Hey, what’s up? My name is Dennis Heil and I am the creator of this website. My diagnosis is Type 2 Bipolar Disorder and Major Depression Disorder with high-functioning autism.
This website and what I’m trying to accomplish are the products of a long, long journey that started when I was about fifteen years old, put a gun to my head, and pulled the trigger.
I didn’t understand what was going on, but I had started bipolar cycling around that time. The confluence of the mental and emotional isolation I felt from the high-functioning autism combined with the extreme nature of bipolar unwellness convinced me that I shouldn’t exist. So I acted on that belief. The feeling that really drove it was a sense of finality, that suicide was all there was for me.
The bullet turned out to be a dud.
I didn’t tell a soul about my suicide attempt until I was almost 30 years old. By then, I had racked up another half-dozen passive suicide attempts, self-harmed, engaged in substance abuse, was temporarily homeless, lived in poverty, lost dozens of jobs, got myself kicked out of college, destroyed several relationships and friendships, turned my life inside out, and some other shit I only have vague memories of that wasn’t good.
On a sunny Sunday afternoon in 2009, I was sat upon the couch, staring out the door of the one bedroom apartment I shared with my then-fiancee. I had been severely unstable, escalating for weeks, and not sleeping more than two hours a night for who knows how long. At some point, a switch flicked in my mind. My mental illness created the thought, “Since you’re not happy and you’ll never be happy, why should anyone else? Make everyone else feel just as fucking awful as you do. Here’s how to do it…”
The intensity in my head felt like something was trying to tear my brain in half. But when that switch flipped, the chaos and confusion went away and was replaced with the same sense of finality I had felt when I put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger. Except this time, my mental illness was telling me to project it all outward instead of at myself.
As I sat there zoned out with my thoughts being tossed around like a tugboat in a hurricane, I sort of noticed my ex-fiancee walk across the room in front of me. She bent over, picked up her cat, turned around, and dropped the cat. The sound of the cat hitting the floor jarred me from my thoughts, causing me to look up at her.
I remember the moment vividly.
She was wearing an emerald green, long sleeved turtle neck shirt with high-waisted mom jeans, standing a few paces away. She clasped and rubbed her hands together in front of her. I looked in her eyes and saw an expression I had never seen from her before. And then she said to me, “Dennis, what are you thinking about? That look on your face is scaring me.” She took a tentative half-step toward me, and then stepped back to where she stood.
Now, as someone who lands on the autistic spectrum, my brain doesn’t naturally interpret body language. I generally have to pay attention and manually interpret or I miss context through body language and facial expressions, but we had been together for years. I was incredibly familiar with her body language, but she was looking at me in a way she never had before. It caused me to stop and think, “Why is she looking at me like that? What does that facial expression mean?”
After a few moments of consideration I realized I was looking at fear.
That realization caused me to think, “Why is she looking at me with fear? I’d never do anything to hurt her.” And then my mind finally processed her words, asking me what I was thinking about, at which time I actually stopped to examine what I was thinking about. At that moment, my mind anchored back into reality and crashed into the darkest depression I’ve ever experienced with all the grace of a passenger jet hitting a mountainside.
The experience was surreal. It was like every bit of who I am and who I thought I was was stripped away and replaced with this monster that I couldn’t recognize. I felt betrayed by my own brain. I’m not exaggerating when I say it gave me an existential crisis, which isn’t the best thing to have when you’re also having a mental breakdown. Overall, I’d rate the whole experience 0 out of 5 stars.
Two things happened the next day. The first was that I called around to every place I could find or think of that might be able to get me a mental evaluation. The second was that I planned a suicide that would have a low chance of being interrupted or discovered until I was dead. I determined that if the psych didn’t find anything wrong with me I was going to kill myself rather than risk losing control of my mind again and doing something horrific.
But, it didn’t come to that. I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder and a new chapter in my life started.
Why should I trust you?
The short answer is that you shouldn’t. All I am is a mental patient with a website who is sharing his personal experiences with mental illness, loving someone with a mental illness, and the pursuit of wellness and recovery.
I am not a mental health professional of any kind. I have no certifications or credentials past my own lived experiences. That being said, I am a firm believer in science and that our deeply flawed mental health industry is the best chance we mentally ill people have for wellness and recovery.
You should be skeptical of anything and everyone on the internet no matter the source – including me. My opinions are my own and they aren’t necessarily correct. And even if they are factually correct, they might not apply to you or make sense for your life.
Always defer to your certified professionals for medical or legal advice.
How can your content help me?
The honest answer is I don’t know. Wellness and recovery is an individual path, though we’re all roughly headed in the same direction. I never set out with the goal to create an end all, be all statement of “this is what you need to do!” Instead, I just wanted to give people a place to start to try to clear some of the fog of confusion moving through a difficult time so they can find their own way on their own path.
How can I follow what you’re doing?
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