The Best Advice I've Got
When it comes to mental illness, it's difficult to find good help. Psychiatry can be a real guessing game if you don't fall neatly into a classic diagnosis, and even then, it's not easy to find the right treatment. And crisis intervention usually doesn't go beyond that; no one is checking to see that you take your meds once you've left the hospital. So when it comes to finding care, I recommend first finding an advocate (a loyal friend or family member, or even a social worker) to aggressively pursue the best doctors and therapists available to you. Waiting for the right doctor to "accept new patients" can be agonizing, but stay on that waiting list while you get started with someone more accessible. It can be worth the wait long-term. After a few years with my local psychiatrist and little improvement, my husband sought out "the smartest person he could find" in psychiatry in nearby Boston. We now drive over an hour each way to see my current psychiatrist, but for the first time in a decade, I feel I'm truly in good hands.
When going through the initial process of finding help and getting started on treatment, I recommend making your life as easy as possible. If that means eating off of paper plates to avoid doing dishes, so be it. If that means limiting your shower to 60 seconds a day, fine. Get creative when it comes to doing the bare minimum. If you have people to help you, that's always great. But if you're on your own, lowering your expectations for yourself for the time being can be key. Having a mental health crisis is hard enough without worrying about what clothes you're wearing, what foods you're eating, and keeping your apartment spic and span. Hire a cleaner if you can afford it, or just do the bare minimum to get by. Eat the same thing every day and buy your groceries online and have them delivered. Pull out some sensible wardrobe basics and make them your uniform for now. This is not the time to challenge yourself too much. It's about taking your meds, getting to therapy, and taking out the trash when it's full. Do whatever you have to do to get through the day. For me that meant watching YouTube all day, every day, and making a checklist for my meals and hygiene. I exercised when I could, but other than going to my appointments, I rarely left the house.
If you find yourself beyond this stage, like I do right now, where things are slowly but surely improving and you're trying to get your life back, I have different advice. I think this is the time to look for a kernel of interest in something to reconnect you to the outside world. Something extremely small and specific that won't overwhelm you, and something so easy that it doesn't feel productive. For me, that small kernel of something is my wardrobe. Clothes seem frivolous and not as lofty as actual "fashion," so I'm not intimidated by them. It's more of a guilty pleasure. I like deliberating over clothes, clearing them out, carefully replacing them, finding the perfect item. I like having a capsule wardrobe and taking care of my things and arranging my clothes aesthetically. Does any of this make me any money or save the world? No. But getting into this one little thing is helping me get better. My interests have expanded to reading books on style and fashion, listening to audiobooks about sustainability and ethics in the fashion industry, and developing my own personal style in a way that empowers me and gives me confidence. If you don't have a "kernel" to start with, here are some ideas that hopefully spark an idea that's right for you:
Look at interior design magazines. Pick an actor or actress that you like and watch every movie they've ever been in. Experiment with makeup and figure out what you like. Pick a favorite musician and listen to every album they have. Plan a fantasy vacation and look online for all the details of your imagined itinerary. Take up some form of crafting: knitting, jewelry-making, crochet, scrapbooking, origami. Get an adult (or children's) coloring book. Try baking something. Find recipes you'd like to try and put them in a box. Look for the best places to get tacos in your area and try them all out, leaving your reviews on Yelp. Set a small fitness goal and come up with an explicit plan to achieve it. Learn to touch-type. Watch decluttering videos on YouTube. Go to thrift stores and hunt for things to resell on Ebay. Read a whole series of romance novels. Learn to play solitaire. Start doing Sudoku or crossword puzzles. Pick a specific painting you like and look up everything the artist has painted online. Look at vintage clothing on Etsy. Clean out a drawer or cupboard and make it look like something on PInterest. Draw cartoon characters, even if they're terrible. Watch an entire baseball game on TV. Watch hip-hop dance videos on YouTube. Listen to an audiobook of a biography of someone you admire. Get into a serial podcast. Plan out your meals for the week and make an exact grocery list of what you need. Alphabetize your books by author, or organize them by color. Watch a foreign-language movie without subtitles (or with). Make an herb garden for your kitchen. Look up Japanese toilets on Amazon.
The idea here is to do something really easy- so easy that it doesn't make you want to just lie down. If these suggestions are too difficult, scale it back to where it feels feasible. And eventually your interest and curiosity can grow from there.