Mental Illness From A Patient’s Perspective
By LYDIA BERGLAR
News Editor
After reading Sandra Gentry’s account of her daughter’s mental illness in the Dec. 3 Sentinel, Ronald Baldwin offered to share with readers about his personal experience with mental illness. Having covered the Dade County Jail’s perspective and a family member’s perspective on the issue, we hoped to cover a patient’s perspective, and Baldwin made that possible.
Hearing from medical professionals who work with mental patients would help complete the picture, but that’s an article for the future.
Unlike Gentry’s daughter and many of the accounts from the sheriff’s office, Baldwin knows that he needs to be on medication and voluntarily takes his meds. He has been a patient at Bridge Health for 25 years.
Baldwin realized as a child that something abnormal was going on with his mental state, but he wasn’t officially diagnosed until adulthood. His mental problems gradually grew worse throughout his life.
“In the 1970s, they didn’t have words for it and diagnoses like they do now,” he says. “I was hearing auditory hallucinations. I was hearing voices. The only one I remember clearly was the one telling me to hit my mom’s boyfriend that I didn’t like, so I hit him. That was the only time I did that. I still hear voices, but the voice now is just my mom berating me.”
Saying that he is not overly religious, Baldwin explains that he didn’t attribute the voices to some spiritual experience, whether positive or negative. “I never thought the voices were real.”
His mother told doctors about his hallucinations, but they attributed it to nerves instead of psychosis. “That’s what they said back then. It was such a different world.”
He remembers being seen by doctors when he was five for his rapid speech. “I couldn’t control my speech because I was talking too fast, and I still have trouble with that. Back in those days, if you couldn’t talk plain, they said you were retarded.”
The doctors asked him questions and quickly found that he did not have an intellectual disability. They said he simply talked too fast and did not make the connection to bipolar and psychosis. “Pressured speech” is a common symptom of bipolar and sometimes is tied to schizophrenia (as well as several other mental conditions).
When Baldwin sat down with the Sentinel, his pressured speech was evident, but he was also grounded in reality, able to communicate, and intelligent. He has an interest in politics and the history of America and clearly enjoyed talking about these topics.
Baldwin attributes his mental issues to abuse from his mother. The holidays in particular are a difficult time for him because of terrible memories from being raised by his mom.
When he was five, his mom started dating a man that Baldwin described as a good guy. “He was like a stepdad to me.” However, the man had been married before and had no desire to remarry.
That Thanksgiving, Baldwin’s mom cooked a Thanksgiving meal even though she didn’t typically cook anything. During the meal, she asked her boyfriend about getting married, and when he said he didn’t want to marry, she threw a fit and threw all of the food outside on the ground.
Baldwin wishes he could erase this scene from his memory. He shared bits of other stories with the Sentinel about his mother’s irrational behavior and poor treatment of him. “It made it worse to me that everybody thought my mom was great. She had this image that wasn’t really her.”
Baldwin’s grandmother was the rock of the family. He called her “Mama” while his mother was “Mom.” He had a sister six years older than him and a brother nine years older, but they didn’t bear the brunt of their mother’s poor treatment. “It’s almost like I was an only child,” Baldwin said.
No one knew what was going on behind the scenes. “My brother never knew about the abuse. Until the day he died, he said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know she was doing all that stuff. If you’d have told Mama—’ I said I know, but when you’re a kid, you don’t know to go tell.”
Baldwin first attempted to get professional help in 1999 when he was 31 years old, but his mom prevented him from going. “She started raisin’ cane because she knew she would get brought to the forefront.”
When his mother died shortly after, he immediately sought help from Bridge Health at the Walker County location (before there was a Trenton location and when it was called Lookout Mountain Community Services). Bridge Health at first diagnosed him with separation anxiety caused by his mother’s death, but eventually, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. He added that he also has Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder saying, “I’ve got a little bit of everything.”
For Baldwin, the biggest effect of bipolar is depression, and he’s been suicidal before. As soon as he wakes up in the morning, he can tell if it’s a “good day” or a “bad day.” “I would say about 95 percent of the time, I am depressed,” he explains. “About four percent of the time, I am manic. The other one percent, I’m the way I should be, but it never stays there.”
