What if you were sick in bed for three days? You’re popping Advil like candy to keep your fever down. You feel like you are going to die. Well-meaning friends offer to swing by the store if you need anything. Your mother brings over chicken soup and tells you to rest up and take it easy. Everyone says “get well soon!” But what if they didn’t? What if, instead, they told you, “Have you tried … you know … just not having the flu? C’mon, shake it off!”
Or imagine you just cut yourself. Or threw out your back. Or had an asthma attack. Or were diagnosed with diabetes. And the response to your malady was “You just need to change your frame of mind, then you’ll feel better.”
These responses seem heartless and insensitive, not to mention socially inept. Yet because mental illness is so misunderstood, this is the type of “helpful advice” that people diagnosed with depression, anxiety disorders and other mental illnesses confront on a daily basis. Talk about adding insult to injury.
We treat depression by trying different drugs until we find one that works—a highly imprecise approach to treating the most sophisticated of organs, the brain.
Alexia had been in-and-out of intensive psychiatric therapy for nearly two decades by the time we met. She suffered from bipolar disorder, which meant that she cycled between explosions of boundless energy and black holes of suicidal despair. Despair brought her to our unit.
Her long chart chronicled how previous psychiatrists had emptied the armory: antidepressants, antipsychotics, anticonvulsants, mood stabilizers, group and intensive inpatient therapy, psychotherapy, dialectic and cognitive behavioral therapy. Nothing had a lasting effect
My anxiety disorder first erupted when I was about 25, after my husband had a heart attack at the age of 35. Two days after his heart attack, I was driving home from the hospital and I had my first panic attack and mental health scare.
Olly Alexander opened up to The Guardian‘s Owen Jones, a noted gay columnist and political activist, about his struggle with depression and anxiety. In the article, Alexander shared experiences that likely mirror those of many gay men and LGBT individuals. From childhood bullying to a desire to be anything but gay, he uses these experiences to highlight the inadequate mental health services available.
Although he is currently in private treatment, Alexander wanted to address the stigma attached to mental illness, its discussion, and its availability. With cuts to NHS (National Health Service) under Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, Alexander wanted to lend his voice to an issue that needs attention.
Of all the patients I have seen in my 40 years as a psychoanalyst, Daniel was the strangest. He was the most inaccessible, inwardly tormented and infuriating man I have ever known, and yet he stayed in therapy with me for over a decade, calling faithfully every week — he insisted that his work schedule precluded coming in person — even though he spent many of those sessions in silence or addressed me as if I were inanimate. He drove me crazy, he haunted me and he moved me, sometimes all in the same session.
Six months after my mom’s suicide, there is still a 12-pound lasagna she made in my freezer, and I can’t will myself to defrost it or throw it away. “In case you have guests,” my mother had said, hoisting the slab of meat, noodles and cheese from her refrigerator bag into my freezer. I took this to mean, you should have more friends over. Now that she’s gone, after struggling with such mental health issues as borderline personality disorder, I realize my translation was wrong. She was saying, I wish I had more friends to feed because I feel alone.
Inside Nebraska Medical Center, Nolan Sensintaffar, 5, drives his red Mini Coop down the hospital halls. In his passenger seat sits a plastic box full of instruments. It’s certainly not the normal hospital picture, but this young patient is on his way to therapy. More specifically, he is on his way to music therapy, to help with mental health.
