(My apologies in advance for writing the longest post in the universe.)
There is a huge stigma in this country that any form of mental health issue makes you "crazy" and that that "craziness" is forever. This stigma keeps people from seeking and receiving treatment, it makes people ashamed of legitimate medical issues, and it makes it incredibly difficult to ask for help, pushing people to allow their condition to deteriorate until it starts to crush them. This stigma pushes people to allow their mental health conditions to rule their lives. I know all these things to be true, because I've lived them. I knew that I was depressed for years before I sought treatment. I knew that I had an anxiety disorder for years before I sought treatment. In high school, I hated everyone. I had a lot of anger, I acted out, and I had a hard time maintaining friendships. For the most part, I was able to put on a brave, smiling face and convince the world that I was a high-performing. successful student. My depression told me that everyone secretly hated me, that I was a fat, ugly loser and that I should just stop trying. During my junior year of high school I threatened to kill myself in my math class. I was able to convince everyone, even myself, that it was hyperbole, the kind of ironic, sightly alternative thing that rebellious teens say, but the cracks were starting to show. I was forced to see the school counselor, but I saw him as an enemy, as someone who would stamp the word "crazy" on my forehead and ruin my future. I realize now that that was the kind of panicked, paranoid thought process that often comes with depression and anxiety. My anxiety kept me up at night, so I was tired and irritable all the time. I felt like I had to do every extracurricular activity I could possibly fit into my schedule, and had to excel at all of them. I wasted time on activities that I didn't enjoy and brought extra stress into my life. I was neurotic and manic sometimes, mostly from pushing myself to be an over-achieving extrovert. A large part of it was the stress of trying to get into the ever elusive "good college," but it didn't go away when I got into schools, and got worse when I went away to college. Away from the tenuous network of friends I had managed to build, my depression and anxiety deepened.
Depression made me lock myself in my room whenever I wasn't at class, spending a lot of time alone watching netflix on my laptop and wanting to cry about how lonely I was. Anxiety convinced me that I was alone because no one liked me, that no one would ever like me. I wanted desperately to go out and have the kind of fun that college students are supposed to, but I was too afraid of what would happen if I went out. I was too anxious about social situations to seek them out. The fact that I never went out soon led people to stop inviting me out. In the eyes of the people around me, I had become a person who didn't go out. I struggled through my freshman year of college, made some friends, and came home trying to convince everyone that college was great and I loved every second of it.
Lying about happiness is something that diseases like depression and anxiety train you to do. You tell the lies to yourself so often that you start to believe them. You start to forget what life without your condition feels like and you start to convince yourself that you've always felt like this. That's the most harmful thing, because once you start to believe that you've always felt like this, you start to feel like you always will. You see life as hopeless and painful because you've been so unhappy for so long that you forget what joy feels like when it isn't tempered by depression and anxiety.
The summer after my freshman year of college I had an internship that I'd wanted for years. However, what I'd thought of for so long as my dream job turned out to be lonely and awful. I felt completely unappreciated, which furthered the idea that I was awful at everything and nobody liked me or wanted me around. I cried alone at work sometimes. My job was stressful, and involved a lot of public speaking. I didn't mind speaking in front of people, but their reactions (or lack of reactions) served as yet more proof that I was incompetent and awful.
I started my sophomore year a complete mess. I was too anxious and neurotic to get along with my roommates, which made living in a triple dorm room a nightmare of conflicts for everyone involved. It took me upwards of two hours to fall asleep every night because my brain just kept repeating loops of anxious thoughts until I was so exhausted that I slept. I didn't want to go out with my friends, but when they went out I stayed in the room and felt like crying because I was lonely and self-hating and saw the fact that I was alone as proof that no one liked me or wanted me around. I was a complete mess. I couldn't concentrate on anything, especially my schoolwork. Finally, I rallied my strength, went to the health center, and made an appointment to see a counselor. That was easily the hardest thing I've ever done. I made a point of going when I thought it would be empty, I spoke to the woman behind the desk in hushed tones so that the other students in the waiting room wouldn't hear that I was one of the "crazies" who needed to see a counselor.
