Recovering From Mental Illness and Addiction

Mental illness is a difficult thing to live with. Sometimes, it feels impossible. To make things even more complicated, the diagnosis of mental illness often comes with "dual diagnosis", a fancy term for living with more than one illness.

Part I of this blog will focus on addiction and Part II, later this week, will focus on eating disorders and anxiety disorders.

Defining Dual Diagnosis

Before I ramble on here let's refer to my favorite website-- sadly, Wikipedia--to define "dual diagnosis."

"The term dual diagnosis is used to describe the condition of a person considered to be suffering from a mental illness and a substance abuse problem... Making a dual diagnosis in substance abusers is difficult as drug abuse itself often induces psychiatric symptoms, thus making it necessary to differentiate between substance induced and pre-existing mental illness."

Alright. That is simple enough. As simple as a complicated topic can be. A personal perspective, an experience, is important. I wish it were not my story, but I would not wish it on anyone else. It is what it is and what happened happened.

My Experience With Addiction

Left something to be desired. A heck of a lot. It's hard to describe it, but I can try to summarize the worst five years of my life:

Diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of twelve, I achieved stability at the age of fifteen. A combination of medication that worked well enough for me to make my way into college.

The suicide of one of my close friends--a friend who also lived with bipolar disorder--drastically altered my life. I cannot blame my addiction on this, but following this event I started using hard drugs. Street drugs. Dirty, dirty drugs. Masses of drugs and alcohol that left me flat on my ass: waking up surrounded by empty liquor bottles, pill bottles, empty drug bags, and unable to walk. Once I could walk...Well, I did it all over again.

What followed? Five years of absolute hell. A couple of seizures. Waking up in the hospital attached to tubes as a result of overdose or suicide attempts. I quickly lost all stability. I dropped out of college and surrounded myself with bad people. Very bad people. People that hurt me. Situations, experiences, that I cannot forget.

A short one day stint in rehab before I insisted on leaving so I could use more. I used for two more years. It's foggy, the memories, but clear enough to remember. I found sobriety at the age of twenty-one.

I don't have enough words to go into detail, but I can tell you that living with a mental illness and addiction made me a very sick woman. A woman who cheated death despite wanting to die.

Addiction almost killed me and, unfortunately, I am not the only one. Dual-diagnosis affects more than 50% of people living with a mental illness.

Why Do People Diagnosed With a Mental Illness Struggle With Addiction?

I am going to simplify this: When you live with a mental illness you often feel out of control. I did. I felt, despite the recent stability, unable to control my moods. The time I spent in hospital as a little girl--the white walls that surrounded me and the terror I felt--I used drugs and alcohol to medicate these feelings. The flashbacks and the post traumatic stress I experienced as a result.

The death of a friend, a friend who lived with the same illness, woke me up to the reality that bipolar disorder would not go away. It would always be part of me, and at that time in my life, still young and not as jaded as I am writing these words, I wanted to be free. Free from the illness. Addiction allowed me to adopt another identity: I was an addict. And that--that--seemed better than being bipolar.

Denial is the home that the addict lives in.

Recovering From Addiction While Living With a Mental Illness

Here is the reality: You cannot treat the primary illness--mental illness--while you are abusing drugs and alcohol. It never mattered how many medications I took to stabilize my mood, I used more cocaine and alcohol to "balance myself."

It is important to note that a person is often diagnosed with addiction before mental illness. It's complicated: What came first? Are the psychiatric symptoms caused by the addiction or vice versa? In this case, our mental health team has a heck of a lot of work to do.

I wanted to die. They say addiction is a slow form of suicide and whether this is true or not, in my life it certainly was.

My experience with addiction is dark, it keeps me up at night sometimes, it reminds me that sobriety is to cherished.

Recovering from mental illness is hard enough, that is why we have an entire blog dedicated to it, but when it is complicated with addiction, it becomes harder. But not impossible.

If you struggle with addiction, or are worried you might self-medicate, seek help, please. Resources are vast, they are more available then those for mental illness and your stability depends on your sobriety.

It's a tough thing to learn but I would not take it back; I now understand that I need to take care of myself. You do as well.