I want to add a trigger warning at the beginning of this because it deals with suicidality, self harm and mental illness, just out of courtesy.

I’d like to make this first blog a little bit about introducing myself. I’m early 30’s. I’m recently separated from a fairly lengthy relationship that ended in emotional abuse. I’m starting my life completely over. I’m also a long time survivor of mental illness.

I say survivor in the most real of terms; I don’t say it lightly or flippantly. I have survived in the most literal sense through my anxiety and depressive disorders. I have survived the suicidality and the major depressive states when I felt that I could no longer carry the burdens, that I could no longer go on. I want to share this with anyone I can reach, so that anyone reading this blog knows that they aren’t alone, that there is hope, and at the end of the day there are ways to cope.

My journey into mental illness started before I was born. It’s inherited and generational and there was really no escaping it. Not too long ago I remember my grandmother telling my father and I, “I had this passed down to me and it was passed on to you and it’s something we have to live with the rest of our lives, and I hate that for you.” It underscored the fact that, like a diabetic, I lived with a disease. I lived with something that for a long time I could not admit was treatable, but not curable. It’s a hard pill to swallow to start believing that something is ‘wrong’ with you. That you are ‘unfixable’. I’d like to ask that we instead look at things through a different perspective however. Nobody berates a diabetic for taking insulin. Nobody berates someone with a thyroid disorder for taking medication. Why do we who have a mental illness beat ourselves up so badly for taking medication for our own mental health issues? Why do we feel that mental health is somehow intrinsically ‘worse’ and more ‘bad’ than something going wrong with our physical health?

Our brains make up who we are. They are the centre of our consciousness and our personalities. To believe that something is ‘wrong’ with our brains is to open up the possibility of something being ‘wrong’ with us, fundamentally, as individuals, and that is just not the correct line of thinking. We are not dominated by our illness. Our illnesses do not dictate who we are as people. One lesson I was taught through my time in psychotherapy is not to refer to the illness as ‘my depression’, or to make it a part of yourself, though I do not know the extent that I agree with this sentiment. To an extent I understand, but at the same time, my illness is a part of me, and there is no escaping it. It is my illness, whether I want it to be or not. I should not internalize it, and I should not let it limit me, but at the same time I cannot pretend that it lives outside me, because it lives within my head alone.

I’d like to take you back a ways, to the beginning of when I started to deal with anxiety. The earliest memories that I have are very young. Some of my earliest memories at all are actually trying to deal with panic attacks. I was maybe four or five, playing in the back yard when suddenly I ran to my mom screaming that I didn’t want to die, that I didn’t know what happened when I died, but I didn’t want to ever die. I remember flashes of it happening, but what I remember most is running across the yard to her with the fear pounding in my chest and the distinct feeling and realization that I was going to die one day, and that there was nothing I could do about it. It was a fear and panic that would go on to plague me for years and years until I could make a very tentative peace and come to somewhat accept it. For me that was what I now know was the beginning of a generalized anxiety disorder. From then on I would have a general unease from time to time, but I’d always work it off or explain it away, and it’d come and go. I was just a nervous kid with an overactive brain.

When I hit 12 years old, my life really changed forever, and it was my induction into the world of mental health and mental illness. I came down with mono. Well, they said they weren’t positive that it was mono, it was a ‘mono like illness’, that behaved exactly like mono. Whatever that means. I was out of school for around 6 weeks, my grades suffered as much as my health suffered as I was doing my schooling from home. Eventually I was slowly introduced back into school but my health was not back to normal. I was sleeping a lot. So much so that my parents were pretty worried. I’d sleep all night and well into the day, and for a kid that was normally kind of hyperactive that wasn’t any kind of normal. So off to the doctor we went.

I remember somewhat seeing the doctor. He told my mom and I that I must be suffering from depression, due to the fact that I was feeling so fatigued and sleeping so much, and prescribed me Paxil. Remember at the time I was 12 years old. Antidepressants even now in 2021 are not recommended for patients under 18 years of age, much less for patients with no prior history of mental health issues and who have never undergone a screening for depression or any other form of mental illness. It was probably the worst decision that doctor could have made.

From this point on, my memory basically quit working. I piece things together based on fragments of memory and what my family has told me. I do remember sinking into an actual depression. I wanted to be alone. I started taking an interest in morbid things. I dressed in all black like I was mourning. I was obsessed with fire and I would walk by myself to a reservoir in town and just sit beside the water and light twigs and kleenex’s on fire so I could watch them burn. I then started to spiral out of control. I started hallucinating, having delusions that there were monsters in the house watching me, waiting to get me. I kept them to myself at first, until I had what we called my first ‘episode.’