When I did see the counselor, I immediately didn't like her. She struck me as patronizing, and she treated me like I was made of glass. After years of building a shell around myself to survive it struck me as insulting that she thought I was that weak. She commended everything that I did, but in a way that felt insincere and insulting. She tried to get me to move out of my room instead of encouraging me to seek to resolve my conflicts with my roommates. She told me that these conflicts were making me anxious, even though I told her I'd been feeling this way for years. She told me that my problems were because of my family, which is hard to hear when you love and miss your family. Most of all, she immediately suggested I try medication. I saw her three times, and each time I came away from it sobbing and more upset than I had been before. I didn't want to ask for a different counselor, partly because I didn't want her to know and feel bad about it (which I now realize is ridiculous) and partly because I had begun to lose hope of feeling better. I believed that one bad experience meant that I couldn't be helped by counseling. She continued urging me to see the nurse practitioner about medication. My initial resistance to this plan was due to three factors: first, I didn't feel like there was any end-game to being on anti-depressants, and I didn't want to be dependent on medication for my whole life; second, I didn't want to be labelled as a "crazy" person taking "crazy" pills; third, seeing the nurse practitioner would show up on my student account, which meant that my parents would see it when they paid my school bills. After my junior year of high school, when it had taken weeks to convince my parents that I wasn't suicidal, I had avoided telling them that I wasn't doing well, and hadn't told them that I'd entered counseling.
Finally, I got sick of the counselor. Before my third appointment with her, I resolved to try medication. Initially, it was primarily a way to get out of that awful counseling arrangement. I forced myself to rethink my stance on anti-depressants. Anything had to be better than the way I was living. I guess that when I said going to the health center was the hardest thing I've ever done I was wrong, because telling my mother over the phone that I was anxious and depressed and was going to try medication was easily a million times harder. I spent close to an hour staring at my phone, trying to draft a script in my head of how this conversation would go. When I finally did manage to tell her, I could hear the concern in her voice, and something else that I interpreted as disappointment. She asked me if I was sure it wasn't just stress. I didn't want to tell her that I'd been depressed and anxious as long as I could remember. I cried through the whole phone call, and could barely choke the words out. I felt like I'd failed her. Like I was a bad child that no parents could ever be proud of. I felt like I wasn't worthy of their love. She tried to make me reconsider the medication, and it took everything in me to stick to my guns. I'd come too far for this, I told myself, I wasn't going to let her doubting shake my resolve. This, of course, was easier said than done.
When I went to the counselor, I told her I was ready to try medication. I told her there was nothing else I wanted to talk to her about, and that I felt better. I didn't, but her office made me claustrophobic and she made me incredibly uncomfortable. She walked me out the desk to make an appointment with the nurse practitioner, as if I couldn't be expected to do it myself. I hated her for doing that, more than I have words to express. I hated her for treating me like I was weak, for treating me like I was a child. When you live for a long time with depression and anxiety, or probably any kind of mental illness, you become incredibly strong. You become strong enough to lift the entire world off of your chest and get out of bed in the morning when all you want to do is curl up and die. You become brave enough to conduct basic social interactions with people that you are completely convinced hate you and think the absolute worst of you. You spend all of your time fighting with demons that only you can see. It is completely exhausting, and it makes it difficult to put up with people treating you like you're anything less than a fighter who has been carrying an incredible weight for so long that you've forgotten what it's like to walk tall with your head held high. People suffering from mental illness aren't victims to be pitied. They aren't "crazy" people to be given up on. We are fighters, we are survivors. Sometimes the fight is hard, sometimes people lose the fight. That doesn't make them weak. It just means that our society made them feel like that had to hide and struggle all on their own for so long that they couldn't do it anymore. Deaths caused by mental illness aren't the fault of the person suffering from mental illness. They are the fault of a society that tells suffering people that they are damaged beyond repair, or that they are somehow responsible for your suffering, and pushes them to hide that suffering.
