BOOK EXCERPT A story from ‘GILA: A Journey Through Moods & Madness’ – an exploration of the landscape of mental illness in Malaysia.
(Jai Ho) You are the reason that I breathe
(Jai Ho) You are the reason that I still believe
(Jai Ho) You are my destiny
Jai Oh Oh-oh- oh
Azlan hits the play button. Listens to the track all the way through. Hits play again. Then again. Then again. There are hidden meanings here, he knows there are, if he can just find them.
Maybe if he listens to it just one more time. Somewhere in its lilting melody and catchy beat, its words contain a special message for him, if only he can decode them and find it.
He hits the play button. Just one more time.
*****
Azlan’s first breakdown occurred in 2006. He had spent countless nights tossing and turning within the narrow confines of his standard issue dorm bed, thoughts racing through his head and cold sweat covering his entire body.
His last exam results were poor, and every time he thought of how much he had to do to get back on track, his pulse would race.
In the wee hours of the morning, his friends were awakened by the sound of crashes and bangs from an unoccupied room in their building. Azlan was rearranging the furniture, tugging and pulling lockers and beds into new configurations with vigour.
When they asked, he couldn’t explain what he was doing or why. And when they surrounded him, faces taut with concern, he began to cry.
Azlan’s friends, confused and disturbed by almost a month of increasingly manic behaviour, insisted on calling his parents, who quickly made the journey from their kampung in Segamat to his university in Kuala Lumpur.
“I’d been taking long rides on my motorcycle late at night, because I’d have trouble sleeping,” Azlan recalls. “I spent RM700 or more on a new handphone and accessories, things I couldn’t really afford and didn’t really need.
My mind was racing all the time, and the lack of sleep had me seeing and believing strange things, things that couldn’t possibly be true.” He would wake up regularly at 2 or 3am, convinced that someone or something – a malevolent spirit, a ghost perhaps – was in his room, watching him.
Wherever he went, he believed he was being followed.
Worried, his parents brought him to his faculty advisor, who gently suggested a break from his studies, and to the campus clinic, where he saw the doctor write on his sheet two words: “Delusional disorder.”
Then, they brought him home to Segamat, where, frightened by his manic episodes – the fast talking, the racing thoughts, the paranoia about being tailed by unknown people – they took him to the emergency room of the local hospital.
“They put me in the psychiatric ward,” he says. “I don’t remember much about my stay there – when you’re experiencing a manic episode it’s like you’re in a dream.
But I do remember feeling like I knew everyone else in there very well, like they all had faces that looked like friends or family or neighbours of mine.”
Azlan was discharged after one day, armed with a slew of medicines designed to keep his symptoms at bay. Yet, he says, he still had no idea at the time that what he had was called bipolar disorder, and that it was an actual illness.
“Nobody ever mentioned it to me,” he says. “Maybe the doctor told my parents, but I don’t remember anyone ever telling me that’s what I had, or explaining what it was.”
He spent the next 4 or 5 months – an entire university semester – recovering at home. The medicines did their work; his symptoms dulled until one day, they eventually disappeared altogether.
His parents were relieved, and so was he. Finally, life could go back to normal.
*****
Catch me, catch me, catch me, c'mon catch me
I want you now
I know you can save me come and save me
I need you now
Fast forward five years later, to 2011. At 26, Azlan seemed to be on track – he had landed a steady, much-coveted two-year contract as an Administrative and Diplomatic Officer and was placed with a government agency in Cyberjaya, overseeing human resources, contract management, employee affairs and finance.
However, it wasn’t to last.
“By the end of 2011, I was worrying about my work prospects, since my contract was expiring,” he remembers. His anxiety, exacerbated by an influx of urgent and critical tasks on the job and the stress of applying for a spot at university to do his Master’s in research, proved to be too much for him.
While on duty at parliament one day, his mania took over.
“I felt like I was someone very important, like everyone around me knew who I was,” he says. “Each time a minister walked past, I felt like he was eyeing me, like his gaze meant something.
I handed my business card to everyone I met, supposedly because I was ‘networking’." Looking back, he says, “I couldn’t even explain to you why I was doing all those things.”
Things grew steadily worse. By the weekend, Azlan was working on little to no sleep, his mind racing with illogical thoughts and delusions.
“I thought I saw weird activity on my Facebook page, and immediately thought I’d been hacked,” he says.
"I drove my car and thought, ‘Something’s wrong with my car, someone’s tampered with it.’ I ate lunch at a restaurant and thought everyone around me had been placed there to spy on me.
"I took a ton of photos of my surroundings on my phone, gathering ‘evidence’ for me to peruse later. After lunch, I headed to a mall and was convinced I’d been followed.
"I spotted more spies within the weekend crowds out and about doing their shopping, and I even suspected salespeople of being part of the conspiracy.”
As the day deepened to night, Azlan headed home in an increasingly fragile mental and emotional state.
He spent the night sorting through his business cards, intent on weeding out the spies among his work associates. He pored over magazines and newspapers, looking for patterns and messages that he felt were predetermined just for him.
He was absolutely sure that his phone had been hacked, just like his Facebook account, and all of his calls and text messages were being scrutinised. He began to send suspicious messages to his friends: “Pandai korang berlakon,” he texted to five different colleagues, convinced that he was surrounded by actors and spies.
