Essay: Mental Health (part 1)

Mental illness is super real. And it’s only getting “real-er” (as in, more and more people are experiencing anxiety, panic, and depression episodes due to COVID-19 and the effects aren’t just going to go away with a vaccine).

Here are a few facts:

  • Women are twice as likely to be depressed

  • If you have literally any other sort of chronic health condition (i.e. diabetes, cancer, heart disease), your risk usually goes way, way up

  • Anxiety and depression are both usually attributable to an imbalance of serotonin (a chemical naturally occurring inside the brain)

  • The literal financial impact of the American mental health crisis is over $200 BILLION in lost wages alone every year

So let’s talk about it. I’ll start.

Shit hit the fan for me in my senior year of high school. I was dating an emotionally abusive guy that absolutely ripped the normal-emoting block out of my mental Jenga. That’s when the really bad panic attacks started. The most memorable of which came during the last hour of my day in high school, sitting in my expository writing class. I had just been excoriated by my boyfriend a few hours prior and all of sudden, during a PowerPoint on grammar, I started getting a tight, scratchy pain in my chest. My heart was racing, my mind wouldn’t, couldn’t, stop going over every word he had said, what I had “done wrong”. In the middle of that classroom, I started sobbing.

Up until that moment, I had been the “permanently cheerful” teacher’s pet with the laser focus on academic excellence. It felt like my world was crashing down around my ears and I just couldn’t hold the misery at bay any longer, through no choice of my own.

I thought the breakup later that summer would fix my problems as I went off to college. Turns out, that’s not how anxiety and depression work. My body just gave up on any attempt at health. Throughout my entire first semester I spent a total of two weeks not on antibiotics. After dozens and dozens of panic attacks like that first one in English, it started to dawn on me: this is not normal. That’s when I took my first trip to a therapist. Finally, I had an explanation—and a diagnosis: I was clinically depressed and suffering from generalized anxiety and panic disorders.

Within a year of my initial diagnosis I was put on antidepressants. It is hard to understate the difference pre and post medication—simply put, the non stop worrying and doubt faded to a manageable whisper. I got my mind back. As a diabetic, I knew that my body just wasn’t capable of managing this aspect of chemical balance for me, so it was time for me to intervene. In the diabetes case, my pancreas just didn’t produce insulin. In the anxiety/depression case, it was a lack of serotonin. I get to be the one to step in and consciously make the choice to help my body feel (more) normal, but it’s something that I have to actively choose. It’s not always an easy one.

Your story may look, feel, sound, BE extremely different. The most important thing is that you find help, in whatever form that it takes. Take care of you! 

By the way, this is just the beginning of the discussion. Stay tuned, hang in there. 😊