Tag: depression

This is one of my favorite posts from my old blog, topazadine.com, that I’d like to have a home here, too. Let’s take a look at it in all its glory.

Today’s going to be a heavier topic, but one that I feel is incredibly important. I’ve been pingponging this around my head since I saw the disturbing responses on a Reddit post, where a fellow writer was encouraging others to care for their overall well-being.

Many commenters responded very negatively to this, insisting that all their best work comes when they’re in the throes of suicidal despair. They claimed that saying you should care for your mental and physical health is some form of ableism, then promptly got into pissing contests about how terrible their mental health is, as if this is a badge of honor (it’s not).

Well, as someone with bipolar disorder, I’m here to tell you that’s a damn lie. You do not need to be a martyr for your art; in fact, it can really damage your craft.

I will note that I am speaking from my experience. Before you go, “well, that’s just your opinion,” hear me out.

Once, during a psychotic episode, I walked 13 miles in the middle of the night in freezing cold weather because I thought I was a torchbearer for the Special Olympics. It wasn’t even the right year for that.

I then broke into Navy Pier after hours (for reasons?? vibes??) through a mistakenly unlocked front door. After letting me twirl around for a bit, likely scared for their lives, the cleaning staff called the cops on me.

Upon being kindly kicked out of this esteemed establishment, I believed I was in the running for the Nobel Peace Prize and started tweeting incessantly about Malala Yousafzai while dancing to “Bad Girls” by M.I.A on a CTA bus. I’m surprised I didn’t get escorted off the bus too.

Yes, of course, all of that makes absolutely no sense: that’s what psychosis does.

My list of prior medications is so long that I don’t even remember all of them; I’ve been involuntarily hospitalized six times. Once, I even spent Thanksgiving in the psych ward. The food was surprisingly good.

I’m not trying to get pity by explaining this. This all happened a decade ago, and I have been perfectly stable thanks to the world’s best medication, Lamictal. (Insert paid sponsorship here! Please?)

Rather, I want you to know that I’ve been about as deep as you can go into a mental breakdown, and I can tell you that it did nothing whatsoever for my writing abilities.

First, let’s dive into the most important reason that you should take your mental health seriously instead of wallowing for your craft.

Untreated Mental Illness Damages Your Brain

Mental illness is not just feeing sad: these are brain disorders that cause real, quantifiable damage to your neurological functioning. This, of course, should set off enormous warning bells telling you to get treatment now.

Depression causes brain shrinkage, including in the hippocampus, which is crucial for memory and learning. It also damages the prefrontal cortices, which help us to relate to others and regulate our emotions.

The areas of the brain impacted by depression are all those that we need to write: our ability to empathize, to plan, to remember important details, and even to feel emotions so that we can accurately depict them.

But it’s not just about writing, of course.

These areas moderate key life activities, making it difficult for you to succeed elsewhere, too.

There is also the fact that persistent, untreated depression is correlated with neuroinflammation. Brain inflammation is one of the cardinal precursors to Alzheimer’s disease, a tragic disorder that results in a painful and devastating death.

As you would imagine, the changes are even more extreme in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, resulting in a marked loss of brain volume and significant impairment in everyday activities. Just one manic episode can cause lifelong changes that increase the risk of dementia and even heart disease.

If you can get treatment, do – as fast as possible.

Don’t give up until you find the right treatment for you, because the risks far outweigh the rewards.

In fact, there are few rewards of untreated mental illness, including writing ability.

No, You Don’t Write Better When Sick

I promise, you don’t, even if you think you do.

You may tell me “but Cameron, I’m the exception! My work when I’m happy is terrible, but my work when I’m on the brink of suicidal despair is genius!”

Is it? Is it really?

A symptom of many mental illnesses, including bipolar, is anosognosia, which means that you do not recognize that you have an issue. This is how you get someone insisting that they’ve had brain surgery, even when their psychiatrist tells them that never happened.

