Sunday, June 13, 2021

My Mental Health

Let me preface this with: I am not a doctor, I am not a medical professional. I am not offering any advice. I am just stating personal experience. If you have any medical questions for yourself or your circumstances, please talk to your doctor or therapist or health professional. Do not start any medications without talking to a doctor.

This is going to be another mental health talk.

My name is Steve and I deal with mental health issues. I have severe anxiety that causes panic attacks and depression that robs me of the desire to do much beyond lie on my couch. Something is messed up in my brain so that it doesn’t produce needed chemicals to achieve a balance in my brain. That imbalance causes problems, from being overwhelmed by the simplest emotions, to not being able to rationally process events, to being confused.

Reading those words is one thing, but understanding them is another. 

Anxiety, that’s kind of like Spider Sense, but it’s always on and it’s always on at full power. There’s always danger and there’s always something bad about to happen. It heightens paranoia, is that person staring? Is that car following? What’s evil and hiding around that corner? It keeps you on the edge of your seat and keeps your head on a swivel. It’s exhausting as well, because having your senses running at full power all the time is beyond tiring. This also leads to Anxiety’s best friend, the panic attack.

What is a panic attack? If you’ve never had one it’s hard to understand and when you have one, it doesn’t make sense. My worst panic attack, I could feel my heart beating a mile a minute, but I couldn’t breathe. I was taking short, hyperventilating breaths and I couldn’t catch my breath no matter how I tried. I was sitting, hugging my knees, tears running down my face for no reason that I could figure out as I tried and failed to figure out what was going on and how I could get my breathing back to normal. It took an hour or more for this to pass. 

Tie them both together with their best friend Depression. A TV character once said “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and gosh darn it people like me.” Well for me, depression is the voice saying I’ll never be good enough, I’m stupid to think so, and no one likes me anyway. So why bother doing anything or going anywhere, in the end it doesn’t matter since no one cares. Might as well just stay on the couch, watch TV and Movies and get fat, there’s nothing else to do.

Hearing my own voice in my head saying those things repeatedly takes a toll. After all, who am I to argue with myself? That’s what makes depression hard to ignore, it’s not someone else’s voice saying these things to me, it’s me saying them to myself. 

So how do I fight this? Simple. I’ve seen a therapist and I’m on medication. I saw my family doctor and talked with her because I knew I couldn’t fight alone, I’d need help. So she put me on Effexor. It’s one of a family of pharmaceuticals used to treat anxiety and depression. 

“It may improve your mood and energy level and may help restore your interest in daily living. It may also decrease fear, anxiety, unwanted thoughts, and the number of panic attacks.”

That’s the textbook description of what the drug can do. What it does for me, it turns my anxiety down from 11 to about 2 or 3, makes it manageable. It quiets the voice in my head so that it's an ignorable white noise that I don’t have to listen to. It lifts the crushing weight off of my chest so that I can breathe. I’m in control of my emotions again. I can feel sad without being overwhelmed by it. I don’t have to pull over when driving because I can’t see through the tears that come from hearing a song that triggers a memory. I can sit at work and not have the feeling that danger is going to burst through the front door at any second.

So the big question is; When do I get better, when do I no longer need the medication? The reality for me is, I don’t. I’m being treated for a medical condition and I require medication to stabilize that condition. Other conditions require medical intervention for life and this is no different. As long as I’m on my medication, I can function. I will still have ups and downs as my brain chemistry changes, I may eventually require an increase in the dosage of my medications to maintain the balance.

This is the hardest thing for a lot of people to understand, mental illness doesn’t go away, it doesn’t just stop or finally heal like a broken bone. This imbalance doesn’t correct itself, it needs the help of medication supplying or making the brain supply the chemicals that it should if it were totally healthy. We live with the illness, we learn about the illness and ourselves and we learn how to deal with it. As frustrating as it can be to watch someone suffer and feel helpless to do anything, we feel just as, oftentimes more, frustrated and angry that we’re fighting so hard on the inside and we’re all alone inside our skulls.

I’ll keep talking about my issues, because mental health needs to be talked about. It needs to be brought out of the shadows, it needs to be spoken of the way any other medical condition is. There needs to be no shame, no stigma and no fear attached to it, so that anyone suffering isn’t afraid to talk or afraid to seek out the help they desperately need. 


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