I had missed a dose of my Paxil after staying with my grandma for the night. I was home and set a fire in my room before absolutely breaking down and telling my mom about it and insisting something was wrong with me. She called the doctor because I was hysterical and he insisted that it was because I missed a dose and was in withdrawal and I needed to resume my medication and make sure not to miss a dose. I wish I could remember more, but I can’t.

Not long after came my second episode, again after a missed dose. I remember being in my room and deciding that I wasn’t going to live anymore. I knew that everyone was better off without me. I wrote out a note to my family telling them how much I loved them and that I was sorry but I knew they were better off without me there, and I went into the bathroom, and I just laid on the floor. I was so out of my head that I truly believed I was going to lay on the floor and simply will myself to die. I do remember my brother coming to the bathroom door and talking, trying to open the locked door and saying something. My parents finding the note and banging on the door. The next thing I can remember they’re standing over me and I am screaming and screaming and I remember thinking to myself ‘I have to not scream, the neighbors will call 911’. My dad slapped my face and my parents later told me that I was making no sounds at all. That I was perfectly still and unfocused, and when my dad slapped my face my eyes shot to him and my pupils were so large there was no colour left in my eyes. I don’t remember anything until my grandparents showed up and we went to the hospital. They hooked me up and did a test to see if I’d had a seizure, it came back inconclusive. The next day we went to Redacted’s psychiatric hospital to evaluate me.

I didn’t know the date. I didn’t know what county I lived in or other obvious information. I was suicidal and severely depressed and by that time hopelessly dependent on Paxil. I couldn’t miss a single dose without going into withdrawal and possibly having seizures. So they admitted me. And of my time there, quite a bit has been seared into my brain.

I remember right after getting there I was led back to a shower area where they gave me hospital clothes to change into. I had to take a shower and change and they took my clothes. I had nothing of my own. I was on 24 hour suicide watch and had to sleep on a mattress under the reception desk the first night. The first full day I tried to talk to one of the nurses about getting my things and was told I had to wait, that they had to be checked and I had to ‘earn my privileges’. I insisted I didn’t need to be there and was told that ‘nobody thinks they need to be here at first’. I felt defeated and invalidated.

My room mate was a really sweet girl from an abusive household and was 5 years my senior. She was there with a long history of self harm, drug use and running away, probably due to the abuse she suffered, but nobody seemed to really want to treat the root issues. I made friends with the misfits. The girl who would collect staples to run down her arms. The girl who asked every newbie if they knew anyone who could get her heroin. The gang member. The one who shared my name. To this day I remember them all and I wonder how they are, if they’re still alive and how they are doing.

One day in therapy group we were sitting sharing our stories, and a newbie came in. She was scared, screaming and crying for her parents and fighting the nurses. They didn’t calm her. They didn’t try and reason with her. They manhandled her and drug her across the floor in front of the therapy room. Our counselors shut the door and told us not to look. I met her later and her arms were so covered in self harm scars that they were more raised than smooth skin. I feel so much empathy for the pain she must have went through to then have been treated so roughly by the people who were supposed to be there to help her.

We went through a module on suicide, where they made us watch videos of the families of suicide victims and look at pictures of completed suicides and suicidal people. One picture in particular stuck out to me. A woman, in black and white, standing on a balcony and holding a knife to her neck. I can never erase the expression of pain on her face from my brain. It’s something that will haunt me for the rest of my life.

I was weaned off the Paxil onto a cocktail of other drugs, and all the while, without me knowing because for the first three days I wasn’t allowed any contact with family, my parents were fighting to get me out. As soon as I was admitted they realized that I was in the wrong place, and in their very short interactions with  Redacted’s, they realized what a terrible place it was. It took almost a week to get me out, but by that time the damage was done. I was severely traumatized. I came home with nightmares, unable to sleep or sleep in my own room. I was on a host of medications. I started seeing a psychiatrist and was diagnosed with general anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder and attention deficit disorder. I was in therapy for years but after decades of counselling, support from family and wonderful friends, I’ve really come a long way.

It took me a long time to come to terms with what happened and at times it still creeps up on me. But now I’m able to share that part of my life much more freely. I wish I could say it was the only traumatic thing in my life but it isn’t, but those are stories for other times. This story is to give a preface to my mental health background, to let you know that I’ve been there. That I understand. That whoever is reading this, whoever somehow stumbles across this blog, you aren’t by yourself in your struggles.

What’s going on in our brain chemistry is not what makes us who we are in the end. My mental illnesses do not define me. They may hold me back at times, but I always come out on top, and they have not beaten me, and they won’t beat you either.