My girlfriend tried to self medicate for years before I met her to deal with her mental health issues. We dated for about a year when I noticed things going off the rails, and she was acting like a bad person, going into fugue like states, and getting in trouble with neighbors and the police.
I had no resources to do anything for her at the time, and I kicked her out to her parents for her own sake, as one of the neighbors she was either intentionally or unintentionally messing with was the kind where I wouldn’t be surprised if they decided to use some castle doctrine actions and they also had 2 edgy German Shepard type dogs.
She was one good terms with her family, and I had been discussing her state with them for a few weeks, since I had been noticing her behavior get worse but they hadn’t been around her enough to notice I guess. I had no idea she had any actual medical issues at this point, so I was really lost and confused as to what was going on, so I had been secretly calling them a few times trying to figure out why she was acting so different.
Her parents were fairly well-to-do, at least compared to me. They owned a decent sized business the grandfather had started and left to them, and they had the resources to get her voluntarily committed until they could clean her up off street drugs and get a working regimen of real medicine and they got her into therapy and DBT class.
I went to see her almost every day, and now that I had a clear picture of what had been going on, I was relieved to know it was something that could be treated and we could work on. I had mainly been concerned she was an asshole and it had been an act to that point. Her family was able to cover her during that period and until she was able to get on disability.
Fast forward a few years, and we rebuilt her credit through a prepaid credit card, I fronted the money to send her to community college, and I handled everything else so she could focus on her therapy and classes.
Now she has a better relationship with her family than I do with mine, she has a better paying and more satisfying job than I do, and she is really loving life and being the best person she can be. I don’t know what it cost her family to have her hospitalized for a month and for the lawyer that helped get some medium severity charges she got while being blackout out, and it required a ton of patience on all our parts and to be supportive while watching her struggle for the first few years afterward, as she had extreme anxiety and self-consciousness problems after falling down so hard.
So many people do not have a support network like that, and she could easily have ended up homeless, jailed, or dead if we weren’t all there and able to play our parts. All these people were someone’s child, someone’s friend at some point in time. My family would not have put in that effort or expense for me. I learned so much from the experience, and I’m forever grateful that she had people she could count on and had the ability to take care of her needs when she couldn’t. It’s so easy for life to take a different path.
She was a really great person from the moment we met, and I was just really upset that I thought she wasn’t who she had seemed to be. She needed help, and I’m glad between the group of us that we were able to get her what she needed, and she was determined to do things the right way and not get so far off the path she wanted to be on again. It was a real group effort, as I was important as the person to hold her accountable and to see the good in her she couldn’t at the time, her family for caring about her health and safety and having the means to get it for her, the team of doctors she got, and her herself for finding a way to believe in herself while she was trying to hold together the broken bits of her life. She was very scared of everything, including herself for a long time, so it was not easy.
I feel a bit bad sharing this stuff, since I’m sure she isn’t thrilled to have others know it, but I think it’s important to see success stories, and I share details about my own struggles for decades with depression for the same reason. This stuff shouldn’t be stigmatized because that does no good for anyone. My inability to admit to what people treat as a weakness helped me screw up my friends’ lives for decades and I lost many important relationships and opportunities in life because of how I felt inside all the time and because people made me feel the need to try to fix it all on my own and not got all zombied up by medicine. It was so quick and simple to get my life fixed for essentially almost no time or money, I kick myself every day for not doing it sooner. Even when I had no insurance, a month of my medicine cost no more than $20, and it started working within the first week and my life did a 180. I thought it would be so long a process, involving so many doctors and years of therapy and feeling dead inside, but I was at my yearly physical and said I’ve been depressed for over 20 years and what can I do about it. Doc sent me out with a scrip and that was the end of feeling a crushing weight every day.
