To the abyss and back: Area women share how far they fell with bipolar disorder

Beverly Northcutt finds strength in the word of God. She looks to her Bible for Scripture, but also to hand-written notes in the margins. One marks the worst chapter of her life: hospitalized in 1996, incapacitated by a nervous breakdown.

Having struggled with bipolar disorder -- and misguided treatment for it -- since 1990, her body and mind seemed to have been pushed too far.

"When they put me in the hospital ... I wasn't even on what they call the normal functioning level. I couldn't do a simple 'Jeopardy' puzzle. I couldn't do a word find," she said. "I couldn't do just normal everyday stuff. I cried all the time."

When she tried to read her Bible, she couldn't. Even reading overwhelmed her faculties.

It was terrifying. She was lucid but helpless, surrounded by family but isolated by a crippling inner tempest unable to quiet the fear that wondered aloud whether this awful state was permanent.

"It made you feel like you've lost all capability, and you're not going to be able to get it back," she said. "What if I can't do anything anymore? What if I am totally mentally ill?"

But eventually, as medicine began to work, she began to recover. When words returned to her, she wrote right there in the margin: "I can read again."

Michelle

Michelle Davis finds strength in her family. Her parents offer a model of perseverance, and she does the same for her daughters. Both help her keep her bipolar disorder in check.

"I always felt close to [my parents], but I think with everything that they have supported me through, they've never given up on me," she said. "[That] has drawn me closer to them."

In turn, she wants her daughters to know she'll never give up on them, either, because she knows what it means to need help. She knows the thick, all-permeating shame that waits in the morning after attempting suicide. She's known it half a dozen times -- first at 13, and as recently as 2010.

"I feel like I put them through hell," she said.

Michelle Davis helps patients at Community Counseling Center after coming through a half-dozen suicide attempts, including her first at age 13.Laura Simon

But she knows the inexhaustible love of her family. And like Northcutt, she knows the meaning of salvation.

Both now work with the Community Counseling Center, using their experiences to make the road a little easier for people struggling with mental illness. Northcutt serves as director at Gallery of Inspiration in downtown Cape Girardeau, which showcases artwork patients at the center have done for therapy. Davis is a peer specialist: someone to whom patients can go for the sort of empathy a therapist can't always provide.

"If they're going through, let's say, a loss of a loved one or say a loss of a home, I mean, that's something I've experienced; I've lost a home due to my illness because of my manic-stage episode," she said. "Being able to connect with them whenever they're telling you their story, if you are speaking with them on their level, I'm not throwing it out of a book; something that maybe they're not comprehending or grasping at that point, so sharing part of my story helps. ... I've had a lot of clients tell me, 'I'd rather talk to you because I feel like you understand more so than my therapist or my doctor,' just because I can relate to them, and I think that's huge for them to understand that they're not alone."

The work suits her. She remembers the limitations of therapy, having been passed off to four therapists before finding one that could help.

Diagnosis

Hers is not an uncommon diagnostic odyssey. Northcutt spent six years on a medication carousel because it was assumed she suffered from the same acute depression that at one point caused her mother to be hospitalized.

But in a way, Northcutt's six-year wait makes her one of the lucky ones. The National Institute of Mental Health found the lag between a patient's first symptoms and an effective diagnosis and care averages eight to 10 years.

Bipolar diagnoses come in two degrees. Davis is diagnosed with Type 1; Northcutt, Type 2. Generally, Type 1 sufferers such as Davis experience more severe mood swings with intense phases of manic energy and equally intense depressions. Northcutt's condition has a slightly more subtle manifestation, characterized by periods of relative calm and gradually mounting depression.

The diagnoses aren't always easy to swallow.

"I was mad," Northcutt recalled. "I was really angry."

Having worked up to that point in the mental-health field at a residential-care facility, being confronted with the prospect of mental illness seemed an indignity.

"I had to quit working," she said. "And now I had to learn how to be the patient instead of the professional. ... I was very angry for a long time."

For Davis, however, it came as a relief. Her entire life, she had been gently written off as "the drama queen" or "the nut for a child." All of a sudden, she wasn't "crazy Aunt Shorty," as her family called her. She just had a chemical imbalance.

And the preceding nine months suddenly made more sense. Davis had been in a consistent manic stage during that time, juggling 40-plus-hour work weeks, cosmetology school and motherhood at once.

It got to where she was sleeping only a couple of hours every night.

Then the wheels fell off.

She quit her job on a whim. She quit cosmetology school halfway through a haircut, in tears over a rude client's remark. She went home and slept for four days before her family took her to get help.

"Once I hit the full-blown depression part, I felt like I was in a hole in the ground with a lid over me, and there was no way out."

She started suspecting, irrationally, her family had forsaken her.

"I felt like I had nothing left," she said.

