Dual Diagnosis

The Duality of My Being

According to Nami.org — Dual diagnosis (also referred to as co-occurring disorders) is a term for when someone experiences a mental illness and a substance use disorder simultaneously. Either disorder — substance use or mental illness — can develop first. People experiencing a mental health condition may turn to alcohol or other drugs as a form of self-medication to improve the mental health symptoms they experience. However, research shows that alcohol and other drugs worsen the symptoms of mental illnesses.

Two years. Damn near two years I found myself clean and sober off of heroin and meth. My bipolar reared its ugly head and took me deep into the darkness. I was not receiving any support for my recovery nor my mental health. Even though I was living with my mother and daughter at that time. My daughter didn’t know what I was going through, she thought I was being lazy. It was a miserable two years. But I seemingly pulled through.

Or at least I thought I had…

I found myself with an overnight job at Walmart making $13 an hour which wasn’t bad actually. Full time and I had just got a car too. So life was looking up. All I had to do was keep my nose to the ground and work at getting my daughter and I a home.

Then everything fell apart. Now I’ll tell you that with my life when I am doing good, something bad always follows. And something did. Shortly after getting my car, toward the end of July my mother kicked me out to the streets. (yeah yeah I know, living with his mother? Recovering addict here, hello? I was also homeless before I was clean, keep that in mind too. So yeah, I was living at moms.) I had nowhere to go. Not a friend who would take me in. Nor any family. They all knew my situation. I was trying with every ounce of fiber in my body to get back on my feet and it all went out the window. After becoming homeless, again, I lost my job. Anyone suffering from depression knows that when everything feels hopeless, that everything you do unfolds no matter what, you will find yourself in the darkness that is hard to climb out of. Suicidal ideation creeps in. Isolation. All those happened to me and I went missing for three days. Hopeless. Contemplating suicide. I wanted a way out. Tears falling down my face. It seemed no one in the world cared. I was alone and wanted to die. I carried such guilt and shame for failing my daughter again. Anytime I talked to her I broke down because I felt like I was a piece of shit father. I love her so much I would do anything, anything to make her happy. To take care of her and to grow with her and here I was, disillusioned, and heartbroken.

That was the day I relapsed.

I was self-medicating.

My shame and guilt laid heavy upon me. My bipolar medication wasn’t working and I was at least a month and a half out from seeing my third Psychiatrist in a year. Ahh, the joys of government healthcare. I could not complain however, I was receiving help with my mental illness. And this help I needed badly. Heroin offered a quick solution to a permanent problem. I knew it wasn’t fixing anything. But I was an addict who desperately wanted to crawl out of my own skin day after day. I was not being a good father to my daughter and that just sunk me further into depression. I came close to suicide on multiple occasions. But I couldn’t. Leaving my daughter behind was not something I wanted to do.

So I went on my merry way and continued to self medicate. No one in my family knew. And I wouldn’t dare tell them or ask for help. They would just get angry and say mean things about how shitty of a father I was and how horrible of a human being I was. I couldn’t bear that less I go out with a bang right then and there. So I kept quiet. To my chagrin, they already knew. I just never made it known. I tell them I wish someone would’ve brought it to my attention, I would’ve opened up and asked for help. But they didn’t know how to go about it. I mistook correction for rejection. And rejection I can’t deal with. So I took it upon myself to do research and find help through my county. In my search, I came across a website which was called dualdiagnosis.org. I started doing some reading and after about an hour or so I realized that I had a dual diagnosis. Later confirmed by both my psychiatrist and therapist.

When my daughter found out I had relapsed she was devastated. And my heart was broken that I had done that to her. I knew she wouldn’t understand. I hardly understood. But that night that I was steeped in darkness and depression I felt I only had two options. One was suicide and the other was too self medicate. To try and quickly subdue this horrible feeling of hopelessness and overwhelming sadness. My heart was beating so fast and it weighed what seemed like a ton. I couldn’t breathe, all I could do was cry. So I picked the lesser of the two evils. I self-medicated. After my initial relapse, I was ashamed of myself but couldn’t quite stop because I was afraid of becoming depressed again, all to avoid that feeling of despair. For a while, I thought I had my relapse under wraps. No one in my family knew, but I was dead wrong. They knew but didn’t know how to approach me. I take criticism as rejection. And I fear rejection. It came out soon enough and I didn’t know how to explain to them that I was self-medicating due to my mental illness. So I found an article from the website dual diagnosis, The Unfortunate Connection Between Childhood Trauma and Addiction In Adults. Sent to both my parents in hopes that works understand that the abuse I sustained in the cult we lived in when I was a child, for fifteen years, in that abuse lies the connection to my addiction and my want to self medicate.

The next day I got phone calls from both of them with their understanding as to where I was coming from. And that they were behind me 100%. I then told them that I had enrolled in both an outpatient and inpatient rehab that would help me get clean and that I also was seeing my psychiatrist again along with a psychotherapist who was going to stay with me for the long haul. I also was back on my medication but was working on finding the medication that worked for me better.

I have learned a lot since my relapse to heroin and meth. use. I learned that my mind went straight to self medicating to mask my depression and also my mania and saw it as a quick fix. But became aware that even though it may have been a quick fix, in the long run it was detrimental to my bipolar disorder. I also learned about dual diagnosis and that there is help out there for those like me who was suffering from it. Now I am two days away from entering my inpatient stint to get clean and to further work at coping with my bipolar disorder.