mental health

Gideon’s Challenge

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Down

Broken Leaf

It is not the ache upon the solar plexus or sinking of the heart, but the silent creep of tiredness and, concealed within that tiredness shadow…. apathy.

The interest in food dissolves, as does the drive toward self care.   I focus on work so that I do not fall behind, but there is little joy, only process.  Mindless process where by I go through the motions that move me along one step at a time.

I try to push back, but there is nothing to push against, and nothing to push with.  It is all shadow and mirror, no substance and thus nothing to grasp or defeat.  After all, how do you wage war a shadow?

Gideon’s Challenge

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Hypocritical 

September Clouds

Twice, today.   It’s an uncomfortable feeling and… unwarranted?   I don’t know why I’d feel that way but I did.

Both times, it was at EC, while answering questions on the forum.   The first was the thread I answered where someone was asking for help and advice considering long distance relationships.  The second was in a thread where someone asked advice on starting a home business from a hobby.

I know my advice in both cases was good, and I am speaking from a place of experience as well in both instances.  And yet…. somehow I feel hypocritical anyway.

I tell myself that I have a thriving online business, and thus I am in an excellent position to give advice on such things.  Yet…. oddly I feel a fraud spouting hypocrisy.   Same goes for the long distance relationship advice.  We’ve been in a long distance relationship for 9 years.  It’s had its ups and downs like all relationships do.   So why do I feel as if I have no room to speak on the topic of long distance relationships?

I don’t understand why I feel this way… and yet it came up twice today.

Gideon’s Challenge

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Gratitude

Mental health issues are not a joke.  Nor are they something you can ignore and hope will go away.  You cannot “wish” them away, nor can you force them better with positive thinking and “will power”.

Most of them also cannot be cured.  They can be managed to a point, both through therapy that can teach you coping skills and techniques as well as with medication… but for many, managing is the best you’re going to get.   Honestly?  That’s a hard one to swallow, even for the patients let alone those that have never experienced mental health issues, and yet… there it is.  The glaring truth is that like one’s physical health, those with mental health issues are required to do regular maintenance to keep things running somewhat smoothly.

  • Major Depressive Disorder  (Although, I have a feeling if I were to be re-diagnosed while on my medication it would be changed to Dysthymia with Major Depressive Episodes.)
  • General Anxiety (at times with social triggers and panic attacks)

These are the issues that trouble my mental health and have since I was a teen, as diagnosed by a psychiatrist and treated (on an ongoing basis) by a psychologist.  And possibly, more recently, a bit of undiagnosed PTSD.  Although, how do you know when you’re cured of that?  It IS curable, isn’t it?  I’m pretty sure it is… unlike the others listed above which require treatment to “manage” them, but cannot be “cured”.

In my life I have tried many different medications for my anxiety and depression.   Some worked.  Some sort of worked.  Others didn’t work at all.  These type of medications work differently on different people, and you don’t know how they’ll work or even IF they’ll work unless you try them. But even with the ones that seemed to work well on my depression or anxiety, there was one constant through them all.  What never changed and never faded was my suicidal thoughts and urges. (Yes, they are different; thoughts are just thoughts, whereas urges are a need to act on those thoughts.)

And then entered one wonderful, miraculous, magical (not in the metaphysical sense) pill.

10mg Prozac

I was so lucky.  And I am so grateful for that luck that inspired the doctor to prescribe me 10mg rather than the usual 20mg starter dose.   I was so lucky because it turns out 15mg is my “magic” number.  It’s a child’s dose, not even the starter dose for an adult.   And yet… it manages my depression and anxiety beautifully.

That’s not the most important part though. What is the really miraculous part is that with this medication my suicidal urges… disappeared.  The thoughts are so rare now, and passing at most.  The urges are completely gone.   Urges that were once my constant companion, with me when I went to bed and when I woke up in the morning.  With me every third minute of the day.   Constantly there, no matter how hard I tried to push them away or bury them.

And with a child’s dose of a pill that I avoided taking (due to reputation) for YEARS… suddenly, those thoughts are gone.

They come back when I’m bumped up to the 20mg dose.  As does the crippling, unmanageable depression.   And yet, 10mg isn’t quite enough to find a good balance.  I take 10mg a day alternating with 20mg…. averaging out to 15mg a day in my body’s system.

Is it perfect?   No.   I still have to go to therapy.   I still have anxiety and mood fluctuations that dip into clinical depression.  But, none of it is as severe in the years I’ve been taking Prozac.

And I am so very grateful.