Unwell

The first time a doctor referred to my anxiety as a “mental illness,” I remember feeling like someone had just kicked me in the stomach.  I didn’t say anything.  I just looked back at him and nodded my head.  I had nothing to say.  I was so offended.  It’s not a “mental illness,” I thought.  It’s anxiety.  I’m an anxious person.  That’s what I do.  I feel uncomfortable.  I worry.  I do shit like that.  AND!!  I just had a baby!  Everybody feels like that after they have a baby.  It’s anxiety, you asshole. Not a mental illness.  Of course, I didn’t say any of that.  Because as if having a doctor label my feelings as a mental illness wasn’t insulting enough, it was a doctor I worked for.  A man I respected.  And because of that relationship, I felt ashamed.  Embarrassed.  Horrified, even.  I remember driving home after that appointment and finding it really hard to breath.  I thought to myself “My bosses think I’m a fucking head case.  There’s no way that they will keep me around.  They’re going to fire me because they think I’m crazy!”  if I wasn’t anxious before that, I certainly was after. 

Needless to say, I was disenchanted with being labeled as crazy. You know who’s crazy?  Schizophrenics.  Those people are crazy.  Borderline personality disorders.  That shit’s crazy.  Those people talk to themselves.  They have multiple personalities.  People with mental illnesses are homeless or in prison or are heinous criminals.  I was not any of those things, so thank you very much, Dr. Larson, I DO NOT have a mental illness.  His words haunted me.  And they made me even more self conscious about my anxiety than I had ever felt before.  Even worse, it made me shield my emotions from the rest of the world.  That way, I had no outlet.  I couldn’t ever tell people when I was scared or worried or consumed with unreasonable fears.  I couldn’t tell anyone because I didn’t want them to know that I had a mental illness. 

Years went by, and I hid it all.  When I left that job in private practice, I did it under the façade of family and personal growth.  I never told anyone that my anxiety owned me.  I never admitted that watching people die and children get sick, without explanation or cause, had finally touched my soul so deeply that I went home crying every day.  I couldn’t tell them that.  I had already been diagnosed as unwell.  I couldn’t let anyone know that it was actually true.  I could never admit that my emotional well being had become a liability for the people I worked with and worked for.  You just can’t say that.  That’s a one way ticket to a fitted jacket and a padded room.  That’s really what I thought. 

I thought that because of the stigma associated with mental illness.  People who are mentally unwell live on the streets and talk to themselves.  I really didn’t want that.  As the years passed, and the anxiety came and went, it made me think about what that doctor meant when he told me that my anxious tendencies were a mental illness.  Finally, I admitted to him “Doc, I don’t want to be crazy.  I never felt crazy until you told me I was.”  And he looked at me, stunned, and said “Angela.  I wasn’t telling you that you are crazy.  I was telling you that anxiety is a mental illness.  I just assumed that because you’ve worked in medicine that you KNOW that mental illness is no different than the flu or bronchitis or acid reflux.  Those are all illnesses.  And they can be recovered from, or at the very least, they can be treated.”  Oh.  Well, then. 

That’s how doctors see mental illnesses. The same way as they see any other ailment.  But the rest of the industrialized world does not see it that way.  We see mental illness as weakness.  We see it as crazy.  Culturally, we see mental illness as a black eye on society.  And don’t think that we do not.  You know how you can tell?  When someone breaks a bone, you can see the injury.  They go to the doctor’s office and they get it x-rayed and they doc wraps it up.  They leave with crutches and casts.  We sign our friends’  casts with well wishes and hopes for a speedy recovery.  When someone gets sick or falls on hard times because of a physical ailment, we rally around them.  We have raffles and spaghetti dinners and take up collections so they can save their homes and pay their bills. When someone looses a loved one to an illness, we send cards and flowers and make donations in the name of the people we’ve lost.  But when people have an emotional ailment, we do everything in our power to ignore it.  If a friend becomes unemployed because his state of mind prevented him from performing his job functions, we don’t talk about it.  And if, god forbid, we lose a friend to an unbearable sadness, we absolutely do NOT post about it on Facebook. 

I had a panic attack on Saturday.  It was awful.  And it was just another reminder of how vulnerable I am.  I tried to explain it to somebody.  That’s when I realized that trying to explain it was like trying to describe the color purple to someone who had never seen purple before.  Then I realized that people always say the same thing.  “Oh.  You’ll be fine.”  Or “you are a fighter, this won’t get you down.”  Or “You’re just making it up in your mind.  You are way better than this.”  Those things, of course, are the equivalent of saying “rub some dirt on it!” when you get a cut.  Or “You’ll be fine!  Walk it off” when you break a bone.  We all know that rubbing dirt in a gaping wound is just asking for a nasty infection.  We also know that you can’t walk off a broken bone.  The only way to heal a physical injury is to rest and protect yourself, so you don’t aggravate the pain.  But with mental injuries, it’s so much different.  They tell you to get back to work, get back to life, get going.  GO!  And since nobody can see the injury, it must not be there. 

Well, it’s there.  And 1 in 3 of us suffers from it.  That’s way more of us than are walking around on crutches or with our arms in slings.  Remember that next time you tell someone to walk it off or work it out. 

-Inner Peas