I know it isn’t that simple for everyone, but for me it was, but I didn’t know until I just accepted it wasn’t something I could fix myself and was tired of trashing my whole life every few years and needed to break the cycle. I’m a lot more successful now mentally, and my girlfriend now works in a hospital helping others. She’s so much smarter and talented than I ever would have thought when we met. If you feel you need help, go get it by whatever means you can. It isn’t shameful, it doesn’t make you weak. We all need help to varying degrees and people are social animals and we need each other by design. Every day I kick myself for not learning this sooner and I ache for all the people I loved that I hurt by being stubborn that I’ll never see again, but now I try to use that to empathize with others. I can’t take back anything I’ve done out of sadness or anger, but I can learn from it and share my experiences to hopefully try to help someone else out. I don’t wish those feelings on anyone; it can be such crushing weight.
Thanks so much for sharing this story and with such detail, what a sobering look into exactly the turning point in her life and how things could’ve gone instead. It shows how things fall apart for so many. That was a lot of support she needed to recover, and I think you made it pretty clear that most folks are not going to be getting that. You also made it clear that with enough support she was able to bounce back and seriously recover, which is fantastic.
These are the kinds of outcomes our society should be striving towards! Not vacations and luxuries for executives and investors.
I don’t want to give the kind of detail you did, but my upbringing could probably be described as a near miss along these lines. Grew up as my family’s finances were going from bad to hopeless and dangerous (no heat or AC sometimes, certainly no healthcare outside of broken bones, etc. etc.). Parents split, mother died slowly to terminal cancer, younger sister from another father lived alone with her and had to watch her unravel as a kid.
I was just old enough to realize “oh shit, there’s no one ever coming to help us, I have to get my life and future path together now, this is an emergency”. My sister wasn’t so lucky, she didn’t get any urgent realizations, she just got deep immovable trauma. She’s struggled since.
I was able to adopt her and raise her through teenage-hood as best I could, I wound up “adopting” my own father for some years to get him back on his feet too, later on (he’d long ceased parenting by then, though to his credit he helped my sister a lot, not even his kid).
I think if the timeline of all that shifted even just maybe two years in the wrong direction, I wouldn’t have been likely to make the realization when I did and build us the shield we needed. I think we all woulda just been fucked.
Neither my dad or sister are doing great, but they’re alive, housed (by their own efforts), somewhat healthy - able to continue the struggle for now. I’m doing pretty well, but the circumstances were different and I lucked into natural talent with tech, so. That’s the only reason any of my efforts were fruitful, anyway.
I’m glad I was able to really help someone and that you were able to make the best of your situation. The fact anyone has to worry in this day and age about affording medical care, heating/cooling, drinking water, clean air, etc drives me insane. I don’t know how someone can look at their neighbor suffer and either not care or think it’s actually a net positive. We could all be hurt, we could all end up lost, homeless, or stuck someplace unsafe.
I was really worried the one neighbor (not sure if he was actually a cop or just wished he was, he always seemed very pissed off so I avoided him and his dogs) was going to hurt her. We live in a cookie cutter neighborhood so all the houses look the same and she was either trying to get into his or one next to his.
She would leave after I went to bed too and was picked up by the police, once pretty violently. She got into trouble with the store in town also, and that one was very close to sending her to jail, and the person she did stuff to was super pissed leaving court after we got her off, and I don’t blame him for feeling like he didn’t get justice.
She got a deferred sentence or whatever the call it, and since she stayed good for however many years now, her record got expunged. Again, only because I helped her write a very good statement to the court when she could barely string words together, and her mom paid for a pretty good lawyer and the care to show she was getting professional help.
I knew the whole time most won’t get so many chances or breaks, so I still don’t take it for granted. I just remember we never know what others are going through in their lives and that almost no one deserves being my written off, as anyone who met her then vs now would hardly recognize her.
I still wish this all never would have happened, but it’s what got her to really become the best her, so I’m thankful for it in the end. I just wish more people could have the same story. Her therapy group was online during Covid, so I got to overhear a lot of stories, and it made it easy to see how it can go with less helpful people involved.
