the fog


BY HANNAH REISS, COLLEEN SURATT hannahreiss@csdecatur.net | colleensuratt@csdecatur.net


nurses made their rounds. Te nurses woke the patients on suicide watch every 30 minutes by shaking their shoulders and shining a bright light directly in their eyes. On suicide watch during the day, she would be under constant watch, but at night she was afforded 30 minutes at a time to herself. Each patient’s risk factors for suicide varied, but at Timberline*,


D


everybody received the same treatment. Eve’s risk was considered very mild, but the nurses checked in on her just the same. Just hours earlier, Eve had confessed to her psychiatrist that she


had been having suicidal thoughts. Tough she never thought she’d follow through with them, they still lingered in the back of her mind. Immediately after Eve’s confession, her psychiatrist called her


parents and then contacted the nearest private institution. By 3 a.m. the next morning, she had been checked in. Te confession was the final straw – her psychiatrist thought that she needed a controlled en- vironment where doctors could get her medications straightened out. As Eve tried to fall back asleep, the situation hit her. “I realized that this was real,” she said. “My feelings and my actions led up to this. I had this revelation about where I was, but at the same time I was really scared. I was in this dark room where I didn’t know anybody. I was completely freaked out.” Only a couple of months earlier, Eve had been diagnosed with


teen-onset bipolar disorder, otherwise known as manic depression. It is caused by a chemical imbalance in her brain. For Eve, her bipolar manifested itself in layers. Symptoms of de-


pression hit before the mania. “Te mania that I used to get was the angry mania,” she said. “My thoughts would start spinning around like crazy, and I couldn’t think straight.” Some people, she noted, clean their houses and use their energy for good, but Eve struggled to harness her energy for productivity.


ecatur student Eve* lay on a thin, flimsy mattress in the middle of a large, silent room, surrounded by other teenag- ers. Several minutes earlier, she had been awakened as the


Once she was diagnosed as bipolar, Eve was prescribed several


medications. But as she would soon learn, getting the right combi- nation is more art than science. Some of her early medications only made things worse. “I started going crazy. I even jumped out of a car,” she said. But her memories during this time are blurry. “Te doctors say that I’ve just blocked it out because it’s traumatic. My mom will tell you that yes, I jumped out of a car. Tat’s characteristic of the kinds of things that I was doing when I was manic.” When dealing with depression, Eve was very particular about her


surroundings. “I was really reclusive,” she said. “I mainly just stayed in my room with the door closed and the lights dim. I wanted everything quiet. Tings would upset me really easily.” Te mania and depression were still not the end. Eve also had hal- lucinations, which were mainly auditory. “It started out with people calling my name, dogs barking or a cellphone ringing,” she said. Te hallucinations weren’t absurd, but out of place. “Tere would be times when I would walk by the Frasier Center, and I’d hear a baby cry, and I’d think ‘that’s probably legit,’” she said. “Ten there would be other times when I’d walk by the math hall, and I’d hear a baby cry, and I’d think ‘ooh, that’s probably not true.’” Occasionally, she experienced visual hallucinations. “I’ve only fig-


ured out one way to explain it,” she said. “It’s like if you’re watching fireworks and you close your eyes, you can still see them. Tese little sparks just kind of pop up places – if you’re standing out in the sun too long, and you start seeing those things come up, it’s like that. But I’d be sitting in the classroom and all of the sudden, these little bursts of pictures [would pop up].” Months before checking into the institution, a psychiatrist pre-


scribed her medication to deal with her symptoms. But he prescribed an antidepressant, which increased her mania. At Timberline, doctors began to find a balance between the medications.


DECEMBER 2011 • CARPE DIEM 47


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