False Friends and True

[There are two posts today. Next week, with G-d's help, I will be moving house, so next week's designated essay is being posted today.]

If my experience is any guide, your family will be the only “carry-over” people upon whom you can count if you have had bouts of severe mental illness. It is only the friends you make during the course of your recovery whom (speaking for myself,) I have been able to count on to be enduring—and this may be true for you as well. 

My best friend I met through work with NAMI, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (of the United States.) She is a family member of three diagnosed people. No matter how close prior friends had been to me, they all fell to the wayside as being “false” during the course of my recovery. My “true” friends outside my family never had to put up with the acutely-ill me. Thanks be to the Good L-rd, I have found a number of them.....

"A friend in need is a friend indeed." Few people other than those doing religious charity or professional clinical work will be there for you in acute illness as will be your family, and the latter will be true to you on-going.

For Despair, What Works for Me....

For Those Times When G-d’s Sunshine is Hidden, and You Despair

Depression is a real biological disease that results in terms of days lost from work, worldwide, a number that is only second to spinal conditions. Grief from the passing of a loved one is natural, but biological depression is an illness. There are medicines and procedures that you can use to move towards lessening of a depression, the simplest of which is getting enough natural light (or blue light from a special unit) in the early morning. If you think that you are depressed, you need to see your psychiatrist if you have one, or your primary-care physician.

What about spiritual malaise? It comes to all pessimists by habit, and even to optimists at times. I do not know a religion better than I know Judaism to be able to state whether there is a season to be depressed, but I know in Judaism that the fast days commemorating our so-painful losses harness for many people that impulse. On the festival days, one is commanded to rejoice, and the plentiful meals and singing--and sometimes dancing--make it possible to have a respite from spiritual malaise. It is possible to—and may be advantageous for you to—join your lot with a group whose customs aim at being happy in G-d’s world, such as I have found in Lubavitch Chabad.

Learn to Look for the Good in All Experiences

My religious beliefs underscore my natural tendency as an optimist to see the best side of everything. Divine Providence sometimes, and sometimes for veritably lengthy periods of time, can be hard to see through the fog therewith pertaining. For most aspects of my life, it has been actually years before I have been able to see why I had to go through some experience or another. I understand only when I can discern how I grew because of it. 

I am so constituted that I often quote to myself the atheist Voltaire’s sentence, “Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds,” completely without putting his sarcastic spin upon it. I take it quite literally and--eventually--always find it true.

There is a Jewish tradition that G-d gives the hardest lives to those who are the most worthy in terms of character. I think that it goes the other way 'round. "What does not kill me makes me stronger" is probably the only thing that Nietzsche wrote (paraphrase) that makes sense to me. But it takes a disposition to like people and be flexible in order to be refined by hard experiences. After all, some who have undergone suffering become criminals..... 

By looking to see what you can learn from every experience, and by being primed to try to find the good aspect of each, you can lead a happier life.

Dating After a Diagnosis of a Major Psychiatric Disorder

Personally, I remained “on the dating scene” for nine years after my initial episode that was later diagnosed as Bipolar Disorder. I stopped dating altogether because I saw that my character defects were making me repeat the same stupid choices. Therefore, I never did marry, to my regret—but never initiated a marriage that would have necessitated a divorce and harm to the children, either!

My advice is that you seek an intermediary to introduce you to a compatible person who has a psychiatric disability, though not necessarily the same one that you do. (Opposites attract.) The traditional Jewish Schadhan (professional matchmaker) would be an ideal agent if you are of that group. An intermediary will handle the issue of disclosing your disability with much greater sensitivity than you would do yourself. And she or he will be able to “accentuate the positive!”

[I am in the midst of moving from one apartment to another, and posts cannot be promised on Tuesdays until I am relatively settled. This one is two days late!]