Demons On The Dissecting Table

If you’ve followed my writing for any length of time, then you know I like to lay it all out there. Sometimes, the main thing that makes me worth reading is that I’ll talk about the things most people keep quiet about.

When I do this, you have to understand that it’s healthy. I’m not looking for sympathy, attention, or forgiveness, especially not for help. If I talk about painful things, I’m talking about painful things in the past. The past may make you sad sometimes, but it can’t hurt you.

I deal with life by breaking it into its constituent pieces and trying to understand them. Understanding the whole can be overwhelming, but the pieces themselves are simple. Sometimes, I like to put my demons on the dissecting table.

Once you know you have ADHD, the disease itself can make you obsess over its details. As best as I can understand it, ADHD is the consequence of some parts of our brain doing their job too well and other parts of our brain not doing their job at all.

Imagine there’s a sort of carburetor between your five senses and your conscious mind. Your senses produce infinite amounts of data, but your conscious mind can only use a small percentage. Your mental carburetor controls the flow.

Try this sometime. In a quiet room, make an effort to notice all the things you’re intentionally not noticing. The sounds of the air conditioning, the ceiling fan, the ice machine in the refrigerator, the fan in your computer, your neighbor’s door, your neighbor’s dog, even the sounds of the house settling around you. Now notice the gradations in the paint on the wall, a spot where it drips. How many outlets have plugs? How many are open? The patterns of wear in your carpet. Your unopened mail on the table. Your dog breathing.

If you don’t have ADHD, or if you have a lower level of ADHD, then you probably have to notice these things one by one. That’s your brain’s carburetor functioning. The more ADHD controls your life, the more of these things try to force their way into your conscious thought at the same time. You learn to regulate it, but you can never turn it off.

I was in a play once. My character had a pretty intense scene with a character played by Larry Welles, who threatened to kill the character who was supposed to be his son. After the dress rehearsal, the director asked if I had ADHD because, amid that intense scene, my eyes were following a fly around the room even though the rest of me remained in the moment. I apologized and promised to try and do better.

Through the years, scientists and psychologists have done a pretty good job at tracking all the other emotional and psychological functions impacted by ADHD. One of these is feelings of depression, prolonged melancholy, a sense of hopelessness, and, with the more inattentive forms of ADHD, different levels of suicide.

You have to distinguish between suicidal feelings, suicidal thoughts, suicidal threats, and suicidal actions. Although I’ve only ever suffered from suicidal feelings from a young age, I’ve found myself constantly surrounded by the other three.

A few years ago, I befriended a woman who suffered from Histrionic Personality Disorder. Her threats of suicide became so intense and so common that I finally had to tell her that she would have to seek help and seek friendship elsewhere because, having lived through several people who completed suicidal actions, I just couldn’t spend every weekend in a crisis with her making threats. When we finally discovered that the photographs she showed of her cutting herself were more than fifteen years old rather than current, I utterly lost it. Using a thing like that to try and manipulate my thoughts and attention is one of the worst things anyone has ever done to me.

When I was thirteen, the father of one of my friends offered me a steak dinner and a free night at the movies if I would help him bail hay. At thirteen, I was twice the size of my peers. I liked steak, and I liked movies, so I agreed.

I don’t know if you’ve ever bailed hay, but it’s one of the more intense jobs I’ve ever tried. A tractor cuts the grass, then the attachments are changed, and the tractor is driven again through the cut hay, which is gathered together and tied in a bail. The third time through, some other boys and I picked the bails off the ground and threw them on the back of a flatbed trailer pulled by the same tractor from the first two steps.

A bail of hay weighs around forty-five pounds. Pretty soon, the other thirteen-year-olds spent all their energy and found places to hide. I was having fun. Flexing and using these stupid muscles that hung on my ever-growing skeleton was a reward of its own. There’s a feeling that goes with strength sports that’s hard to explain. In the movie “Pumping Iron,” Arnold Schwarzenegger compares it to sexual release. I wouldn’t go that far, but he’s not entirely wrong.

