Disadvantages

Growing up in a middle-class suburban town with high expectations from everyone in my life, mental health was not a topic of discussion. I remember the first time I told my mother that I felt like I had depression. I was around twelve years old at the time, and the chronic dark cloud fogging up my mind wouldn’t go away. I had only one close friend, and at the time we had started to drift away from each other.

My parents fought all of the time, and my father drove my mother to alcoholism along with him. I remember one argument that was so bad, I thought they were going to kill each other. I had actually searched out a gun that I knew wasn’t in a safe, and I hid it in the basement before swiftly retreating to my room. One of my earliest memories is my sister and I huddled up in the corner of our room, my sister crying because our parents were screaming at each other and my father was slamming or throwing things. My mother was the only parent I felt remotely close to, and it broke my heart to see her drown her sorrows in a cheap gallon of wine.

Despite all of this, my mother had told me that I had no reason to be depressed. I had food, clothes, and shelter. You see, no one needs a reason to develop cancer or a devastating autoimmune condition such as multiple sclerosis. Certain things may exacerbate the the situation, such as pollution, toxic waste exposure, genetics, and poor diet, all of which can make it more likely for these diseases to flourish. For me, it was the emotional, verbal, and occasionally physical abuse we received from my father coupled with endless bullying from students and teachers alike. People fail to realize that the brain is an organ that can get sick like any other organ.

I didn’t even want to be alive. I thought about death on a daily basis as the only means to escape my hellish upbringing and the agonizing pain in my heart.

It took a lot of courage to broach this topic with her, and the fact that it was shot down so quickly meant that I never opened up about my mental health again- not until I was caught self harming. I had became far more shut in, refusing to discuss my day with my family, and muttering nothing but a few words as I locked myself into my room. However, none of this was taken seriously. It took the sight of blood as a physical manifestation of my pain for them to realize that my sickness was more than just “all in my head.”

Was this sickness treated with compassion? No. I was threatened to be “thrown in a mental hospital” and was treated as crazy, which only made the situation worse. I continued self harming by whatever means necessary, even after my tools were taken away. Don’t get me wrong; on a surface level this seems to be the correct choice of action. Who wouldn’t take away something with which their child was mutilating their body with? However, simply taking away the tools didn’t make me stop, it just made my one and only coping mechanism more dangerous with a higher risk of infection.

Despite being ostracized from my family, I am one of the luckier people who’s parent finally took them to therapy. There, I learned survival skills to navigate my father’s abuse, such as stone-walling; a technique where I intentionally minimized my presence through verbal and physical means with the intention of becoming as boring as possible to my abuser. If my father wanted to pick a drunken argument with me, I would go along with whatever he said and respond with one or two word sentences. This, in and of itself, is not true therapy, but a means of survival until I could escape the abuse entirely. This method will not work for everyone and may even cause some abusers to escalate their sense of control.

It is impossible to heal from abuse when you are still actively being abused. When I went off to college as a first-generation college student, there the therapy truly began. I became exhausted, finally able to rest and let my nervous system settle for a while.

However, the cumulative years of abuse and insufficiently-treated mental health had taken it’s toll. College was the first time I ever started taking antidepressants, and I was quite hesitant at first. I thought; “what if this changes me? What if it makes things worse?” I had a poor understanding of these medications and how they worked, and the stigma of taking a pill for mental health weighed heavy on my mind. I didn’t want to become a zombie like so many people had warned me of, but the more I thought about it… I already was one. Change is scary, but when you feel that you have nothing to lose, it’s better to take a leap on something that might help as opposed to the inevitable leap off of the bridge if I had let things continue to spiral.

I was put on a low dose of an SSRI. I tapered up until the max dose, unfortunately with minimal effects. It just wasn’t the right medication for me, and I was still battling suicidal thoughts.

Things got to a point where I had started to shift my thinking from passive death wishes to active ideas on ways to take my own life. One day, I had impulsively attempted to take my own life before somehow finding it within myself to stop. Still to this day, I don’t know how I was able to force myself to stop; it took every fiber of my being. For being in one of the worst periods of my life, the only reason I had to live was that my cat was still waiting for me in my apartment. She was my main driving factor, and a huge source of joy in my life. I couldn’t bear to think about leaving her all alone, wondering where I had disappeared to.

So, I had resolved to admitting myself to a psychiatric hospital to prevent a repeat attempt. There, I was finally put on a medication that truly worked for me! I was also referred to intensive outpatient treatment and individual therapy. Mental hospitals are severely stigmatized. Although not all of it is unfounded, I am glad that I chose that path. Medication alone won’t fix things. In some instances, neither will therapy alone. It often takes a combination of therapy and medication to see change.

Through years of trauma-based therapy, I have come to realize that my childhood experiences primed my brain to develop major depression. I have also been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (yes, the same type that veterans have, if that puts into perspective the different type of battlefield I had to navigate just to survive as a child). Mental health is no joke. Whenever I tell people about my diagnoses, some are in disbelief simply because I am not a veteran. However, just because my battleground looks different, doesn’t mean it should be treated as any less valid.