As most of you know, mental health issues are rather common within my family, and it's never really phased me too much as I have always been the one to help people deal with it. But I am really worried at the moment.
Again, as most of you know, my sister Shell has had a really tough time of it lately and suffers with depression quite badly. I've been keeping an eye on her behaviour (as I do with my mum and other sisters too due to liking to have an awareness to their shifts in mood and therefore being able to predict and deal with each episode) and for a while now, I have been suspecting something like Manic Depression or Bipolar Disorder due to her erratic behaviour (my mum also suffers).
She goes through stages of extreme depression that last for weeks on end, which usually involves severe anxiety attacks, sleeping problems, lack of appetite, intense mood swings, inability to communicate with people, paranoia, seeing/hearing things (for example, her fiancee who died last year), feeling unwanted, self-doubt, and fairly recently, self-harm). She gets 'breaks' of 'normality' occassionally, but she tends to spend most of her time in the depression.
But saying that, she also has odd stages of hyperactivity, almost as though she were on drugs (which she isn't). She will be ecstatically happy (though rather irritable), full of energy, proud, full of ideas of things she can do (you know she's in one of these stages because she rings with all these suggestions of how she can make something of herself), but she also gets quite 'out of control' too, in that she'll spend too much money or she'll become quite promiscuous, even though she is in a loving relationship.
So I had my suspicions, but this evening she worried me as she called me in the middle of one of her anxiety attacks (as she oftens does as I can calm her down over the phone), and she was crying and screaming down the phone and could hardly breathe. It took me nearly an hour to calm her down enough to talk, and well, I was crying my eyes out by the end of the call. She was saying about how depressed she is and that she can' cope, and wants to really hurt herself, and she can't control the urge to do so. Her anti-dpressants aren't working properly, and she's struggling coping each day with her life. That she's not happy at work or at home and that she's looking at loosing both her house-share and her job due to her swings. She's very paranoid about everything and everyone, and she is now saying that she thinks she needs to get sectioned, even though she really doesn't want to.
She also said about the fact that I moved away, and that I was her only support system, so to speak, and now that I was gone that she just couldn't deal with it anymore. This really upset me, as I have always been there for my sisters and my mum, always been there to pick up the pieces and help them to get on after a particularly bad episode, so what she is saying is kind of true, which made it so much harder to hear. Since I moved, I haven't been able to drop everything and run to them in the same way that I had before, and I can imagine that that is pretty difficult.
Well anyway, I am booking her in to see her doctor on Wednesday, and I am going to push for them to start testing and looking into the possibility of Bipolar Disorder, and other such mental health rpoblems, and also to see about having her referred to a psychiatrist and possibly getting her signed off work. I am also going to look into getting her into some form of sheltered housing so that she has a suuport network there too.
I really am so worried about her
Sorry for the really long post...