By the end of the day, we had a barn full of hay, and I was feeling close to euphoric. My friend’s father started using my example to make fun of the other boys who hadn’t stuck it out with the hay bailing. I felt pretty bad about that. His boy was one of my best friends, but he was small, really small. It wasn’t his fault. A boy who weighs less than a hundred pounds can’t throw around forty-five-pound bails of hay like I could.

That night, his dad gave me a perfectly cooked steak as big as my plate. There were no potatoes or green things, just steak. I really like steak. At first, I was giddy and happy, even laughing at my promises to finish this steak the other boys made egg-eyes at.

Working through this formerly part of a cow, a shadow of melancholy began to take over my mind. The more I ate, the more the feeling intensified. My friend’s dad laughed at my efforts to finish the slab of meat. Eventually, water began flowing from the corner of my eyes. “Keep working, boy!” the father said.

Pretty soon, I began noticing a pattern of intense emotional discomfort following intense physical or mental effort. As I got older, I noticed that it extended to intense emotional and sexual expression as well.

When my brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia, all four of us children were soon sent for psychological evaluation. That’s how you do things when there are four children. I’m sure my father asked about group pricing.

My first psychologist was Dr. Elkins, who soon changed his area of practice, so they moved me to Doug Draper. Doug was my psychologist for something like forty years. Doug and I discussed this business of intense emotional discomfort following intense effort. Since I was beginning to spend a great deal of my time invested in intense physical exercise, these occasional peaks of sadness were something of a concern.

Like a lot of teenagers, I suffered from a pretty constant state of emotional discomfort. That never really changed. One effect of ADHD is that you never feel comfortable. You’re always slightly on edge, and after a while, that can lead to a state of constant irritation and depression.

Since I was having these periods where depressed feelings peaked, he tested me in several different ways for suicidal feelings, suicidal thoughts, and suicidal actions. That’s where I learned to evaluate my place on this sort of spectrum of depressed thinking.

Suicidal feelings are a general sense of hopelessness. You’re intensely depressed, and you don’t know how to make it stop. The next step is suicidal thoughts, where you begin thinking of ways actually to hurt yourself as a practical matter. The final stage is Suicidal actions, where you begin to take action on these plans.

I soon learned that I couldn’t control my suicidal feelings, which sometimes followed intense effort, but I also learned that they didn’t last. If I just hunkered down, they would overtake me, peak, and then go away. Sometimes, these events manifested themselves as full-blown panic attacks. I ended up in the emergency room several times, determined I was having a heart attack.

It was like being at the beach with rough surf when that happened. If you go in that kind of surf, you can feel the waves beating against you, rolling over you, and then receding. Doug thought that my serotonin levels were out of control, so they prescribed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. These little white pills made it impossible for me to have a panic attack but also caused pretty troubling sexual problems and sometimes pretty intense digestive issues.

All this time, about once a year, someone I knew died from suicide. I began keeping intensive notes comparing what they went through with what I went through. Doug constantly reminded me that I wasn’t a suicide threat, but all I could think of was that if psychologists can predict who will and who won’t follow through, then why is it still happening?

Eventually, I made peace with my demons. There were sometimes extended periods where I simply wouldn’t exercise or push myself creatively because I knew that risked triggering a spike in my depression. Eventually, I learned that was actually making things worse. Dealing with suicidal feelings for thirty minutes is far better than a veil of melancholy that lasts for months.

We’re complex creatures with brains and bodies designed for a very different environment from where we live. Emotional issues are just one of the many discomforts we live with. I don’t particularly like waking up in the morning either, but if you want to enjoy the day, you have to do it.

Suicidal feelings, suicidal thoughts, and suicidal actions are all closely tied to ADHD. Every day, they learn more about these relationships. It manifests differently in boys and girls, but it manifests itself in them all. If you deal with these issues, there is help, effective help, that can save your life.

Everyone suffers, and we all suffer differently. You must find your own path through it, but never be afraid to confront and discuss it.