Worried at his strange behaviour, two of his friends, familiar with his previous episode and suspecting a relapse, took it upon themselves to take him out to dinner and inform his sister of their concerns.
“They took me home after dinner and helped clean up my messy house a little bit,” Azlan recalls. “Before they left, they told me I should get some rest.”
But rest eluded him, and he spent the rest of the night on his laptop. “I looked at every song I’d downloaded onto my laptop recently, and began listening to them for secret messages.”
The song that especially captured his attention: Jai Ho, by the Pussycat Dolls and AR Rahman, made popular by the movie Slumdog Millionaire. “I pored over the lyrics to the song and played it over and over again,” he says. “I listened to it until the sun rose, determined to understand the meaning behind the words.”
*****
I can (I can) feel you (feel you)
Rushing through my veins
The next day, Azlan’s sister drove him home to Segamat as he stared out of the car window, taking note of number plates, the colours of the cars that zoomed past on the highway, the faces of the drivers, even the advertisements and bumper stickers on each car.
I am a very important person, he noted to himself, and these people are all following me, and I must remember every detail so I can identify them later.
In his childhood home, Azlan went over every inch and corner of the house, rearranging objects to find the bugs he was certain had been placed there to trace his every move. He ransacked his bookshelves, looking for clues within the pages of his old books, poring over the pages and cramming copious amounts of notes into the cramped margins.
Names were particularly important – on one page, where the name Zaini figured prominently, for example, there is a list of other Z names scrawled in the margins: Zainab, Dr Zaini, Zaharuddin, Ustaz Zaharuddin, Zubaidah, Zuraida, Zakiah.
“They were all related somehow – the names of friends, lecturers, family members, celebrities, important people – and I had to investigate them,” he says.
And the whole time, Jai Ho played over and over again, as Azlan looked for some sort of sign or message – although from whom, he couldn’t tell you.
*****
There's an ocean in my heart
I will never be the same
It took two visits to the doctor for Azlan to finally receive his diagnosis: Bipolar Disorder (previously known as manic-depression), a biological disorder of the brain that causes debilitating mood swings, between states of mania - which accounted for Azlan’s racing thoughts and speech and his delusions of grandeur – and depression.
Despite the many scientific leaps we’ve made, such is the complexity of the human brain that nobody really knows what causes it.
We know there’s a genetic component, meaning it’s hereditary, but you can’t predict who will or won’t develop it solely through genetics either.
In other words, it’s the equivalent of a biological lottery, except nobody really wants to win, and once you’ve won it, you’ve won it for good: It’s a long-term illness that requires a lifetime of careful management.
The World Health Organisation estimates that up to 29 million people worldwide live with some form of bipolar disorder.
In Malaysia alone, a report by the Malaysian Psychiatric Association in 2013 shows an estimate of approximately three percent of Malaysians suffer from it, although the number may be greater than that.
In other words, it’s a lot for a person to take in.
“I didn’t believe him,” Azlan says. “I was still in the throes of my manic state, and I was convinced that he was lying to me. But gradually, as the medicine took hold and I was able to calm down and do some research on bipolar disorder – understand its causes, its symptoms, the medication and side effects – only then did I finally begin to accept it.”
*****
Bipolar disorder happens to rank among the top 10 most disabling disorders in working age adults worldwide (according to The World Health Organization 2002).
So it’s no wonder that it took almost two months of medical leave, regularly taking the prescribed medications, checking in with his doctor and resting at home, before Azlan was able to get back on track and return to work.
The U.S.-based National Institute of Mental Health estimates that 50 per cent of people living with bipolar will go through a relapse one year after a manic episode; 70 percent will go through a relapse five years after a manic episode.
That means Azlan’s timeline, with his first bipolar episode in 2006, and his second in 2011, puts him squarely within that 70 per cent population.
Now 29, Azlan spends his days working as a software engineer. When he has the time, he helps run an online support group for those living with bipolar disorder in Malaysia.
But offline, he says that nobody outside of family and his closest friends knows anything about his condition, and he prefers to keep it that way.
“I worry about being exploited or discriminated against,” he shrugs, “And our society is still set up to stigmatise people with mental illness.”
These days, Azlan is meticulous about taking his medication on time each day and visiting his doctor every three months to check in. “That’s the best advice I can give others who suspect that they may have bipolar disorder,” he says.
“Get yourself to a doctor, get your symptoms checked out and confirmed. And then make sure you keep taking your medication.”
Azlan should know. The one time he lapsed and allowed himself to run out of pills – in early 2012 – he had a minor relapse where he believed his co-workers were hatching a plot to set him up with a girl in the office.
“When I’m in a manic state, I get really over-confident,” he grins.
(Jai Ho) So come and dance with me
Jai Ho! (Oh) (You and me, it's destiny)
This is just one of the many stories featured in GILA: A Journey Through Moods & Madness – an exploration of the landscape of mental illness in Malaysia through the personal narratives of patients, caregivers, psychologists, psychiatrists, volunteers and advocates.
Get your copy now at GerakBudaya, or online at www.gbgerakbudaya.com.
