Bipolar Book Club: Tales from a Storybook Recovery | Kelly Rentzel | TEDxSMUWomen

I joined the bipolar book club in 1996 I was a first semester senior at Rice University and the invitation I received to this book club didn't come in the way that typical book club invitations have in my life you know like when your fun friend comes up to you and says hey I'm starting a book club and you say I love books and before you can really get that sentence out she says don't worry you don't have to read any of the books and there will be a ton of wine this invitation was different I guess the best way to say it would be that my invitation to the bipolar book club came from the universe with a little assist from my dad when I moved in that year I had no I had no idea anything was was gonna be different about that year I would I had been selected to be one of ten senior interviewers at Rice I was an orientation week for Han Solo week which was our big splash for all the incoming nerds at Rice and I was on pace to graduate with honors I had even managed to purloin from my fellow coordinators the large Han Solo cut out with blaster for my room so that was very exciting life was good and then in late September life started feeling a little too good what started out as a good mood became euphoria my thoughts raced the world looked visibly brighter I thought everything seemed connected to each other and there was symbolism in all that I saw in the world at night my energy kept up I couldn't sleep at all in fact instead of sleeping I started listening to the Beatles White Album over and over again and mapping my life out to the words of John Paul George and Ringo and in case you're wondering yes the White Album is a red flag when it comes to insanity after about four nights of this I realized that I couldn't read I picked up a book to read it for an assignment the next day and I could see the letters on the page but they weren't forming words in my brain and it was terrifying two weeks later my mom would walk into my dorm room and see a stack of books piled on to each other because I had been sitting there on my ridiculous black target beanbag chair trying to read all of these books and I couldn't I knew something was terribly wrong not even Han Solo could save me but I didn't know what it was my best guess was adult onset ADHD or something like that there was no internet for me to reach out to and find out what this might be so that night I stayed up yet again staring at the ceiling praying for sleep not sleeping and thoughts just cascading all through my brain if you know anything about manic episodes you may have heard that their drug fueled orgies of binging on things from shopping to gambling not my mania I am living proof that even a very severe mental illness can be outweighed by sheer dorkiness even on my last day on campus I was still going to class and after I went to class I went to an appointment with my favorite professor dr. Grubb my Shakespeare professor I can't remember exactly what I said in that meeting with him but I know that I rambled I know that it was what the specialists call pressured speech I know I mentioned the United Nations and I know that I ended up with my head in my hands crying we were just supposed to be talking about what I was gonna do after graduation you know maybe law maybe journalism dr. grout didn't really have United Nations on the menu that day but he was a very caring man and he had a daughter who had been diagnosed years before with depression and he asked me very gently if I would be willing to go to the Counseling Center we went to the Counseling Center the counselors talked to me for for a pretty long time couple like an hour or two and they decided that the best thing for me was to go to the hospital they asked me are you willing to go to the hospital I was picturing like the standard hospital with nothing more embarrassing than the backless gown and I have no problems with backless gowns because they're among the only gowns I don't have to get tailored so I was good with that I agreed to go to the hospital I was exhausted I was exhausted I hadn't slept in days I hadn't been on drugs I hadn't been drinking there were none of the usual suspects involved I had just lost my mind a police car came to pick me up on the curb outside of the main building at rice in the front of rice Lovett Hall and I was alone in the back of the police car and he drove me to a hospital I don't need to tell you it was a psych ward it was a psychiatric hospital and I was just as much of a fit for that place as every other patient there over the next couple of weeks things went from bad to worse I decided that for other patients were the Beatles despite the fact that they were all african-american men minding their own business in the cafeteria I thought the TVs were talking to me and even worse I thought the TVs were telling me that I was like totally super in love with a guy at Rice that I did not have any sort of crush on but that I you know I still decided to call him from the hospital and explained to him my undying love that was horrible that may be the worst part one day I woke up and I decided that I was the Virgin Mary I think well I know I had gained a lot of weight on institutional pie and ice cream because no manic person counts calories and also for medication and I was using a blue towel over my wet hair and I think my crazy brain just sort of interpreted that as Virgin Mary this is this is how bad it was I saw auras around people if I if someone had struck me the wrong way I'd see kind of a brackish dark aura if they seemed light and kind they were getting a light aura I saw angels I saw demons and it's some of those moments were the most terrifying in my life I ended up after I got out of the hospital using a nightlight for the first time since I was 7 mania itself is hard enough but one of the more difficult aspects of it is that you're both aware while you're in the manic episode that it's going on and later as you're coming out of it you become aware of what has happened and although at first I just kind of heard words being bandied about by the doctors around you know bipolar bipolar one manic depression first at first they were just words it was like a foreign language but one day it clicked I had totally lost my mind I had lost my mind I was in a psych ward the nuthouse the loony bin the away and they're coming to take you away I was gonna be on medication for the rest of my life I was gonna have to explain this to people one day if they were close to me if I ever dated somebody for a lengthy