Sheila Hamilton
Benefitting the Lines For Life
Sheila Hamilton was married to David, the kind of man she always wanted to have kids with, brilliant and funny with a zest for life. And then one day she saw something in him that she hadn’t seen before - a darkness that suggested a deep internal struggle, which later progressed to extreme behavior change. It was confusing. Was this still the man she married? What she didn’t know was that David was suffering from undiagnosed bipolar disorder. What should we do when we suspect the one we love is suffering from mental illness?
Warning: this episode discusses suicide
In This Episode, We talk about:
Sign posts as David descended into mental illness.
What it means to be a caretaker and love someone who is mentally ill.
The struggle to separate the person from the illness.
The power and importance of hope to carry someone who is a place of suffering and darkness.
How common these conditions are.
How better off we would be as a society if we could talk about them.
Wise Words
Sheila: In hindsight, what I would say to my younger self is, “You actually didn’t engage him in the deep conversations that are necessary in order to have a really solid stable life together.” A lot of them were in my head.
Sheila: I really don’t believe that he had seriously ever considered marriage. I think if I could really be honest that in his mind he probably knew something was really wrong with him and that the confines of a domestic union would probably kill him. Yet he was really in love with me and really in love with the stability that I brought and the ease that I brought to his life. So, I think he was just at that point agreeable, and he said, “Let’s do it.”
Sheila: As his illness progressed, he actually got to the point where he was acting on a lot of the behaviors he must have been feeling internally.
Sheila: It was horrifying for me to witness, because what I realized is that for most of his life, he had likely either managed those compulsions, those behaviors, or the stress was so insane at that point in his life that he had no choice, he was just acting completely irrationally.
Kimi: Being in a relationship with somebody who is living with an unmanaged, undiagnosed mental illness, or any mental illness for that matter, whether there is a diagnosis and treatment involved. You think about physical ailments, somebody having a spouse with cancer, there now is discussion about the impact on the caretaker.
Sheila: I also had the experience that I couldn’t separate when he was just being an asshole with what was happening with his brain, because he had never said to me, “I feel like my brain isn’t functioning.” He had never said, “I fear I have a mental illness.”
Sheila: I keep thinking what if I had just caught him earlier by saying, “No. If you don’t get help, if you don’t actually do something to really address the issues that you’re having, I need to leave this marriage,” we might have caught him. I get really emotional thinking about that, because once again it’s like the amount of responsibility that we can carry for another person’s mental illness is pretty profound.
Sheila: All of the people that I’ve talked to about this question of how do we know whether it’s the illness or the behaviors of a human being who is doing whatever the fuck he wants. That is the question around mental illness, and none of them can answer it. They really cannot.
Kimi: This role of hope in the loss of his life. That had there been a different narrative, had he been provided the gift of hope, that the doctors looked at him and said, “We have hope for your future, we have hope for your health, and we’re going to find the right solutions,” that perhaps it would have been a different experience for him and a different outcome for him.
Sheila: It is because of the unique biochemistry of people with Bipolar Disorder that antidepressants are not just dangerous, they’re deadly. They are completely deadly. I think there should be a black box warning on them that if you’ve ever suspected a history of Bipolar do not take them until somebody has taken a psychological background.
Sheila: I’ve often talked about how when you lose someone to a heart attack or cancer, immediately there’s all of these casseroles and people doing food chains and all of the notes and flowers. When someone dies by suicide, there is this big void. People actually don’t know what to say, so they don’t say anything at all. As a person grieving that loss, I think that what you want to hear from people is just what you want to hear if you lose a person any other time. You want to hear funny stories about them, you want to hear how generous they were, you want to hear memories of your loved one that remind you of what a capable, fun human being they were.
Sheila: One guy said to me, “If you were in a burning building, would you jump or would you be burned?” That’s what you have to understand about a person who is in that much psychological pain, that they don’t really see any other option than moving away from the pain.
Sheila: For the first few weeks, I’m Googling, “What causes suicide?” It’s very basic type of questions. Then I started understanding how prevalent suicide is, that it’s the ninth leading cause of death, that it’s the number one leading cause of death for young men, that it is so completely common in our society to have people attempt. I don’t know if your listeners know this, but for every one completed suicide, there are 25 attempts. That’s millions of people impacted by this problem.
Sheila: I would only just say to people if you have a hunch, if you have a concern, follow it, obsess it, make sure that you don’t dismiss it because they tell you that they’re all right.
Sheila: I’ve always said that if every person who actually had a diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder came out and actually was honest about their diagnosis and how they’re managing it, we would see half of corporate America.
Sheila: There are so many very capable people, just as David was when he walked in that coffee shop, who actually have this disorder and they manage it very well.
Sheila: We absolutely can’t expect people to continue to perform like they did under the stress and crisis of the pandemic. So, how do we actually bring an awareness into the workplace? How do we give people coping skills? That’s really where a lot of my interest is now because I want to move into the prevention part of serious mental illness. I want to catch people upstream of the worst behaviors and the worst type of the illness that you really can’t claw back from.
Sheila: I want people to understand how common these conditions are, how disruptive to our lives they are, how destabilizing a force it is in society that we can’t talk openly about it.
LINKS
Website: www.sheilahamilton.com
Podcast: Beyond Well Media
Facebook: Sheila Hamilton Portland
Instagram: @sheilahamilton
Twitter: @SheilaHamilton
Charity Donation: Lines For Life