Out of the Shadows

Much has been written about the impact of the last two years of social isolation upon those already struggling with mental health issues.

But newly published author and Kingfisher High School alumni Debra Harman Miller believes social isolation is a concept victims of mental illness already understand all too well.

“That’s a big part of mental illness,” she said. “It separates you from the rest of the world.”

It starts with symptoms that can trap sufferers inside their own heads, compounded by mind-dulling medications and their often debilitating side effects that make social interaction impossible, and exacerbated by the stigma still attached to mental illness that keeps others at a distance.

Miller calls that “isolation to avoid the stares and the hurtful comments.”

And she should know.

She’s battled symptoms of mental illness since her childhood in Kingfisher.

And has continued to battle since her 1976 graduation from KHS to find her way to recovery.

Curiously – or maybe not so surprisingly – all those years of isolation and feeling “other” prepared Miller to not only survive the pandemic, but to thrive.

In the last two years, she has:

•Finished a book she’d been working on for more than six years.

•Worked as a receptionist at Austin Area Mental Health Consumers at the Self-Help and Advocacy Center, the facility she credits with saving her life.

•Completed training and an intensive 250-hour internship to be certified as a mental health peer specialist by the state of Texas.

•Worked as an MHPS, sharing her experience with navigating her own mental health wellness with others.

As Miller writes in her book, “talking with others who have found creative ways to manage their own symptoms gives people both the vocabulary and the opportunity to see themselves outside of their diagnostic label.”

But that healthy perspective was a long time coming for Miller.

Although she wouldn’t be diagnosed with bipolar schizoeffective disorder, Miller was already experiencing symptoms as a child growing up in Kingfisher.

“I stayed pretty manic, so my escape was to read,” she said. “I spent a lot of time at the Kingfisher Public Library.

“I read the entire encyclopedia and that gave me an idea of what was real and what was not real because I saw a lot of things other people didn’t see.”

Although she doesn’t describe herself as “super smart,” Miller invested much of her mania into hyper studiousness, reading and studying through the night at times.

“So school was always easy for me,” she said.

She also was active in Girl Scouts and band and served as editor of The Stinger, the school newspaper, her junior year.

While never feeling like she fit in anywhere, “I worked hard at pretending that I fit in everywhere,” she said.

Miller also was an enthusiastic creative writer, participated in the Miss National Teenager contest and was a skilled bass guitar player, all of which earned college scholarships.

All that aggressive overachievement also allowed her to finish high school after her junior year in 1975, although she returned after her first year of college to graduate with her Class of 1976 peers .

But what she calls her “Miss Goody Two Shoes” image was just one facet of her persona.

“A girl bass guitar player in the 70s? Yeah, I had this other life and had a lot of fun,” she said. That after dark lifestyle

That after dark lifestyle also included drinking, which was Miller’s way of self-medicating her mania. “It was how I got to sleep,” she said.

In 1977, Miller married a radio disk jockey and started two music magazines in Tulsa and Amarillo, interviewing big name artists of the era like Eddie Money and others.

She moved to Houston during the 1980s oil boom where she worked as a typesetter and then started her own business as a graphic artist.

Her inability to come to terms with her mental illness continued to be a barrier.

“The problem was that I didn’t understand who I was and didn’t understand what it was to be me,” she said.

It’s not as if Miller didn’t seek diagnosis and treatment.

She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1987, “when bipolar was like an epidemic and everyone was being diagnosed with it,” and treated with Prozac.

When that was not effective, Miller was put on a class of drugs called neuroleptics and soon developed Parkinson’s disease, with its distinctive hand tremors, and tardive dyskinesia, a condition marked by involuntary facial tics and grimaces.

“I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t feed myself,” she said. “These tremors make your mouth move around like you’re on methamphetamines.

“It’s very uncomfortable and adds a whole new stigma.”

By that time she had made her way from Houston to Austin, where she lived alone in an assisted living apartment and kept to herself.

“I pretty much stayed in my house that first year and didn’t go out because I thought people would find out how sick I was and put me in a nursing home,” she said.

Both her parents and her younger brother died around that period of time, compounding her anguish. Plus, she had trouble accessing mental health treatment.

At the end of her rope about nine months later, Miller posted a plaintive question on Facebook:

“Does anyone want to say goodbye?”

The post drew an immediate response from a KHS classmate: “Where are you going?”

Her single word response: “Nowhere.”

That caught the attention of two more classmates and Miller said the three of them, all living in different parts of the country, consulted each other before making the decision that she said probably saved her life.

They called her local sheriff’s office to request a welfare check.

Miller said she wasn’t actively attempting suicide when the officers came knocking, “but I was very close.”

While the deputies left that night without hospitalizing her, when another childhood friend reached out from Las Vegas and offered to find someone to care for Miller’s dogs, she admitted herself for inpatient treatment.

Although life-saving at the moment, that hospitalization ended like many others, “with a whole new drawerful of medicine” and a referral to a psychiatrist who did not take Medicare patients.

It was that final brick wall that convinced Miller to schedule another 22-minute bus ride to the Self-Help and Advocacy Center.

It was after coming home from her first visit to the SHAC that Miller hit rock bottom, posting her fateful goodbye message on social media.

But when she went back, what at first seemed an intolerable confrontation with the extent of her disabilities was instead a recognition that she was no longer alone.

“When I went in there, the other people were also disabled and in so many different variations and combinations,” she said. “I saw I wasn’t just the most horrible person and I wasn’t all alone.

“They also did something no one had ever done in a long time...they asked me to come back the next day.”

And Miller did go back and continued to do so throughout the next year.

In addition to benefiting from the wide range of classes and support groups, she learned valuable information from her fellow program participants.

She learned simple things like what kind of case makes your phone easier to hang on to with trembling hands as well as impervious to being smashed under the wheels of your motorized chair.

And she learned life-saving things like which medicines were likely triggering her severe Parkinson’s and dyskinesia symptoms, which have practically diappeared thanks to changes in medication.

(She was recently able to speak to a crowd of 200 at a women’s conference.)

“Over the year, I saw how much better I got,” she said.

Peer recovery goes against the grain of long-held treatment beliefs that discouraged the mentally ill from associating out side of inpatient treatment centers.

“We weren’t allowed to see each other except when we were in extreme crisis,” she said. “So the idea that we could come together and do what’s called mental health peer recovery services was so refreshing for me.”

Her book, We Are the SHAC, arose from her interest in giving voice to her peers.

As the book developed, she interviewed 25 people over several years to tell their evolving stories.

“It’s an active of courage that these people would come forward and be so open with their experience,” she said. “I wanted them to see themselves as I saw them. They had grown so much and became so beautiful, but they didn’t see themselves that way.”

The book also documents her own progress as her tremors eased and photos taken by her become sharper, she said.

The book’s completion was delayed by another catastrophe when Miller underwent several back surgeries after her motorized chair was struck by a car, but even that didn’t derail the project.

We Are the SHAC will be released on Amazon on Jan. 12. Miller raised funds to cover publication costs and all sales proceeds will go to the Self-Help and Advocacy Center.

She plans a book launch in Austin for 2:22 p.m. Feb. 2, 2022.