"My mind just wasn't working. It just totally shut down, like I'm the [most] worthless thing on earth."

But she said she never would have suspected it was a mental disorder. Her perspective had been warped by the episode itself.

"I would have never went on my own. ... To [my family], it was like something's not right with her," she said. "I just felt like I was extremely worn out and tired."

Mother's suicide attempt

In Northcutt's case though, indignation concealed an icy, pointed fear.

Before her diagnosis, she had watched her mother's life derailed by depression.

"She goes, 'I'm just heartsick,'" Northcutt recalled her mother telling her one day. "I said, 'What do you mean? You need to go to the hospital? Let's go.' She said, 'No. My heart hurts. I'm just so depressed, and I can't do nothing about it. I'm cold. I don't have no feelings at all.'"

She was prescribed several medications. For whatever reason, they failed.

One night, Northcutt felt compelled to pay her mother a visit.

"Momma's going to try to kill herself," she told her roommate. "It was like a, just ... I knew it."

She asked to stay at her mother's house for the night to keep an eye on her. Her mother angrily refused.

That night was near Christmas, and after crossing "Maw-maw" off all the gift tags beneath the tree, Northcutt's mother left a note, took as many pills as she could and laid down.

The pills counteracted each other. She survived but was institutionalized, and Northcutt and the rest of her family were left at a loss.

Northcutt worried she'd been doomed to the same trajectory. During adolescence, she had known her own heartsickness -- a fascination, even a perverse longing for a way out.

She remembers dropping high-school sports, instead spending afternoons on the riverbank looking skyward.

"[I'd say,] 'God if you're there, turn that sign around for me.' I've always had a deep faith, but in those times, I just got really despondent," she said. "The thoughts of, 'How can I kill myself without it being ... How can I just go to sleep?'"

One night during adulthood, working for the residential-care facility, she was sorting clients' medications alone. The thoughts returned. She poured out a handful of assorted pills and looked at them.

"This will be the way," she told herself, but something stuck in her mind.

"If it doesn't work, then I've stolen these pills. And I don't want that on my record," she said, then laughed at the recollection. "Isn't that silly? But that's what I thought. With my luck, it wouldn't have worked."

Northcutt came close, but never tried to kill herself. Others, such as Davis, are not so fortunate.

Self-harm

From an early age, Davis showed a tendency to express frustration and distress through self-harm. At 13, upset over an argument with her parents, she consumed an entire bottle of aspirin and passed out. She remembers it being less a fully articulated suicide attempt and more an adolescent outburst. But it was risky and worrisome regardless.

Even after she was diagnosed, neither she nor her husband had learned how to cope with her emotional symptoms. There were times when she didn't take steps to control her anger. There were times when he would tell her to, "Suck it up."

"Things would get way out of control," she recalled. The memories are painful, but she doesn't hold any grudge toward her ex-husband. "On a family member, or husband or wife, that's probably just as hard of a job dealing with it as the person with the illness."

Within a year of her diagnosis, he asked for a divorce.

"It totally triggered something that; I didn't want to live anymore," she recalled.

So she got into her car and drove it into a telephone pole.

"At that point in time, I think my mind was, 'You're not worth anything,'" she said. "'Nobody wants you. Just end it.'"

Most recently, she overdosed on benzodiazepines after a family event sparked another depressive episode. Thankfully, that was her last serious tangle with her disorder. But the emotional scars remain.

"You have that shame. That sense of shame," she said. "Then you're going around trying to fix things that you've ... been destructive with."

Recovery

But for Davis and Northcutt, once they began receiving adequate treatment, their lives turned around.

Northcutt met her current husband Charles in psychosocial rehab group. He was there for his schizophrenia. They've been married 12 years.

"I knew he was the one," Northcutt said with a laugh. "It just took him some convincing."

She worked her way from small-scale assistant work to full-time employment. She since has earned an associate's degree in health-care administration.

Davis worked her way off disability and even off of medication. She reiterated medication is a necessary part of treatment for most people, but with her doctors, she learned other coping techniques. She adheres to a rigorous daily routine and works out with her daughters for family time and to keep her mind level.

She said even though some of her journey is hard to swallow, she looks back and wouldn't change it. It's given her the tools to help people others can't relate to. But sometimes it's hard work for the big-hearted.

"I meet with people every day who don't have family, have very few friends," she said. "When I'm talking with them and they tell me they don't have any family, that hurts, because you just want to help them all but you can't save them all."

Her journey has brought her closer to her family as well.

"When I say family, we are very tight. I can't imagine not having family."

And her family is growing. Her oldest daughter recently gave birth to Davis' first grandbaby.

"He's a year and three months old. I have two daughters and a grandson," she said, smiling. "It's heaven."

tgraef@semissourian.com

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