widen to take-in everything in my field of vision. Everything around me suddenly seemed to be receding away from me (‘far away look’), and eventually came to a wide-angle view that felt as though I was seeing a boundless infinity. If I held my hand up in front of my face, it would seem horrifyingly large. If I moved my hand away by extending my arm, it would feel too distant to be my own hand. Only the obvious fact it sat at the end of my own arm would convince me it was still my own hand. Shortness of breath, cold sweats, and increased heart-rate and general anxiety would accompany the experience. The sensations, even the visual distortion, would continue when I closed my eyes. Sometimes, the ‘far away look’ would happen shortly after I laid down and before I fell asleep.

At first, these events were alarming. I would ask family members in the room if they saw the same thing. I would try to describe what I saw. I called it a ‘far away look’, and my parents would tell me that I had a very active imagination and would recommend that I walk about a bit or take a nap. These spells would last about five minutes and then dissipate slowly to return to normal perception. As I grew older and more familiar with the spells, I would sometimes work with the experience rather than try to correct it. Most of the time, if I was sitting still or lying in bed, I could induce the ‘far away look’ at will. I would try to ‘hold’ everything at once in my visual frame of reference—it felt like I was perceiving infinity. Other exercises included ‘making a path through part of the infinity’, using my mind’s eye to explore a section of my strangely large field of vision. I didn’t think of it as infinity at the time—it was just a hugely distorted field of view. All of this was very strange, and even today I find it challenging to convey through description.

At some point in my adolescence, the spells subsided and eventually stopped. I can no longer conjure at will the experience. Sometimes a memory of it feels very sharp, and the feeling of the ‘far away look’ seems near, but as I get close to creating it, the more it eludes me.

A few months ago (thanks Internet), I discovered that I was not alone with my ‘far away look’. Sure enough, someone posted their experience on a wellness forum and 24 pages of replies followed, all expressing their gratitude at having found they’re not alone with this condition. Most speak of how they experienced it as a child and eventually grew out of it. And there is a label (again, of course there is!) for this, and it is an apt one: Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. According to Wikipedia, causes of the condition are unknown, but one associated factor is head trauma. Perhaps my head injury from the car accident was a causal factor.

A Challenging Recipe

We are the sum of our experiences. From a mental health perspective, we can benefit from looking at causes and conditions that converge to create problems later in life. Sometimes, we find ourselves sitting in a stew of mental health mire—we often use terms like ‘fog’ and ‘darkness’ and ‘being stuck’ to describe the condition we find ourselves in. When I look at my own history, specifically the childhood manifestations of: (1) the belief I was ‘saved for a purpose’(see my blog post 5 Going on 35); (2) solipsism OCD; and (3) the ‘far away look’, and take these experiences together as a connected set of causes, I see the ingredients of problems that arose later in my life. This is the first time I have pondered this, so I am thinking and writing on-the-fly here, so please bear with me!

During my formative years, from the age of the emergence of self-awareness at 5 years old to my adolescence and beyond, I may as well have been in The Matrix. I carried with me a secretive belief that I was on Earth for great purpose (The One), that I may have access to a singular, unique perspective (I alone took the Red Pill), and that I could hold infinity in my perception (I could see a glitch in The Matrix). Unfortunately, when I was 16, The Matrix would not be released in theatres for another 20 years! Seeing it back then might have helped me.

Holding a deep-seated and secret belief that I was that unique and special might have propelled others to do great things with their life. For me, however, this recipe of strange ingredients pushed me into anxiety, social phobia, and a persistent and often immobilizing variant of existential self-doubt. It seemed that the things that came to me easily did so because of destiny. Meanwhile, when I struggled with anything that I thought ‘everyone else’ could manage successfully, I suffered greatly and became very hard on myself. I did not believe that I needed to work at things the way others did. This, of course, set me back in many ways. I sailed along wonderfully when engaged with anything I had natural aptitude for, but when I hit speed bumps that demanded focused effort, I often just changed course. When the going got tough, I got going. How this pattern worked in determining the state of my mental health will be the subject of a subsequent post.