Mental illness isn't funny

It's very, very scary. Have you ever seen "A Beautiful Mind" with Russell Crowe starring as the super intelligent college professor who battled schizophrenia? It is based on a true story. Watch it sometime if you haven't already seen it. Very well done, and I think it gives people who don't deal with mental conditions a glimpse into the world of someone who does. I've come very close to mental illness over the last couple weekends through some of the guests here at the campground.

One of them, Jack and I have known for years. He's been struggling with bi-polar disorder most of his life. He came in to the campground a couple of weeks ago for a get together of the motorcycle group we all belong to. Lives fairly local, and seems to have taken a serious liking to me and Jack. He managed to get his meds mixed up while he was here and started taking 2 doses a day instead of one, which is not a good thing. After three days of this, he was seeing things that just weren't there - bad things. He knew somebody in the camp was plotting to kill him, and they had code names like "Evil-1".

This is where it's easy to make fun of somebody who's going through this - if you don't know them. These things were very very real to him, to the point that his fight-or-flight sense took over. Thankfully, he chose to leave and didn't hurt anybody, but when he started up his truck, we didn't know what was going on in his mind. He made it as far as the gas station a mile up the road before he stopped and went in to ask the clerk for the phone to call 911. Jack had followed him and was able to convince the police that our friend was having a bad reaction to his medication, that his wife was only an hour away and she was on her way to get him (which she was by that time).

I'm really glad that he was at our campground, where we know him and we try to look out for him, instead of at one of the others he'd been going to last year. As it was, he was somewhere that he trusted somebody, and we were able to calm him down. Even after he was calm, he would float in and out of lucid conversation - sometimes he was still talking about what "Evil-1" was saying right that moment.

His wife later told me that was the worst break he'd had in 22 years, and apologized all over the place for us having to go through that with him. Um... where else, besides home of course, would you have rather he'd been? Chances are, he's considered a nusiance at some of the other campground because he is pretty weird, even when lucid. I don't know that somebody else would have gone after him.

And, it turns out, that the camper right next to him takes medication for... you guessed it... bi-polar disorder, also. He'd been with us a week and a half at that point, and had been fine. He confided in us after the incident with our friend that he had the condition, too.

Shortly after that, he started acting strange. And stranger. And stranger still. He spent Saturday riding laps around the perimeter road of the campground on a full dress Harley Davidson, in full leather gear and a rainsuit over top of it. Not exactly something you want to do on a warm day, in gravel, with a bike that weighs as much as an elephant. Yesterday morning, he was asleep in the parking area in front of the office, wrapped up in a towel, according to some of our other guests.

We'd gone to church and missed it all. When we got back after church, he'd packed up and left, shoving a bunch of travelers checks under the office door to take care of his bill. He called while we were at church yesterday evening and left a message on the machine that he'd checked out and was doing fine, on his way back home. He was here almost three weeks - I wonder how much of his medicine he brought with him.

He's a very nice gentleman, very respectful and courteous. Had he not told us about his condition, we wouldn't have had a clue until he started going weird on us. I think he may have run out of his meds and decided to try to wing it for awhile. I hope he wings it back home safely.

I never realized that bi-polar disorder and schizophrenia go so closely together. Both of these guys, intelligent, interesting people, take meds for bi-polar, and displayed symptoms of schizophrenia when their meds got out of whack (I'm guessing the second guy's were out of whack,anyway). I'm sure it's possible to have one without the other, but if left untreated or over treated long enough, does bi-polar trigger schizoprenia? I don't know, but I do know that it's scary enough to be on the outside looking in, wandering what I can do to help. I don't want to know what it's like on the inside looking out, knowing what is going on and not able to stop it.