Mental illness can be treated, through medication and counseling. But only if people feel like they can come forward, only if people feel like they won't be judged or treated badly for coming forward. Most of all, this plays out in the endless battle of self-help versus real help. Whenever I tell people that I'm depressed and anxious, they respond with completely ridiculous "Have you tried" statements. "Have you tried meditating?" "Have you tried exercise?" "Have you tried supplements?" "Have you tried sleeping more?" Then, of course, the ever-present "Well it sounds like" statements. "Well it sounds like you just have too much on your plate." "Well it sounds like you just need to go out more." "Well it sounds like you aren't getting enough sleep." "Well it sounds like you have a negative outlook on the world."
Depression is caused by a serotonin imbalance in the brain. That's fixed by anti-depressants. It is not fixed by sleep, vitamins, exercise, or partying. It is not caused by sleep, lack of partying, or being busy (though it is exacerbated by stress). This is a disease. You would never tell someone with Type 1 diabetes that their insulin is just a crutch that they are using to avoid making changes in their life, so why on earth do people feel like it's okay to try to talk people off of medications for mental health conditions? When I confessed to some people at a kickback that I was on antidepressants (it came up, otherwise I never would have just opened with that), one of them told me "You should just smoke weed for that." Now, I'm a firm believer in medical marijuana. In fact, I'm a firm believer in recreational marijuana. However, trying to talk people who have braved incredible stigma to seek help to go back to unhealthy, unregulated self-medicating behavior is irresponsible, immoral, and just plain rude.
So when someone feels comfortable enough with you to confess that the suffer from mental illness, don't be a dick about it. Don't treat it as a challenge for you to come up with a better course of treatment. Keep all of your judgments and your terrible advise to yourself and remember this: Telling people that you suffer from mental illness goes against literally everything that you have trained yourself to do to deal with your symptoms. You have learned to do everything that you can to hide what's wrong and look like a normal person. You have learned to blend in and bury all of your broken pieces deep down in your soul. Opening up to people is difficult. It's soul-baring. It's parading around your biggest secret. It's hoping that people you care about won't cringe and run away. It's stressful and terrible and usually people say stupid things that make you wish you just kept your mouth shut.
I try not to care what anyone thinks about my mental illness. I refuse to live in the mental illness closet to avoid making other people uncomfortable. I refuse to put up with ignorant bullshit from people who don't understand what they're talking about. Keep your self-help method to yourselves please, I have found a solution that works for me. Because anti-depressants have worked wonders for me. I don't feel like everyone hates me anymore. I can recognize that I thought things that made no sense before. I can pick out stray depressed or anxious thoughts that make it past the medication and I can see them for what they are. I don't feel like the world is going to end at any moment. Most strikingly, I could tell that my dosage was right because for the first time I can remember when I looked in the mirror I understood what other people saw when they told me I was pretty. At the age of nineteen, it felt like I was seeing my face for the first time. All of that is worth more than anything else. It's worth all of the stupid things that people try to tell me about a condition they've never experienced. It's worth that crying phone call with my mother. It's worth the twist in my stomach every time I fill out medical forms and have to check the boxes next to ugly statements like "I have sought psychiatric help" and "I am currently on medication." I will not live in shame. I will not go back to the darkness that I lived in before I sought treatment. Mental illness bent me until I came close to breaking, but it made me stronger in a million ways. I learned how to take care of myself, and I learned how to live with a terrible demon on my shoulder. I'm not magically just better now, but I am getting better. I feel better. I fought my demons alone for years and I can tell you that no one should ever have to do that. No one should ever be forced into the darkness because of fear of the stigma our society puts on mental illness.
So if you are suffering from mental illness, please seek help. I know it's difficult, but sometimes if you reach out people will catch you. I will catch you. And if you hear someone say they're suffering from mental illness, be supportive of the path they choose. If they choose counseling, let them. If they choose medication, let them. They don't need your input about their medical treatment. You aren't their doctor. Don't try to talk them out of their diagnosis or their treatment. It doesn't do anyone any favors.We're all fighting our demons, and we're all dealing with our own problems. So don't be a doctor, be a friend. Be a shoulder to cry on and a hand to hold and all that other soppy metaphor crap. Just be a friend.
Until next time,
Isabel.
No comments:
Post a Comment