I’ve wanted to write about mental health for seventeen weeks now. Every week I write a few hundred words on depression and anxiety and then I scrap it. Instead, I write about self-confidence, or building better habits, or taking on meaningful work. You know, things that make me look good. Topics that make me seem competent and worthy of the weekly eight minutes you spend reading what I’ve written.
Mental health issues are awkward to write about. It feels self-pitying and irrational. I read back over what I’ve written and flush with embarrassment. These are the musings of someone who’s desperate for attention and validation. Someone that needs others to acknowledge that all of their failures and idiosyncrasies aren’t entirely their fault. Rationalizations of someone who can’t get it together and needs you to understand why.
Reading about another’s mental health makes many of us really uncomfortable. It’s like seeing your reflection when you aren’t ready for it. You’re going about your day and catch a glimpse of yourself on a bad hair day while you’re slumped over your desk with terrible posture. Do I really look like that?
It’s not that we can’t relate to it, but that we don’t like that we can relate to it. We spend so much of our time battling the same traumas and intrusive thoughts as everyone else. And how do we address our own problems? Certainly not with kindness and acceptance.
We tell ourselves to grow up, get over it, suck it up. You’re being weak. You need to be better than this.
We certainly don’t speak up about it to anyone. We do our best to push everything deep, deep down inside ourselves and continue moving forward with our lives.
And so when someone else speaks about their mental health issues it reminds us of how we dealt with our own. Either we can double down and feel as if this other person needs to suck it up and stop being weak or we can address the fact that we may have dealt with our own issues in an unhealthy way. Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a motivator and the latter would be a lot more painful than the former.
And so our response becomes:
I dealt with this on my own without having to blab about it so why can’t they?
With that out of the way, let’s get uncomfortable.
Last year I was diagnosed with clinical depression.
It means something different for everyone. For me, it means my life is periodically derailed by periods of intense negative emotions.
For the majority of my life I’m happy, I’m driven, I live my life as if I have a bright future ahead of me. I’ll often have months of uninterrupted energy and normality.
And then, inevitably, one morning I wake up and gravity’s pull on me has doubled. It’s like I’m enjoying a sunny day on a boat and someone kicks the anchor overboard with my ankle tied to it. I can feel myself sinking, see the surface of the water pulling further and further away from my grasp. I know how to swim. Given normal circumstances I can tread water for hours. But none of that matters when there’s a weight tied to your feet. And so I sink deeper and deeper into melancholy.
I’ll fall into extended periods of incomprehensible depression. I have trouble socializing, following a routine, thinking positively about my future or my present. In extreme instances I’ve fought bouts of suicidal ideation. When I’m experiencing an episode it’s as if the happy, positive thought patterns I’ve built for myself over my life are completely out of reach. In those moments it can be hard to believe I was ever able to feel positively about the world at all or ever will be able to again. It’s isolating.
And then, just as suddenly as it came on, I’ll return to normal. I wake up back on the deck of the boat and I can appreciate the sunshine. The strange thing is my clothes are dry, there’s no rope burn around my ankle. There’s no traces of being dragged down into the water at all. It’s as if it happened to someone else. I can no longer relate to all of the negative, irrational, and hopeless thoughts.
It’s as if I’m two people; the normal Trevor - the one that’s ambitious, has lots of friends, is loved and loves others - and the depression Trevor who can barely pull himself out of bed.
The greatest difficulty of my life is that anything normal Trevor does, or studies, or develops to overcome hardships and become more resilient, none of those tools transfer over to depression Trevor. When in a depressive episode all of that goes out the window.
My earliest memories of this pattern are from when I was a preteen, maybe eleven or twelve. For much of that time I have been completely at the mercy of the cycle. It comes and goes and there isn’t much that can be done.
However, in the last two years I’ve taken a much more active role in my mental health.
For starters, I’ve been meeting with a therapist regularly for about two years. This isn’t my first time trying therapy. My first attempt was in high school, and my second in college. In both instances I left feeling crazier than when I first attended. I’d seek help while in the midst of a depressive episode. We’d spend the first few sessions trying to get to the root of the issue:
Are you experiencing a high level of stress right now?
Have there been any negative events happening in your life that have caused you to feel sad?
Do you have any supportive, loving relationships in your life?
But I couldn’t identify a cause. This is just how I feel right now and I don’t know why.
And then after a few sessions I’d snap back to normal Trevor. The therapist would notice a difference in me during our sessions and assume we’ve made progress. Since I have a hard time even relating to the thoughts I have in a depressive state it’s difficult to discuss the issues because I can so easily overcome them when I’m happy. So we’d run out of things to talk about and end our meetings with the illusion of progress being made.
And then one day, maybe weeks later, maybe months later, I wake up and gravity’s pull one me has doubled…
What has made this third time exploring therapy different is we’ve been able to identify and acknowledge the pattern. The pattern is that there is no pattern. Most likely, my brain has some faulty wiring somewhere that causes intermittent imbalances of neurotransmitters (aka happy chemicals). This comes with acknowledging it’s not my fault, there’s nothing that I’m doing wrong. I just need to train my body to manage it. Which brings me to SSRIs.
Along with my clinical depression diagnosis last year my therapist encouraged me to explore using a pharmaceutical intervention. This is something I have been highly resistant to. I don’t love the idea of being completely dependent on a medication. I’d like to believe that I can handle things through sheer power of will myself. But after a lifetime of trying, and often failing at that, it was the right thing to do to explore other options.
Ultimately, an SSRI is a tool just the same as meditation, or journaling, or exercise in managing mental health. For those of us with physiological imbalances, SSRIs can enable our body to produce the right amounts of chemicals at the right time. These medications can have different effects for everyone, but for me, the right medication acts as an absence. Rather than feeling an influx of positive feelings by taking a daily SSRI I have a notable reduction in frequency and duration of depressive episodes. My body regulates itself more efficiently.
And so that’s my story of mental health. It’s a debilitating, embarrassing, and scary mountain that I’ve just now started to climb by acknowledging there is a mountain in the first place.
Your mental health isn’t something to feel shamed about. It’s not something you’re going to be able to white knuckle and ignore and hope to live a fulfilled life. It’s not fair that your mind works the way it does. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t your responsibility to address it.
I wrote this in the hope that acknowledging my own issues can encourage you to explore yours.
If you need any help, I’m here.
Take care of yourself.