Clare Engenoi

“I got diagnosed with ‘bipolar affective disorder’ last year in May 2018 after spending three months in an acute ward and it’s coming up to the anniversary of my first – hopefully last psychotic episode. Anniversaries are always a difficult time when dealing with trauma and there was a lot of trauma leading up to my episode and subsequently through my hospitalisation in an acute ward where I was ‘treated’.

I always seemed to have it together and very few people knew that I was battling with periods of severe depression over the past 5 years. I was dosed up on the antidepressant ‘sertraline’ before my current diagnosis, which essentially is like being on cocaine for people with bipolar disorder. It increases the likelihood of manic depression and was a major catalyst to my psychosis. This was intensified by different traumas in my life but the final blow for my body and mind was a sexual assault. My mind was not able to resolve the pain that weighed so heavy on my shoulders- So it protected me and we had a whale of a time until I got sectioned. My psychosis protected me and made me BELIEVE  that I was the queen of everything and I could have anything I wanted. Not this vulnerable young woman whose body had become a foreign terrain- physically and mentally.

After the episode, people didn’t treat me the same. There was a lot of stigma. I’m mixed race, born and raised in Kenya and living the UK. My African family dismissed my episode to drug use. I’ve heard a lot of stories about my supposed ‘drug addiction’ or similarly ‘the devil’ possessing me. The English side didn’t know how to cope. They assumed it would be best for me to remain sectioned for a full 6 months under the Mental Health Act and took every step to ensure my discharge from the acute ward would not occur. My parents lived in Kenya and listened to  the advice of my next of kin in England before realising I was not going to recover as an inpatient. I have never felt so alone and misunderstood as I did under section- even with the staff who lost my trust and respect within a few hours of my meeting them. I spent the first three days in seclusion after attempting to attack the psychiatrist who insisted that I was inventing my trauma. I admit, I did have hallucinations and genuinely believed I was the queen – but to have three nurses restrain a scared young woman who was sexually assaulted the day before, throwing her in a dark cell with nothing but a mattress on a cold concrete floor for ‘acting out’ and forcefully injecting drugs, is to strip a person of all their dignity.

There are so many roots to the tree of anger

that sometimes the branches shatter

before they bear.

~Audre Lorde

I’m in my 20’s and I have a lot of ‘woke’ friends who rally behind mental health awareness, ‘me too’ and other social causes in vogue. But psychosis is not in vogue. Neither is bipolar. We talk about ‘mainstream’ mental health difficulties such as anxiety and depression in a different way to how we engage with bipolar and schizophrenia, alienating individuals who already feel alienated from their body and mind.

Prior to this episode, I had persevered through many challenges in my life and despite the mountains I felt I was climbing every day, I begun to thrive. I was/am a poet. I was/am a musician. I was/am a marketing specialist. I was/am an activist, I was/am a student. I ‘WAS’ is something I’ve been working fervently on with my therapist because during my manic episode and subsequent psychosis, I burned down a lot of bridges, destroying a lot of the hard work I had done. I could take the time to build the life I had before, but I’m working on building a new life. One that makes me genuinely happy and one where I don’t have to rely on medication to survive. I am a beautifully flawed woman with battle scars that remind me how far I have triumphed. I am not bipolar. I just have a mood disorder called bipolar with elevated periods of sadness (severe depression)  and happiness (mania) and I’m working on restoring a healthy balance with the help of CBT, mental health mentoring, exercise and rest.

‘Bipolar affective disorder’ previously known as, Complex PTSD and Manic Depression is a poorly understood mental illness that still heralds a lot of social stigma. The usefulness of the label itself is questionable. For sufferers like myself, an episode of psychosis carries a lot of shame, guilt, pain and the indignities we face as patients whilst under the ‘care’ of institutions is appalling.

We still have a long way to go in restoring a sense of dignity for sufferers of bipolar, who drift in and out of psychiatric wards, universities, offices, families and lives.

Clare Engenoi Smyth”