My girlfriend tried to self medicate for years before I met her to deal with her mental health issues. We dated for about a year when I noticed things going off the rails, and she was acting like a bad person, going into fugue like states, and getting in trouble with neighbors and the police.
I had no resources to do anything for her at the time, and I kicked her out to her parents for her own sake, as one of the neighbors she was either intentionally or unintentionally messing with was the kind where I wouldn’t be surprised if they decided to use some castle doctrine actions and they also had 2 edgy German Shepard type dogs.
She was one good terms with her family, and I had been discussing her state with them for a few weeks, since I had been noticing her behavior get worse but they hadn’t been around her enough to notice I guess. I had no idea she had any actual medical issues at this point, so I was really lost and confused as to what was going on, so I had been secretly calling them a few times trying to figure out why she was acting so different.
Her parents were fairly well-to-do, at least compared to me. They owned a decent sized business the grandfather had started and left to them, and they had the resources to get her voluntarily committed until they could clean her up off street drugs and get a working regimen of real medicine and they got her into therapy and DBT class.
I went to see her almost every day, and now that I had a clear picture of what had been going on, I was relieved to know it was something that could be treated and we could work on. I had mainly been concerned she was an asshole and it had been an act to that point. Her family was able to cover her during that period and until she was able to get on disability.
Fast forward a few years, and we rebuilt her credit through a prepaid credit card, I fronted the money to send her to community college, and I handled everything else so she could focus on her therapy and classes.
Now she has a better relationship with her family than I do with mine, she has a better paying and more satisfying job than I do, and she is really loving life and being the best person she can be. I don’t know what it cost her family to have her hospitalized for a month and for the lawyer that helped get some medium severity charges she got while being blackout out, and it required a ton of patience on all our parts and to be supportive while watching her struggle for the first few years afterward, as she had extreme anxiety and self-consciousness problems after falling down so hard.
So many people do not have a support network like that, and she could easily have ended up homeless, jailed, or dead if we weren’t all there and able to play our parts. All these people were someone’s child, someone’s friend at some point in time. My family would not have put in that effort or expense for me. I learned so much from the experience, and I’m forever grateful that she had people she could count on and had the ability to take care of her needs when she couldn’t. It’s so easy for life to take a different path.
You are a kind and wonderful person. Thank you for taking care of her when she needed help.
We don’t have enough compassion in this world, we need more people like you.
She was a really great person from the moment we met, and I was just really upset that I thought she wasn’t who she had seemed to be. She needed help, and I’m glad between the group of us that we were able to get her what she needed, and she was determined to do things the right way and not get so far off the path she wanted to be on again. It was a real group effort, as I was important as the person to hold her accountable and to see the good in her she couldn’t at the time, her family for caring about her health and safety and having the means to get it for her, the team of doctors she got, and her herself for finding a way to believe in herself while she was trying to hold together the broken bits of her life. She was very scared of everything, including herself for a long time, so it was not easy.
I feel a bit bad sharing this stuff, since I’m sure she isn’t thrilled to have others know it, but I think it’s important to see success stories, and I share details about my own struggles for decades with depression for the same reason. This stuff shouldn’t be stigmatized because that does no good for anyone. My inability to admit to what people treat as a weakness helped me screw up my friends’ lives for decades and I lost many important relationships and opportunities in life because of how I felt inside all the time and because people made me feel the need to try to fix it all on my own and not got all zombied up by medicine. It was so quick and simple to get my life fixed for essentially almost no time or money, I kick myself every day for not doing it sooner. Even when I had no insurance, a month of my medicine cost no more than $20, and it started working within the first week and my life did a 180. I thought it would be so long a process, involving so many doctors and years of therapy and feeling dead inside, but I was at my yearly physical and said I’ve been depressed for over 20 years and what can I do about it. Doc sent me out with a scrip and that was the end of feeling a crushing weight every day.
