The Medical Side of Mental Health

People are becoming more and more aware that mental illness is not just psychological. Education is so necessary around this point, even for patients. There may be plenty going on in their lives to cause them emotional distress, but at the same time, I’ve never known anyone who could talk away a chemical imbalance.

And now, a fitting Monty Python quote:

“This new learning amazes me, Sir Bedevere. Explain again how sheep’s bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes.”

You cannot treat a chemical imbalance if your brain is not making that chemical in the first place. There are three main neurotransmitters that have to be hit to not get depression: dopamine, seratonin, and norepinephrine. If all three aren’t balanced, you will go one of two ways: down into depression or up into mania. For most people that go up into true mania, they cycle. Whether that person’s cycle takes four months or four days, there is an extreme fluctuation in those three brain chemicals that have to get evened out.

Because each person’s mental health is individual to them, I can only talk about what I’ve been through, what’s worked, and what hasn’t.

I didn’t realize that I had depression so much as I realized that I was only getting three productive days per month. I couldn’t function because I couldn’t motivate myself. I was mired in sadness, with no reason for it at all. I didn’t believe I could handle my life, so I didn’t. I was about 19, and my anxiety was trying to kill me. I don’t mean that I was suicidal. I mean that I got panic attacks and the shortness of breath was severe.

After that, I was put on an antidepressant called Celexa. It helped with the depression because it hit my serotonin, but not as much as I needed. I continued with it for years, sometimes adding Wellbutrin to hit dopamine as well.

It wasn’t until 2005 that I saw a brilliant psychiatrist at University of Houston who said, after running some tests, that I had been misdiagnosed, and that’s why I didn’t feel much better. He said that instead of monopolar depression, I was Bipolar II. This meant that I wasn’t cycling into true mania, but often staying up for days at a time. I tapered off everything I was taking and started a cocktail of Lamictal (lamotrigine) and again, Celexa.

That was eight years ago, and I have been mostly stable ever since. Occasionally, I have days where nothing feels right and everybody sucks. Other days, I can’t get enough of being with people and listening to their stories. It’s a cycle, but a small one.

I take medication every day so that the rise and fall stays true to my personality and I can be who I want to be without being too sedated or too miserable to get out of bed.

So many people do not even bother to take the tests to see if they’re depressed, most likely because their insurance is shit and they can’t afford it – or – admitting that you need professional help is hard. You have to admit that you have faults, big ones, and even though you aren’t knowingly causing unrest, you do. Both for yourself and those around you. That’s the danger of not getting mental health treated- you fall into such a hole that you cannot see the ways you are affecting the people you love. You can unintentionally put a severe burden on a relationship if they are close enough to you to see that you need help.

Plus, getting better in terms of mental health is difficult at best… not so much when you find the drugs that work for you and you can stick to them. However, when you are in the throes of finding that “right thing,” you may feel as if the world is ending and a brick keeps hitting your head repeatedly out of spite. Thrown from a third story window. If you’re lucky, you’ll have someone to lean on when all this is going on. I didn’t, because PEOPLE WILL NOT COME AND HELP YOU UNLESS YOU ASK THEM. I went to the “I can handle this” school and quickly figured out that I could not maintain. I was freaking out at everything, and once, on a memorable trip to Homo Depot, thought someone was following me with a gun. Who knows? They could have been, but I sincerely doubt it. I have never been a fan of asking for help, because I’d rather sit in a cave until my brain gets ahold of itself. The problem is that sometimes it takes more time than you can afford to recover. Let people help you, or life will not move forward.

The bitch about crazy meds is that it takes a while for them to work- up to six weeks, in fact. What you do during that time will be anything but normal, and not necessarily on the outside. For instance, you may feel as if you have the type of headache you get after wearing someone’s glasses… except that you can take glasses off.

Acknowledge that you are sick, and get in bed. People will say your pain is not real, and that’s ok. They’re just really uneducated about what it feels like to start psychiatric medication. Assure them that your head feels like it’s coming out of your skull, and that should about cover it.

My best wish is to share some common ground with this article. I think we need to start a dialogue around mental health that is more personal and less emotionally violent than what we’re hearing in the news right now. For most people, mental health is just that. Taking a pill like you would if you had high blood pressure. Believing the media when they act like all people who are diagnosed with mental health issues are thisclose to snapping and blowing up everything.

Don’t listen. Just tell your story, and hope that the people reading it will gain new insight as to what you’re going through.

Most of all, though, I am here to show you that you are not alone, and you will always receive compassion here.