period of time this was probably gonna need to come up and I was 21 I knew what society thought about crazy people when I was little we used to play this game mash mansion apartment Shack house there you go well for crazy people a lot of those aren't options it's more like asylum attic shelter Street and my daughter would love to tell you what that spells out by the way IV I was aware of that and I was despairing of that like many people who go through this are and my dad came in at just the right moment he came in with books he came in with books by Patty Duke the actress the miracle worker who ended up doing some miracle work in my life and he came in with another book by Kay Redfield Jamison who was a psychologist at Johns Hopkins and who had succeeded incredibly despite having faced the odds of a bipolar diagnosis I read these works by these two women and it was slow and painful to read them because I had to wear reading glasses by this time due to the medications effects on me and my hands were shaking from the medication - I probably was also holding the book out here because of my large Virgin Mary ask God that was resolved later somewhat anyway I I cannot express how much hope that those stories gave me and they also gave me purpose I now knew what I needed to do after graduation even in 1996 I knew what I needed to do after graduation I was going to finish I was going to be successful in something and then I was gonna tell some other people who were bipolar that they could do it to so I was just gonna follow the map that Patti and Kay had laid out for me first I had to graduate I went back to rice the next semester and miraculously I graduated on time with a double major and with honors [Applause] now all I had to do was figure out how to be successful like what was I gonna do creative writing was out after my time with the Beatles and The White Album and all that so I needed I needed a profession with guardrails I needed turgid boring formulaic prose that's what I needed you know but I needed I needed the law so I applied to law school I went I did well I was hired in a big law firm I saw some demons there very few angels but I I was doing great I was doing great in 2006 I decided to move to the federal court where I had a pro se staff attorney position in 2008 I got married to my law school sweetheart and in 2009 I decided that I wanted to get try to get pregnant I knew it was a risky proposition to get pregnant I had to get off all my medication and I did and I had a perfectly uneventful pregnancy and then I crashed five months after my daughter was born I had to get off the medication because of the potential effects on the fetus and I had to stay off medication because I was breastfeeding so I had the twin horrors of no sleep and no medication and I ended up right back in the psychiatric hospital where I signed myself in again as I had 14 years before my depression was gripping me with a stranglehold and I spent two years I came back to the federal court after I got out of the hospital I was only there for a cup for a couple of weeks and I was able to return to work but I was dog paddling from a mood active I was struggling and over the next two years I went through a divorce I went through people judging and criticizing me for my divorce even though my ex-husband and I got along perfectly well and then my judge announced that he was going to retire from the court I panicked I had struggled for two years with this depression and I had been a shell of myself for two years and I had not been the mother I'd wanted to be and I felt like I was a burden to everyone especially my daughter I was going to be the sick catatonic mom in the corner and I did not want my daughter to have to deal with that and as irrational as it sounds it made sense in the depressed brain that I had at the time and I swallowed 5070 ambien filled up a bathtub got in the bathtub and waited to die I woke up eight hours later the tub had drained and I went right back to the hospital this time the doctors told me your condition has become medication resistant you you only have one choice left ECT ECT electroconvulsive therapy shock treatment that was what I had left that was my option well I mean first of all nobody could explain to me how it worked how it was more than just a placebo effect what was going on secondly why are we talking about putting electricity through my brain that's insanity my dad showed up with more books this time it was Han Solo's girlfriend intergalactic princess Princess Leia Carrie Fisher with the book about her experience with ECT and also local author Julie Hirsch with telling about her experience with ECT I wasn't an intergalactic princess and I also wasn't a wealthy philanthropist like Julie but I they had been exactly where I was a grief-stricken guilt ridden suicidal mom I had no other option but to try it I knew if I got released I would end up killing myself so I did I had four rounds of ECT the first three were pretty uneventful the last one knocked me into a mini manic episode but the doctors were like this is great she is better she is better and I was such an incredible debt of gratitude to both Carrie and Julie for so honestly telling their stories I came back after the shock treatment and three months later I came back to the federal court after the shock treatment and three months later I started working at the bank that was six years ago I'm now the bank's general counsel and executive vice president here's what I want you all to know the other gift my bigger success is that I have a beautiful and year-old daughter I have a wonderful eight-year-old daughter and I have no doubt that she has a mother because of that shock treatment and she has this mother because it's a gift of the bipolar book club of Kay Redfield Jamison Patty Duke of Julie Hirsch of Carrie Fisher all four of them gave me stories that got through some of the toughest times of my life we all have a story that can help someone you all probably know a story in your mind that you've never told that can help someone stories are such a gift and the more vulnerable the more valuable the great news is you don't have to write a book or stand on a stage to tell your story you might be at a book club one day you might say I've never told anybody this but dot dot dot you might change someone's life thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 34,499

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Health, Mental health, Women

Id: 5a0CAZRc2_g

Length: 19min 52sec (1192 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 05 2018