What? Don’t look at me like that. It made sense at the time.

And it does make sense to the ill person, because they are living in a different reality. Their brain is making wrong connections between facts, sensory inputs, and memories that diverge from the real world.

What happened to me is a very extreme version of this, but that those insisting that they make their best work when they’re messed up are also suffering from anosognosia. They’re not able to see that the work they’re doing is not at the same level as it could be if they were better.

As an example, let’s look at some poems I wrote during different mental states. This is one from my Psychosis Era.

Shiverheart shiverbrain banana banana shrivel,
press the dancing bone to watch the sun sink
for another fifty years, another fifty years
we sacrificed for the sake of our bloody maries.
And sweet Antoinette, whose brocade was stained
with her juicethoughts, and the maid had a tantrum.

Sleep sleep deep deep where the cars can’t find you
where the wheel always turns soft smooth like butter
like butter, except for when it’s not. Babygut
sand colonoscopies for free, like daisies
for a winter wedding, but we’re all oozing black
massacre wine from our very pores,
like insecticide.

I am dying, I am dying, so quiet, so soft, wavering
upon the shore between dream and deritus, crashwave
summoning, crashwave beckoning, welcoming me home.
But my feet cannot cross the sand. Saline eyepus
coming to wash my sins.

It’s straight word salad, and I don’t mean that in the silly politician sense; this is a textbook example of the disorder. It makes no sense and is, frankly, dogshit.

I’m sure I thought it was deep at the time, but a sane person would be horrified. Clearly I believed I was the next William S. Burroughs (spoiler alert, I am not).

Now here’s an excerpt of one I wrote during an episode of bipolar depression.

I sat on the train writing my will
and the tracks were humped like vertebra
of my scoliosis back. We were running
over corpses.

Would they take us
and throw us to the end of the train
and pose with our dead bodies
our berry juice staining the floor?
But this is not, this is not,
and I choke down bile and say my testament
like rosary.

Where will we go
after the meals have been spat out
and the toys burnt to carbon
and the babies rocked to coma
and the prizes won and coffins bought
when there is no more suffering to drink?

Yeah, the Sylvia Plath vibes are strong with this one. I will say that it’s better than the bizarre world salad poem, but it’s still … bad. It’s bland and repetitive, which perfectly encapsulates the soul-bleaching monotony of depression.

There’s also the fact that it is really depressing, but that’s to be expected when you’re depressed.

Lastly, here is one that I wrote for What Is Cannot Be Unwritten (coming winter 2025), now that I’ve been stable for many years.

Bending neck like willow bough,
wings that sweep like summer snow,
dark eyes of blackest bright,
gleaming river of cool delight.

Swan seeks silent melody,
turns its feathered prow to sea,
paddles past every boundary,
acknowledging no nationality.

Stretch one’s beak to the yielding sky
and trumpet out the true heart cry.
To be wild and proud and limitless,
bowing only to love’s largesse.

This one seems quite sweet but you’d be horrified at the context, as you will learn later this year.

Notwithstanding that it has a much more pleasant theme, the fact of the matter is that this poem is objectively better than either of the poems I wrote while unstable. The theme is more coherent, the rhyme scheme gives it a better melody, and the imagery is stronger. It’s not my best work ever, but it’s certainly much improved.

After a decade of treatment, I can look back and recognize that being ill did not help my work at all. However, I think that some people still believe this myth because they haven’t had that experience … yet.

You May Not Realize How Much Better Your Work Can Be

The thing many people do not understand is that a brief period of stability isn’t true remission. You may feel better for a few weeks or even months, but your brain is still in a fragile state and can relapse at any time.

In fact, the brain changes that result from a manic episode have been observed up to six years after the initial episode, and there’s evidence that even medication-compliant patients still show abnormal brain structures despite having no symptoms.

Researchers also have found that brain changes from depression persist for years after remission, though it’s not clear how long that really lasts.

