Therapy She Gives is Therapy She Receives
By Jeff Hawkes
Darkest moment Dose of self-help
Julie Armold, 43, is telling a small group that she knows what it’s like to feel lost and unloved.
She assures them she understands solace is elusive in a world of trouble and pain.
She shares stories of numbing herself with pot and Southern Comfort. Of being unable to get out of bed in the morning. Of all- consuming rage. Of guilt deepening to despair. Of fingering a trigger and romanticizing the end.
“Just like I got my mom’s eyes, I also got her disorder,” says Armold, talking to patients in the mental health unit at Lancaster Regional Medical Center.
Armold’s work history is social service jobs, portrait photography and running with ambulances. But while her credentials may be few, her authority is compelling.
Armold lives with bipolar disorder, and since October her mission has been to help others with the same diagnosis live, too.
She is a peer educator with Mental Health America, and her biggest qualification is her authentic voice.
“I had to accept my illness,” she tells two women and a man sitting in an alcove. “If you have an illness and know nothing about it, how are you going to help yourself?”
Taking ownership of one’s illness is Armold’s bottom-line message. She encourages people to reach out for the help they need and to stay faithful to a life of healthy choices.
Armold didn’t have the benefit of a peer telling her these things. She had to find out for herself severe mood swings were something she could control.
She’d spend time in hospitals, get better, leave, stop taking medication and relapse. She’s fortunate she didn’t kill herself.
“When doctors would say to me, Do you have a plan for committing suicide?’ it was like a joke,” Armold told me. “Of course I had a plan.”
She thought about slamming her car into the side of a stone tunnel. She thought of walking deep into fields where her body would not be found for weeks.
A mountain of bad memories, none more so than her brother-in-law murdering her sister and two young nieces, exacerbated feelings of hopelessness.
In 2002, Armold was in such despair she decided to kill herself, sure that her two young sons and husband would be better off.
She made sure suicide wouldn’t void her life insurance. She left credit cards at home so someone finding her body at her sister’s grave site wouldn’t take them. She went to K-mart to buy a rifle, then went to a gun shop because a used rifle would be cheaper.
While waiting for the clerk’s assistance, she remembered what her son said before she left. He had pointed a popgun at her and said, “Mom, I just shot you with a bullet full of love.”
Armold thought, How can I let that be the last thing he said to me?
The next day, she entered the hospital and committed herself to living with her illness.
Since then, Armold has stayed on her medications, kept appointments with doctors and counselors and worked to manage stress.
And for a year she has found that educating others with bipolar disorder, formerly called manic-depressive illness, is therapeutic.
At Regional, a patient tells her, “I don’t think I’ll ever get out of here.” Armold assures her, “Every time I come in here, you look better.”
The group session lasts 45 minutes, and while Armold does most of the talking, one patient opens up about feelings of anger and confusion. Armold feels she’s getting through.
Some days leaving for a talk at a hospital, Armold battles gloom.
“I feel like a phony because I’m stressed out over finances or whatever it is,” she tells me.
But then she shares with patients and realizes she benefits from her message as much as they do.
“I never leave the hospital not feeling better,” she says.
“Never.”
E-mail: jhawkes@lnpnews.com
(c) 2007 Intelligencer Journal. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.