I know it isn’t that simple for everyone, but for me it was, but I didn’t know until I just accepted it wasn’t something I could fix myself and was tired of trashing my whole life every few years and needed to break the cycle. I’m a lot more successful now mentally, and my girlfriend now works in a hospital helping others. She’s so much smarter and talented than I ever would have thought when we met. If you feel you need help, go get it by whatever means you can. It isn’t shameful, it doesn’t make you weak. We all need help to varying degrees and people are social animals and we need each other by design. Every day I kick myself for not learning this sooner and I ache for all the people I loved that I hurt by being stubborn that I’ll never see again, but now I try to use that to empathize with others. I can’t take back anything I’ve done out of sadness or anger, but I can learn from it and share my experiences to hopefully try to help someone else out. I don’t wish those feelings on anyone; it can be such crushing weight.
Thanks so much for sharing this story and with such detail, what a sobering look into exactly the turning point in her life and how things could’ve gone instead. It shows how things fall apart for so many. That was a lot of support she needed to recover, and I think you made it pretty clear that most folks are not going to be getting that. You also made it clear that with enough support she was able to bounce back and seriously recover, which is fantastic.
These are the kinds of outcomes our society should be striving towards! Not vacations and luxuries for executives and investors.
I don’t want to give the kind of detail you did, but my upbringing could probably be described as a near miss along these lines. Grew up as my family’s finances were going from bad to hopeless and dangerous (no heat or AC sometimes, certainly no healthcare outside of broken bones, etc. etc.). Parents split, mother died slowly to terminal cancer, younger sister from another father lived alone with her and had to watch her unravel as a kid.
I was just old enough to realize “oh shit, there’s no one ever coming to help us, I have to get my life and future path together now, this is an emergency”. My sister wasn’t so lucky, she didn’t get any urgent realizations, she just got deep immovable trauma. She’s struggled since.
I was able to adopt her and raise her through teenage-hood as best I could, I wound up “adopting” my own father for some years to get him back on his feet too, later on (he’d long ceased parenting by then, though to his credit he helped my sister a lot, not even his kid).
I think if the timeline of all that shifted even just maybe two years in the wrong direction, I wouldn’t have been likely to make the realization when I did and build us the shield we needed. I think we all woulda just been fucked.
Neither my dad or sister are doing great, but they’re alive, housed (by their own efforts), somewhat healthy - able to continue the struggle for now. I’m doing pretty well, but the circumstances were different and I lucked into natural talent with tech, so. That’s the only reason any of my efforts were fruitful, anyway.
Edit: slightly more detail on outcomes
I’m glad I was able to really help someone and that you were able to make the best of your situation. The fact anyone has to worry in this day and age about affording medical care, heating/cooling, drinking water, clean air, etc drives me insane. I don’t know how someone can look at their neighbor suffer and either not care or think it’s actually a net positive. We could all be hurt, we could all end up lost, homeless, or stuck someplace unsafe.
Most people in her situation die or go to prison.
I was really worried the one neighbor (not sure if he was actually a cop or just wished he was, he always seemed very pissed off so I avoided him and his dogs) was going to hurt her. We live in a cookie cutter neighborhood so all the houses look the same and she was either trying to get into his or one next to his.
She would leave after I went to bed too and was picked up by the police, once pretty violently. She got into trouble with the store in town also, and that one was very close to sending her to jail, and the person she did stuff to was super pissed leaving court after we got her off, and I don’t blame him for feeling like he didn’t get justice.
She got a deferred sentence or whatever the call it, and since she stayed good for however many years now, her record got expunged. Again, only because I helped her write a very good statement to the court when she could barely string words together, and her mom paid for a pretty good lawyer and the care to show she was getting professional help.
I knew the whole time most won’t get so many chances or breaks, so I still don’t take it for granted. I just remember we never know what others are going through in their lives and that almost no one deserves being my written off, as anyone who met her then vs now would hardly recognize her.
I still wish this all never would have happened, but it’s what got her to really become the best her, so I’m thankful for it in the end. I just wish more people could have the same story. Her therapy group was online during Covid, so I got to overhear a lot of stories, and it made it easy to see how it can go with less helpful people involved.