The point here is that a few months of feeling better does not mean that you are cured.

It takes time for the brain to heal itself after a serious episode of mental illness, so you really can’t know how much you’ll improve until you are half a decade or more in remission.

And those years while you are healing are messy; you’re not doing your best work then, either. My poems and stories really only started to get better about five years after my manic episode because my brain was still rorienting to Normal Neuron Stuff.

Additionally, psychiatric medications can cause issues with cognition, memory, and personality while you’re stabilizing for a reason: they’re equalizing your neurotransmitters. You’ll feel weird and brain-foggy even if the medications are working because everything is out of wack.

This is completely normal, but it can be frustrating to writers, and it may make them falsely believe that recovery is the reason that their work isn’t so great.

No. The problem is still your mental illness, but that adjustment period can make it appear that treatment is the issue.

Sadly, many creatives decide that medication isn’t right for them because they don’t like the adjustment period, leading to an endless cycle of remission and relapse. The more frequently you cycle, the more likely you are to end up with severe impairments, so it is crucial that you fight hard for stability.

It is true that some medications can cause serious side effects. In fact, I suffered from extrapyramidal symptoms while taking the antipsychotic Geodon; the trismus that resulted would leave me with my jaw locked open for up to eight hours.

Most people would not have faulted me for throwing all those pills down the toilet and never trying again, but I kept at it until I found the right medication for me. I understand that the risks of psychosis are far worse than any physical discomfort, no matter how extreme.

This discussion flows perfectly into the next part I want to discuss – which is also the most controversial.

We Idolize Suffering Artists Because of Survivorship Bias

Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allen Poe, and so many others are famous both for their work and their incredibly depressing lives. And yes, I’m not discounting how great they were, but we’re really focusing on the wrong thing here.

Firstly, we have no idea how much better they could have been if they were not ill, or if they’d received treatment and wrote restrospectively of their sorrows.

Secondly, pointing to them as proof of why suffering is good for art reflects survivorship bias, meaning that we are only looking at those who became famous due to connections, luck, or talent.

There are millions of other prodigies whose work never gained renown because of their mental illness. Maybe they were institutionalized, or they became too ill to write, or they didn’t have a support system who helped them in their journey.

And finally, we have the sad fact that had these literary heroes not been so severely ill, they may have produced many more incredible gems.

We can’t know, of course, but I imagine that some of the best creations were never made because their creator didn’t live long enough to see it through. And that, frankly, is one of the worst things I can imagine. Mental illness takes so much not just from the individual, but from our society at large.

Your Health Is More Important Than Your Craft

There’s so much that mental illness takes from us, including our creative fire. It’s not fair, but you don’t have to let it take more from you by choosing not to get treatment.

I’m not saying that you can’t write while you’re sick – not at all.

The germs of genius may be in there, and when you’re better, you can recycle that into something even more beautiful. I’ve taken a lot from older works and generated some truly amazing poems that have such better flow than the original; I wouldn’t have had that raw material if I were not ill.

But that’s still not an excuse not to get better, to stay stuck in illness because you think it’s the best thing for your craft. I am telling you now that it’s not. Your work can be great now, but it can improve dramatically when you improve.

You deserve to be happy.

And you can get there, no matter how much your brain tells you otherwise. If I can come back from trying to jump into strangers’ cars because I thought I was late for my own wedding, you can reach stability too.

Mentally ill brains lie to us because getting treatment is scary. The human brain thrives on stasis, even if that stasis is killing us; it makes up all sorts of cognitive dissonance to dissuade us from trying to change. For writers, one of those cognitive distortions is that we write better when we’re sick.

Don’t listen when your brain starts whispering that you shouldn’t bother. Realize that mental illnesses are serious and, in many cases, degenerative disorders that cause far more harm than good.

Please get treatment.

It gets better. Your work gets better, too. I promise you from the bottom of my heart.