In contrast to Gentry’s account of her daughter’s actions, Baldwin says, “When I’m having a manic episode, I’m not running off and doing stuff like some people do, but I do the rapid speech thing. I’ve never ever in my life felt like hurting anyone else.”
He has found that a few songs alter his mood/mental state on the bad days. “Some songs, immediately, the chords of the song throw me into mania which is better than being depressed. People say, ‘You don’t want to be manic.’ That’s true, but it’s better than being depressed.”
Many people are aware that Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) impacts people in the winter months, but Baldwin has reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder which “Scientific American” called “a lesser-known and lesser-studied summer SAD variant.” (See their July 3, 2024, article, “Summertime Sadness Could Be a Type of Seasonal Affective Disorder.”)
For Baldwin, he’s more functional during the fall and winter months, even with the terrible holiday memories, but he’s much more depressed during the summer.
Baldwin reports that he is on 12 medications for his mental illnesses. He takes them in the evening, and they make him very tired. “My meds have me in a perpetual dream state. I’m aware, and I’m fine with it, but it’s like a perpetual dream state. I know I need them. It’s okay they make me sleep because sleep kills the pain I feel. Sometimes I sleep the whole day away.”
He eventually got on disability when he was unable to function due to his depressive symptoms. He says, “The hardest part is there’s a faction of people who don’t know me well, and because I’m kind of well spoken, they think that I’m pulling the wool over Social Security’s eyes, but if I was faking it, it wouldn’t be for just $1,000 a month. If it wasn’t for the few people in town that help me with food and stuff—I get food stamps, but it’s not enough. I liked working when I used to work. I worked in radio. I was interested in politics, but that didn’t pan out.”
His decision to apply for disability came when he was a call center interviewer working for Wilkins Research Services. He took medical leave because he was struggling to get out of bed. “I had no energy. I was trying to keep my job, so at first, I signed up for intermittent leave under the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA). I could take so many days off, unpaid, but it got to the point where I missed too many days. It got worse and worse.”
During the disability application process, the office gave him lists of jobs they thought he could do. It came down to being a greeter at Wal-Mart.
According to Baldwin, “My lawyer and my counselor had told them I’m not a violent person. If I get frustrated, I don’t jump on nobody; I walk off. Something that might be the least bit of stress to you might make me walk off, because I don’t want any aggression. Even Wal-Mart greeters might have some small conflict that they have to deal with.”
Baldwin says he was approved for disability because he wouldn’t have been able to handle any conflict that might come up in a job.
The last five years have been especially hard for him after the death of his brother and then the death of his best friend. When his brother died, Baldwin lost not only a close relationship but also a purpose. “I felt like I had a purpose, and that was taking care of him. He was the only one who could calm me down.”
His cousin, who is like a sister to him, calls every day, which helps Baldwin, but he also gets out around town during the week to talk with friends and acquaintances. The weekends, when businesses and offices are closed so Baldwin stays home, are hard on him.
While medication has kept him alive and generally stable, therapy has also been extremely important for Baldwin. “Therapy is what’s helped me, just talking. Having somebody that I can talk to is amazing.”
He says that 20 years ago, two or three sessions per week were offered through Bridge Health, but now it’s only two per month.
The therapist he currently sees has been wonderful, but he had a negative experience with one before who held the session via video call. At the end of the time, the call shut off without any sort of wrap up. It seemed robotic and impersonal to Baldwin, as if this therapist did not care about him as a person.
Overall, he appreciates Bridge Health, but he gives them a C rating, saying that they don’t have enough resources to meet all the needs. “There’s wonderful people that are down there right now, like the girl who helped me set my Humana health insurance up. It wasn’t her job to help me, but she was doing it because they don’t even have a person to do it.”
When asked what he wants people to know about mental illness, Baldwin answers, “That it is no different than someone who has cancer or heart problems. I’ve talked to people who say, ‘Ronald, you talk good. You’re intelligent. There’s nothing wrong with you.’ Because they can’t see this on an X-ray.”
Since he’s been going to Bridge Health, he’s heard them use a variety of different words to refer to patients. “At one point, it was consumers. At one point, they were calling them clients. They were steering away from the word ‘patients,’ because they said some people didn’t like being called a patient.”
Most recently, he’s heard himself and other patients referred to as “individuals,” but he sees himself as a patient, just like anyone else going to any other doctor or treatment.
