Married to Mental Illness: What Is Going On?

By Agent Tarter
Posted on Monday, July 4th, 2016

Before you can start helping someone with a mental illness, you have to know exactly what is wrong. Little did I know before my partner and I entered this process, that’s far harder than you might think.

My partner A. had always been anxious, something we both assigned to elements of his upbringing. Look up “insecure attachment” in a psychology textbook and you’ll have an idea of what it was like for him growing up. As he got older, he never knew what would result from his actions – whether he would be praised to high heaven or screamed at for being wrong – but chances were good that anything he did would be interpreted in the worst light possible.

During our Bachelor’s degree, the career that A. had planned on for nearly a decade fell through in spectacular fashion. Naturally, he became depressed. Between the anxiety and the depression, it was a very rocky couple of years, but we got through it. And that convinced us that both of those things were situational. Stick it out, we thought. Find a new career and be reassured through our relationship that he was worthy of love, and things would get better. And they did.

Sort of. Hindsight is 20/20, and looking back now, things weren’t really better. They were contained. But obsessive thoughts – like the terror he had that he might cheat, even though the very idea made him sick, or the fear that gripped him if I was late – were still lurking, just manageable. Compulsions were hiding in slight exaggerations of normal behavior – like how he needed to click “save” on his essays three times, then also save them to two separate flash drives, before he could sleep.

But who doesn’t have some quirks? So we didn’t think anything of it.

Things got worse again when our oldest, O., was born. We assumed that having a child had triggered some worries and issues from A.’s own childhood. Watching his mother and father respond to O. in a way that we knew was unhealthy opened A.’s eyes to just how dysfunctional the dynamic in his family was. No wonder he was anxious about being a good parent and depressed to realize that the relationship with his parents would never be want he wanted it to be. Right?

And it got worse again when our youngest, G., came around. By the time she was six months old, I was desperately frustrated, taking on too much, asking A. over and over again to get more significant help.

We moved; A. started a new job. But the pace was faster, and his career is one that is emotionally very draining. He kept taking on more and more; I kept trying to convince him that he didn’t need to ruin his happiness and his health just to prove his value. But when he literally couldn’t sleep for two days because he was worried about getting a project done, or when he was sure that an idle comment from a client meant that everyone he worked with hated him, he just brushed it off as that old but comparatively meek demon of anxiety – something he had fought before and surely could fight again.

There was one particularly bad summer that finally convinced him to see a doctor. The obvious stress came from external factors – a two-month span that was grueling and brutal for many reasons – but it was really just the reasoning that convinced him to go. And then we started the wait… Anyone who’s needed to see a specialist knows about waiting (even in the socialist health care paradise of Canada.) He wasn’t a risk to himself or to others, so he had to wait…and wait…and wait.

Meanwhile, his family doctor prescribed something appropriate for anxiety. And then another something when the first thing had unpleasant side effects and didn’t really seem to help. Then another something for depression, which replaced the thing for anxiety but only after a painful period weaning off one drug, then on to the next. Oh, and something to take as needed for the anxiety. I could give names of the pile of medications we tried, but really, that’s incidental. The fact was that our family doctor was pretty upfront: he didn’t know for sure what was going on, so he was essentially trying a “spray and pray” approach, trying the medications that were most common for the symptoms that were most bothersome and hoping they would help.

When A. finally got to see a psychiatrist and a counselor, the diagnosis was clinical depression. Major clinical depression, actually. Persistent depressive episodes – have you heard of dysthymia? Well, perhaps you’re actually bipolar with a tendency towards depressive episodes; you do sometimes get explosions of rage, which can be part of mania…

It is very disconcerting to realize that even the professionals know so little about mental health. That’s not their fault; psychiatry is really a very new discipline, so it’s probably on a par with surgery over 200 years ago. But when someone you love needs help, you just want someone to be able to run a test and say, confidently, that THIS is the problem and THIS is how you fix it.

The hard thing for me was constantly feeling like something wasn’t adding up. I can’t count how many times I said, “That’s an obsessive thought; should that be happening?” Or “What did your counselor say about your trouble sleeping?” Or “Did you ask the psychiatrist if it’s normal for your thoughts to be racing this much?”

In the end, it took a month long period of overwhelming, terrifying obsessive thoughts – thoughts that drove A. to considering suicide simply as a way to make them stop – before we got the right diagnosis: obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD.

This might seem obvious as I’m telling it, but go online sometime and look at the symptom lists for mental health and it’s shocking how much they overlap. In retrospect, it’s easy, but at the time, how could we distinguish the obsessive thoughts A. had that he was going to fail from fears that would be generated by social anxiety? How do you identify seemingly helpful habits – reviewing one more time for a test, insisting on checking that the doors are locked one more time before bed – as compulsions until you’ve put all the pieces together? And until you know what’s going on, the strategies that work for one disorder can make one disorder significantly worse.

So why am I telling you this story? Because if you’re living with a partner who is struggling with mental illness, there are some things you can learn from my story:

Diagnosis is not simple. Expect it to take time. That’s painful when you just want a solution, but counseling or medicating for the wrong thing is at best unhelpful and at worst can make things deteriorate.

Diagnosis is also based on self-reporting. In hindsight, I wish that I had gone to A.’s counselor to talk to her about what I was noticing in him, because I think he minimized some things and failed to mention others.

Don’t settle for a diagnosis that doesn’t seem to be working. Whether there’s something niggling at you that doesn’t seem to fit, or the medication that usually helps doesn’t, pursue it at least for a while. Mental health is complicated, so in the end it may simply be the complexities of the human mind that result in things not quite adding up, but if you have reason to feel like the diagnosis is missing something significant, follow up.

If someone you know is struggling with mental illness, have patience when their diagnosis seems to take a long time – or when it changes. It’s not as simple as getting a blood test or filling out a questionnaire and being able to say what’s wrong. And trust me, you are nowhere near as frustrated with the challenge of getting a diagnosis as the person who is desperate for help.

For those who aren’t dealing with mental illness personally or within their family, it’s time to push for further research to improve our understanding. Mental health care now is the equivalent of the days when we had just decided to anesthetize patients before surgery: it’s better than when we began, but it’s not sophisticated, it’s not consistent, and it’s not successful as often as it needs to be.

And we can change that.

About the Author:
Avid reader, budding writer, incessant singer. Married to a partner with OCD and parent of a child with autism. My opinions may be slanted by my experiences living in the socialist paradise of Canada.