Finding a way out of the dark
Mental illness isn’t a choice — or an anomaly
Bruce Purcell lived 58 years before he understood why he was the way he was.
He was born in Orange County, California — “up the street from Disneyland,” he says — but grew up in the Midwest. As a kid, Bruce minded his rigid, traditional, often-overbearing mother. Despite having dyslexia, he worked hard in school. As a teen, he juggled part-time gigs and worked hard at them, too.
As an adult, Bruce started his own handyman business. He drove a bus taking kids with mental and physical disabilities to public school. He managed apartments. He made microfilm. He worked as a hospital cook. He drove a city bus. He ran a home-decoration business.
He has worked a lot of jobs in his 64 years. He says his passion, determination and energy made him the ideal worker to his bosses and colleagues. Until they didn’t.
This same boundless passion and energy sometimes shifted into something else, something darker. His most positive qualities could shift, at any moment, into rages, violent episodes that often left him exhausted, disoriented
and physically sick.
“You’ve seen ‘The Incredible Hulk’? That’s what it looks like,” Bruce says. “I turn into another person. I’m violent and destructive. I’m screaming and yelling and wanting to break things. And I’ve never hurt anybody, but the thoughts are there.”
Bruce hasn’t had a manic rage in almost five years. But getting to this point of stability and freedom took 58 years of paralyzing lows, euphoric highs and Hulk-like rages. That’s because Bruce lived those first 58 years of his life with multiple, undiagnosed mental illnesses.
Bruce’s reality isn’t an anomaly. Mental illnesses are common in the United States. One in five American adults has one, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.
And people living with mental illnesses — Bruce included — will tell you, straight up: Your idea of what it means to live with a mental illness is probably wrong.
Mental illness, they say, isn’t one-size-fits-all or a choice, and it doesn’t look like what movies and television shows make it out to be. It’s nuanced, highly personal and biological.
It’s the farthest thing from being a choice.
Bruce
Bruce Purcell’s home is deceiving. On the outside, it belongs in any average Arizona subdivision: tan, stuccoed, with a single paloverde tree in the center of the graveled front yard. When Bruce opens the door, though, it’s apparent the house is anything but average. Forty or so paintings, an easel, paints and blank canvases fill the front room, his in-home art studio.
Bruce builds the canvases — basic rectangular ones and oddly-shaped 3D ones, depending on the day — and his husband, local artist Kurt Joachim Von Behrmann, paints them. Kurt, who has bipolar disorder, often paints about his relationship with his mental illness.
Bruce points to a painting of a yellow and blue fish, hanging above the TV in the living room.
“That one’s my favorite,” Bruce says. “The fish.” Bruce sits down and takes a sip of water. He always keeps a drink nearby. One of his medications gives him cotton mouth.
Bruce takes medications to manage bipolar disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, borderline personality disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and seasonal affective disorder.
“And just to show you that I’m crazy, I’ve been president of my homeowners association for 15 years,” he says. He leans back in his chair and lets out a belly laugh.
Humor is one of the many coping skills Bruce has learned to utilize over the years when he’s low.
“Really dark humor at times,” he says, sitting on his cream-colored couch across from Kurt.
They met online 17 years ago. “I actually ran an ad on the AOL ‘looking to meet’ section,” he says. “Two people responded. His was the second one, and we really just hit it off right away.”
They went on their first date the Friday after messaging on AOL and have been together since.
Bruce and Kurt say they understand each other in a way most people can’t. Kurt, like Bruce, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder years after they got together.
He knows what it means to be lower than low, and what it means to feel manic without even knowing what it is. He also knows why joking about it, however twisted it might sound, is sometimes the only way to get through an episode.
“I can tell when he’s about to get depressed,” Bruce says. “He’ll usually tell me, ‘Make me laugh.’ We spend most of the time together mostly cracking each other up.”
Bruce couldn’t always joke about his symptoms. Life was “pretty miserable,” he says, until he found out why he felt and thought the way he did and got treatment for it. “I didn’t know what to do, where to go,” he says. “There wasn’t a lot of help out there — or if there was, they weren’t pointing me in the right direction.”
Bruce first sought help for his mental health by accident. One day at work, many years ago, his heart started pounding, hard. He began sweating profusely and struggled to breathe. He thought he was having a heart attack. His employer reacted accordingly and sent him to the hospital. The emergency-room doctors told him he was having a panic attack.
He needed help, they told him. But they didn’t tell him where he could find help. He didn’t know where to begin. The next day, he woke up feeling terrible.
“I woke up and wanted to kill myself,” Bruce says. “It was Friday the 13th.”
He had what are known as suicidal ideations — suicidal thoughts and a plan to do it — but for some reason, he called the Crisis Response Network. That call changed his life, he says.
“It didn’t happen overnight,” he says. “But I always say Friday the 13th is my lucky day now. Because it’s the day I found out I was mentally ill.”
Juliana
Juliana Swenson started feeling depressed shortly after she immigrated to the United States from Brazil. When she made the move to Los Angeles in the summer of 1989, she had just turned 17.
Juliana, a self-described rebellious teenager, moved with her boyfriend, a 39-year-old Brazilian she surfed with regularly in Rio. A year later, she married him. A lawyer had advised them that because Juliana’s boyfriend had obtained a green card through his American employer, if she married him, she would be able to get one, too.
As she tackled the green-card application process, her grandparents in Brazil fell ill and died. In 1994, five years after she moved to Los Angeles, the Northridge earthquake rocked the city. She was living near the epicenter when the 6.7 magnitude quake hit at 4:31 a.m. Jan. 17.
