My Daughter’s Mental Illness

Yesterday was my beautiful daughter, Kimberly Joy’s birthday. It is hard to believe that my second child, born on June 2, 1982, after only four hours of back labor is a college graduate, married, and employed 36 year old woman.  It has been a challenging road to get here and perhaps we missed all the small warning signs that something was different in her brain chemistry until she was in college and had her first break in 2003.Kimberly Joy was a planned pregnancy.  I am a lucky woman in that I had regular periods and like my mother, I was very fertile.  Determined to give my children the best start possible, I was a compliant expectant mother with all three of my birth children.  I gladly took my prenatal vitamins, ate all the best known foods, took daily walks, got good sleep, no drugs, no alcohol, no smoke, no harsh chemicals, and no caffeine. I rubbed and talked to my belly and listened to good music.  I was happy and stress was kept to a minimal.  I made all of my doctor’s prenatal appointments.

It was at one of those early doctor’s appointments that the OB informed me that something in my blood work looked abnormal and that I might have to consider ending the pregnancy.  He had my labs redone.  He didn’t go into any details, but I was concerned.  We went to church that week and prayed.  The following week, my labs turned up normal.  The doctor could provide no explanation.  I thought perhaps my labs had gotten mixed up with someone else’s or maybe God performed a miracle.  I never suspected until later that perhaps the labs were briefly revealing a mutation.  Medicine is always learning and in 1982, they may not have been equipped with the knowledge to catch certain problems.  In truth, I don’t know if they are able to catch this problem yet.

The birth was fast and Kim was the most beautiful curly-haired and extremely alert baby I have ever seen.  She looked like a living doll.  People would stop me on the street or in the store to comment on how beautiful and animated she was.  The pediatrician commented that she had never encountered a new born who was as alert as she was.  At her first office check up, the pediatrician commented again about her alertness, adding how unusual it was that as a newborn, her eyes followed her around the room.  She asked how things were going and I said, “She doesn’t sleep at all during the day”.  As any mother of a baby knows, we depend on those naps to get other things done, including catching up on sleep.  My then three year old still took afternoon naps, but not this newborn.  She was otherwise healthy and the pediatrician suggested I simply find help to give me some reprieve.  My next door neighbor and friend, Kathy, came over every afternoon and took Kim so that I could clean house, cook dinner, and maybe take a short nap. She was a lifesaver and I am forever indebted to her.

I’ve often thought that Kim’s lack of napping during those first months accounted for her doing everything early.  She was sitting up and drinking from a sippy cup on her own at 5 months, walking at 8 1/2 months and singing the lyrics to her favorite songs, “What’s Love Got to Do With It” and “Beat It” at 18 months.  She was a side show everywhere we went.  She looked too little to be walking and certainly too little to be singing, which she did relentlessly.

As the years progressed,  I noticed two disturbing things about her: one was her incredible imagination and the outgrowth of that was constant lying.  She made up incredible stories and passed them off as truth and she had imaginary friends that she believed to be real.  The second was a high level of impulsivity.  When she was hot, wet, cold or uncomfortable in any way, the situation had to be dealt with immediately.  When she wanted something, she would simply take it.  She began to steal from her older sister and from me.  If either of us was missing something, I would simply go to her room and find it.  For all these behaviors, she was disciplined.  I explained to her about the little boy who cried wolf and how if she kept telling lies, no one would believe her when she told the truth.  I explained the virtue of patience and the consequences of stealing.  She was the child who endured the most restrictions, monitoring, and punishments throughout her childhood.  But she just became better at hiding her most troublesome behaviors.

It was during her freshmen year at San Francisco State University that the first signs of mental illness reared its head.  It began with what I thought was situational depression.  San Francisco State is located in an area of the city that remains overcast nearly all the time.  In addition to the gloomy weather, she was the first to come across the body of a man who had committed suicide by jumping off the top of the Student Union where she worked on campus.  After that year, she transferred to Cal State University, Northridge where she could “C the SUN”  as the acronym for the school is CSUN.

However, that was when the problems really began.  Working with college students, I was well aware of the fact that many with mental illness experience their first episode in late adolescence.  Her roommates called to report that she hadn’t slept for four days and wasn’t making sense.  We wasted no time taking her to the mental ward at UCLA where she was admitted and later diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

The subsequent years have been a challenge for her, her husband, and we her family.  I’m very glad that she tells her own story of struggle with mental illness in her own blog, www.mybipolarvoice.wordpress.com 

As a parent, I’m grateful for the ability to read books on the topic, such as “The Bipolar Handbook: Real-Life Questions with Up-to-Date Answers” by Dr. Wes Burgess.  What has also been extremely helpful was a twelve week “Family to Family” course offered by NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness.  My husband and I learned a lot from going to those “free” classes each week along with other families seeking ways to support and also deal with mental health issues.  NAMI is an advocacy group and offers many areas of support for the mentally ill and their support circles.

Every year, I participate in the Ventura NAMI Walks event, their major fundraiser. I use the opportunity to ask friends and colleagues to sponsor me for the walk as another way to help remove the stigma around mental illness and to raise awareness about NAMI as a resource.   Mental illness touches everyone in some way and it is time to begin dealing with it in smart and empathic ways.

So, happy birthday, Kimberly Joy.  You are a gift to me and to the world, not only because your voice on your experience with mental illness will be helpful to so many, but because the woman you are rings true of your middle name, “Joy”.