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Mental-health board clients shed light on mental health issues
On a spring day nearly 25 years ago, Maureen Waybright began to cry at work, unprompted and uncontrollably, and didn’t stop for a week.
With a cloak of deep, impenetrable sadness upon her, Waybright took the first step on a journey that has brought her to emergency rooms, psychiatric units, and, at least once, to the brink of death.
To meet Waybright today, however, is to be met with a passionate, jovial and purposeful take on life that doesn’t seem to mesh with the image of that woman who 25 years ago was diagnosed with severe and persistent mental illness.
Waybright lives with bipolar, borderline personality and seasonal affective disorders.
She’s adamant on this point, however: “This illness does not define me. I am a normal person who lives with an abnormal illness.”
“I’m an employee. I’m a friend. I have children and grandchildren. I take care of my home. I reach out to people less fortunate. I’m active in my church – just like every other normal person,” she said. “But sometimes the symptoms of my illness hold me back.”
Waybright, along with Jeff Pitzer and Thelma Rist, all of whom are actively involved with the Columbiana County Mental Health and Recovery Services Board, recently shared their experiences of coping with mental illness.
THELMA
Last year, Thelma Rist learned that she had cancer.
The diagnosis, however, didn’t scare her.
“I never blinked an eye,” said Rist, of Lisbon. “What I was worried about was my mental health.”
For more than 30 years, Rist didn’t have control over her mental health, or even an idea that she suffered from post-traumatic stress and borderline personality disorders, chronic low-grade depression and, at times, major clinical recurrent depression.
“I would not be sitting here talking to you today if I hadn’t gotten into treatment,” she said. “I would be long dead and gone, buried and forgotten.”
As a child and later as a teenager, Rist attempted to commit suicide. At that time, she said, society didn’t understand how to deal with what today would be recognized as a manifestation of mental illness.
Her suicide attempts – one of which involved wrapping a dry-cleaning bag around her head at about age 7 – were dismissed by medical professionals, she said, and for the next few decades she was left on her own to deal with the inextricable cycles of depression and suicidal thoughts.
“When you’re in the middle of it, it just seems like nothing is going to get better,” she said. “At times, if it’s really, really bad, it’s almost like you want to curl up in a fetal position. You don’t want to do anything; you don’t want to talk to anybody; you don’t want to eat, or you eat everything that’s in front of you.”
As damaging as the depression itself, she said, was the stigma attached to it, which she believes cost her a job and her marriage of more than 30 years.
“People just don’t get it. They think this is a character flaw, that you just snap out of it and pull yourself up by your bootstraps and keep moving,” she said. “People don’t get that you can’t just make up your mind to be happy.”
Rist recalls instances when people have grabbed their children and backed up from her, or have cautiously withdrawn handshakes after learning of her illness.
“You can’t catch it by touching me!” she said, her tone laced with frustration and bemusement.
Rist did not begin to come to grips with these issues until, finally, at 38, she received the help of mental health services.
“When I finally got into the mental health system and got a diagnosis – a lot of people don’t want to hear that – but for me, it was like, ‘Oh, thank God, there is something that’s real. It’s not just me. There are other people, or they wouldn’t have a name for it.’
“So it was like an understanding: ‘Now I know what’s been going on for the last 30 years.’”
In March, Rist learned that her cancer was in remission.
JEFF
Jeff Pitzer always felt like he was different.
That feeling first took hold in high school; as his classmates formed bonds with one another, he kept to himself.
Then, in his early 20s, more alarming signs began to appear. He started to have panic attacks, and to see and hear things that weren’t real.
Pitzer, of Salem, suffers from schizophrenia, a mental illness that can manifest itself through symptoms such as amnesia, delusions, memory loss, aggressive behavior, self-harm, hallucinations, paranoia and more.
For Pitzer, the effects of the condition disrupted his life in extreme ways, causing him to lose jobs and leaving him homeless after prolonged hospital stays numerous times over the years.
Waybright estimates that she’s been hospitalized between 15 and 18 times; the most major incident that brought her to the hospital was in 1998, when, in the midst of a bout of severe depression, she ingested more than 40 pills.
“The emotional pain inside of me had gotten so severe; I couldn’t deal with the sadness and the negativity,” she said. “I couldn’t deal with the voices in my head saying that I was horrible, that I didn’t deserve to breathe and I was a terrible mother.”
She recalled another hospital visit of a much different kind: for an operation to have a shunt installed to treat a medical issue unrelated to her mental illness.
“I got cards, I got flowers, I got visits from people from church and from my family,” she said. “When I was in the hospital for my mental illness, I never got a flower, never got a get-well card, didn’t get the phone calls.
“People could see the incision in my head. They understood that illness, and they accepted it.”
Pitzer, too, struggled to get his loved ones to understand his illness; his parents, while loving and supportive, for many years didn’t grasp the nature of his condition, he said.
“It was very rough for the first couple of years, until they found a medication that would work for me,” he said of his condition, speaking haltingly and at times displaying a shy, sweet smile. “That’s part of living with the mental illness – living with the setbacks. It’s been a rough road.”
Today, however, contentment and even pride seem to ebb from Pitzer.
“I was angry about it for a long time. The anger took over; then, once I got over the anger, it was acceptance,” he said. “The acceptance gives me a little bit of hope.”
“RECOVERY IS BEAUTIFUL”
A few years back, Rist wasn’t doing so well.
Driving back from work every day, she was unable to face the thought of going home.
So, she would make a stop along the way at Waybright’s home.
“Hi, come on in,” Waybright would say, offering her something to drink.
“And I’d say no. So I’d sit in her rocking chair in the living room, and she’d sit there – never said a word, just let me rock,” Rist said. “A half-hour later, I’d say, ‘OK, I’m going home.’”
The story illustrates a common thread that ties together the recovery stories of Rist, Waybright and Pitzer: the importance of support from people who understand what they’re going through.
“One of the really important things for me was meeting Thelma,” said Waybright. “It was the first time in my life somebody else had what I had. ... I wasn’t alone anymore, and that was really important to break that isolation.”
Waybright, Rist and Pitzer remain engaged with their recovery process. They are actively involved in leadership roles at the mental health board, attend counseling sessions and manage their medications.
For all three, their lives drastically changed for the better once they entered the systems in place to help people like them. One of the obstacles they faced in taking that first step, most of them agreed, was the stigma often attached to mental illness.
“If all the rest of the body can be treated with medications, help from doctors, support from family – why can’t mental illness? Why can’t we accept that?” Waybright said. “Because mental illness doesn’t show up on an X-ray. Bipolar disorder does not show up in a blood test.”
“Recovery is beautiful. I’m always going to have this diagnosis of severe and persistent mental illness, but I don’t have to be caught up in it. It doesn’t define who I am,” she said. “My children define who I am. My job. My beautiful grandbabies. That’s who Maureen is.”