That was the cherry on top for both Juliana and her now-ex-husband. They were traumatized and decided they needed to move again.
“That’s why we came to Phoenix,” she says, sitting at the black desk in her Sun City home. “For a year after it, I was still waking up at 4 a.m.”
These experiences weighed on Juliana’s psyche, and her depression worsened. Logically speaking, Juliana knew seeing a mental-health professional would help her. She had seen how untreated bipolar disorder affected her father’s quality of life. But she didn’t have insurance, and mental-health professionals were too expensive to pay for out of pocket in the United States.
On an infrequent visit back to Rio de Janeiro, and in a deep depression, Juliana saw her father’s psychiatrist.
The psychiatrist initially diagnosed her with major depression, though he had a suspicion that wasn’t the illness Juliana was dealing with.
“He thought I was bipolar,” Juliana says. He told her that people whose parents have bipolar disorder are likely to develop it, especially after experiencing traumatic events like natural disasters or deaths. “But he couldn’t treat me as bipolar because I wasn’t going to be treated there (in Brazil).”
So he put her on Prozac, a commonly prescribed antidepressant medication. Prozac didn’t help. Juliana didn’t have depression; she had bipolar disorder.
Antidepressants like Prozac aren’t effective for people with bipolar disorder, but mood stabilizers are. The Prozac, she says, made her “numb,” and with the untreated bipolar symptoms, she spiraled her into the worst depressive episode she can remember.
“I didn’t feel suicidal,” she says, “But I thought dying would take the pain away.”
As Juliana describes it, her unmedicated brain dissociated from reality and convinced her that everyone she knew and loved was out to get her. She felt so paranoid at one point that she plotted to run away from her ex-husband. She bought a plane ticket to Rio, wrote him a letter explaining why she had to leave and left for the
airport without saying anything.
Her ex-husband persuaded her to stay after the airline called their home with an alert that her flight was delayed. But her distrust didn’t dissipate. The omnipresent depression and delusions clouded her judgment every moment.
She could muster enough mental and physical energy to only do two things: watch Oprah Winfrey’s TV show every day, and read every book on the host’s signature book-club list.
She had an epiphany: The characters in the books Oprah suggested suffered in ways Juliana could never imagine.
“And I thought … ‘What am I doing?’ I should just rise above it and do something,” Juliana says.
She made moves. She studied graphic design and animation at Glendale Community College and, after graduating, earned an internship at a Phoenix-based advertising agency. The agency hired her six months into her internship, full time as an associate art director.
Juliana experienced her first and only euphoric mania after this. She became obsessed with the idea of feng shui, of redecorating and updating her home.
“I went and bought new furniture, a new Mac computer,” she says. She rolls her eyes and exhales. “I bought a bunch of stuff thinking I had a bunch of money.”
Typical manic behavior, she says. “I was completely delusional.”
The feng shui spending spree was a final wake-up call. After the manic episode, and finally equipped with health insurance, Juliana could afford to see a psychiatrist. She was 27 when she saw him.
The doctor confirmed the Brazilian psychiatrist’s suspicions: She had bipolar disorder. Her illness caused her to have depressions more frequently than manias.
“That psychiatrist saved my life,” she says. “After we figured out the combination of meds, I felt normal.”
Medication and therapy have allowed her to maintain that sense of normalcy the last 18 years.
Now she is a creative “Juliana of all trades.” She substitute-teaches, photo-edits for a Scottsdale-based photography studio, sells original designs on Etsy, runs her blog, “The Curious Brazilian.” The list goes on.
Juliana says people close to her usually act surprised when she tells them she has bipolar disorder.
“They see I’m calm, they see I’m usually very understanding and they don’t see me expressing strong emotions,” she says. “So they’re shocked I’m bipolar.”
She wishes people without mental illnesses would take the time to understand this: A mental illness doesn’t have to render a person incapable of doing everyday things like working and socializing.
She wishes people didn’t jump to conclusions about people with mental illnesses.
“They don’t try to understand. They just go with their beliefs and that’s it,” she says. “We need to educate people about mental illness. We need to talk about it.”
Finding recovery
After Friday the 13th, Bruce was able to embark on his own recovery journey. That’s a key word, Bruce says: journey. “Recovery is a journey, not a destination,” he says, as if he’s recited the phrase 100 times before.
Bruce’s recovery got worse before it got better. He lost jobs. He had to deal with the debilitating mental and physical side effects of balancing his regimen of medications until they got it just right. He was hospitalized eight times in a three-year period because of his manic rages and the suicidal and homicidal ideations that came with them.
“It was three years of no fun,” Bruce says.
Each visit was a gradual wake-up call.
“Each day was a different light bulb,” he says. “I learned more about myself and about my illnesses and what I had to do to get into recovery.”
But Bruce found stability. He finally balanced the right medications and was able to use the coping skills he learned in therapy.
The last 41⁄2 years haven’t been completely smooth sailing. Bruce has dark days, still, as do most people with or without mental illnesses. But the light outshines the dark.
Bruce is back to working hard every day, as he did before his illnesses controlled his life. He works 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. as a peer-support specialist at the behavioralhealth agency Marc Community Resources. He teaches mental-health-education classes for the National Alliance on Mental Illness’ Valley of the Sun chapter. He leads a support group for people with bipolar, aptly called “Bipolar Bears.” He builds canvases and cooks and hangs out with Kurt and his dogs.
That’s recovery, Bruce says: the ability to fight and prevail, even when illness attempts or succeeds to cloud your reality.
“I’m in control of my illness,” he says. “My illness isn’t in control of me.”