The ambulance ride – I can barely remember. But that month inside, how could I forget it: hospitalized for the first time in a psychiatric clinic. Diagnosis: depression due to bipolar disorder. Bars on the windows. Two people per room. White coats. Everything so aseptic. Am I still capable of feeling emotions? A pill to stabilize me, an injection to calm me down. A swing of medications. Doctors and nurses are there to care for me and help me but in the meantime I cancel myself out. I annihilate in a vortex of apathy, nonsense and claustrophobia. I sink.
“That Month” is a subjective journey. What I feel and what I think merges with what I see. My gaze turns somberly toward objects, spaces and reflections. Inside me, the emptiness takes shape. Before I fall, I feel like I have power over everything, I feel hyper creative and hyper lucid. Then it happens: a moment later here I am, sunk, motionless and bewildered.
I suffer from type 2 bipolar disorder, and my depression is cyclical. The ups and downs alternate, both can last weeks or months, both are unpredictable and, above all, detached from events. Roller coasters are a fitting metaphor for what I experience through the months and years. During some periods, these roller coasters take me up, way up. During others, they drag me down—further and further, infinitely down. And I struggle, I struggle desperately to do what I should and what I want, but the fight is cruelly uneven: if the “beast” has decided that I will fall, I simply will fall, and there is no way to get back up. At least, not immediately.
In the psychiatric clinic, I truly hit rock bottom: I was apathetic and distant, from others and from myself, and I had the perception that everything around me had lost its sense. In the meantime, I felt myself dying inside. Can you imagine what it is like to spend a month in a non-place, in a non-time?
I chose to tell my story, and show myself personally, to raise awareness about the stigma surrounding mental disorders and to spark a conversation about rehabilitation facilities for those who suffer from them. At times, I feel like a “survivor”: I am a survivor of excesses. Of depressions. Of suicidal urges. I will always carry in my heart what I felt during that month. Today, and until a next fall, I am a survivor.
