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(Personal) Tharn

16 Jul

Myth 150It’s been a rough summer for me, anxiety-wise. The news is full of terrible stories from the current president’s administration in the United States, and it’s coming so fast the scandals just bleed together. Saying the President or his Cabinet has done something awful that threatens the fabric of democracy is like saying water is wet at this point — it’s hard to keep up the outrage and drive to do something when you feel like anyone in power won’t do anything to resolve the mess we’re in. Honestly, the best I can do is hang on for the 2018 midterm elections in the hope that the Blue Wave manifests and Democrats take the House and/or Senate. For now, it’s hard to know how we stop anything — even the atrocious Supreme Court nominees.

If political news isn’t bad enough, environmental news fills me with an existential dread. This summer has already been extraordinarily hot, with a number of records broken all over the world. Hurricane season has started, and there are so many people in island nations who have yet to recover from the last round of devastation. We’re seeing the first obvious effects of climate change right now, and these effects will only become more pronounced over the years. Here in the US, our government’s response is to remove all references to the phenomenon from all departmental documents.

Despite the fact that police officers are still killing unarmed people of color, we’re still at the part of the conversation where we need to convince people it’s a problem. People of color are being harassed in the street, reported to the police for anything from doing their jobs to using the community pool, beaten and killed through racist criminal actions; but we can’t seem to convince people that the racist rhetoric of the President and others associated with him are responsible for the rise in white supremacist terrorist activity. Newspapers would rather legitimize ignorant, irresponsible, bigoted thinking in editorials and human interest articles than hold the administration accountable for what it has enabled. Trump voters, the people responsible for this state of affairs, are still having their feelings centered while the poor and disadvantaged suffer horribly.

Most days, it’s more than I can take. I can’t look at the news because there’s nothing I can do about the knot it generates in my stomach. I can’t look at Twitter because my timeline is full of anger about the terrible things that people in the various communities I belong to are saying, or what the social media platforms are letting others get away with. It’s difficult to talk about something I love or promote what I’m writing when I see retweets for someone’s GoFundMe to pay for medical expenses, or the latest in jaw-dropping evil from the people in power. The idea of engaging in a world that feels so cruel, so aggressively and stubbornly ignorant, so inhumane — it fills me with dread.

I don’t want to be the person who looks away from the pain in the world and chases what fleeting, shallow pleasure he can manage while everything burns down around him. But it feels like this is what I have to do in order to stay sane these days. What good does it do to spread awareness about problems I could never hope to fix? What’s the point of arguing with someone who isn’t interested in understanding your experience, only shutting you up so they don’t have to feel bad about what they do? Why contribute to all the noise when no one’s listening anyway? Why try to save the planet when those with the actual means to do so would rather figure out how to build bunkers to survive the apocalypse?

It’s been so hard to see a way out of this predicament. Even if our current President is impeached and removed from office, the Vice-President is still a religious zealot who would do many of the same things but with far more socially-acceptable language. We still have an entire political party that enabled this disaster for the sole purpose of hanging on to power. We still have at least a quarter to a third of Americans who support what’s happening, who will refuse any attempts we make to fix this. We’re still just one bad election from having all of this happen all over again.

I don’t know what to do with that. I truly wish I had more faith in us as a species. I wish that I could be more hopeful about our ingenuity, our ability to come together, our resilience. I wish I could see us becoming a society that prizes intelligence and expertise again, that honors the sacrifice of personal comforts so that we can actually take care of the people in our community. But I just can’t from where I’m sitting. There’s always going to be a sizable chunk of people out there who only care about devoting themselves to their worst impulses, and those people will likely have the money and power needed to keep the rest of us from doing anything about that.

I’m tired, and I know that there’s a very long way to go before anything will be OK. I don’t know how to change the minds that need to be changed at this point — certainly not in time to prevent the death of our civilization at our own hand. It feels inevitable, and the only thing to do is decide what kind of people we will be when it happens.

I know how this sounds, and I want to be clear that I’m not giving up. I still write, I still try to be the change I want to see, I still help where and when I can. But the fatalism is something I’ve had to push through in order to motivate myself, and that kind of sustained effort takes a lot out of you after a while.

What’s strange is that this doesn’t feel like depression, though I’m fairly sure it is. It just doesn’t feel irrational to think this way; things are terrible, and those in power are pretending they aren’t, and there’s not a lot we can do to change that. Still, there’s nothing for it but to keep trying to make the world around us better. We can’t do nothing, even when it feels like anything we could do won’t matter.

That’s where my head’s at right now, and I know it’s not the best place. Still, I thought I’d write about it here just to put it out there.

 
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Posted by on July 16, 2018 in mental-health, Politics, Self-Reflection

 

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(Mental Health) How to Help Others

23 May

Myth 150When I look back on the person I was in college — during the worst period of my depression — I am honestly amazed that I still have so many friends who knew me back then. I spent most of my time in the computer lab talking to folks online, and barely had enough energy to eat, sleep or bathe. Everything I talked about centered around how awful life was, how insurmountable my problems were, how much of a failure I had been. When folks were kind enough to apologize when they offended my hypersensitive emotions, they were treated to small passive-aggressive jabs instead of gratitude. It was awful. I was awful. And it makes me so grateful that there were people who stuck with me through all of it.

I try to take that knowledge with me whenever I’m dealing with someone in the throes of depression or anxiety, because I know how much it helped to have people who never gave up on me even when I wasn’t capable of showing my appreciation at the time. They made one of the worst times of my life a little more bearable, and I know now that it was at considerable expense on their part. The energy and patience required to deal with me when I was in my worst depressions are more than I could ever expect from anyone, even close friends. But those people who spent it on me are people I would do anything for now.

There is no shortage of people in geek spaces suffering from depression, anxiety, or another mental illness; supporting us can be very difficult, especially if you can only do so online. It can feel so inadequate to put encouraging words on a screen when someone tells you that they just want to die, and it’s really hard to be sure you understand what they’re going through when they bring up a problem. And, quite honestly, it’s a rough deal to spend so much time and energy consoling someone when you’re online to gain some measure of relief from the world yourself — especially if it feels like all of that time and energy is being sucked into an emotional void with no measurable improvement. Still, most of us are good people who don’t want to see our friends and fellow fans suffer, so we do what we can to ease the misery where we can.

With that in mind, what can we do to make sure we’re helping friends who are having a hard time coping with mental illness? There are a few things I can recommend from my personal experience on either side of that conversation, combined with suggestions from professionals and mental health advocates. I can’t guarantee that your friend will be cured if you follow this advice, of course, or that it will even result in a marked improvement. I do think that they will help you understand what your friend might be going through and offer the best assistance you can.

Listen actively. It takes work to be a good listener. Most of us only practice what I call “surface listening”, where we pick up the generalities of what’s being said while planning the next thing we’re going to say. Deep listening, the kind where you not only hear what’s being said but work to understand the intent behind what’s being said, is both more rare and more difficult. However, for those of us stuck in a bad headspace, it can mean a lot for someone to understand what we don’t have the vocabulary or insight to say.

When I’m in a bad depression, it’s hard to open up about what I really feel. Sometimes I don’t even know what that is, so I end up talking around the problem or trying to get to the precise feeling from different angles. It can be frustrating to have this strong emotion roiling inside of you without the means to express it, only to have a conversation that leads you further away from it with someone else.

I know this sounds like depressed people might expect you to be a mind-reader, which isn’t fair. But you don’t have to be — sometimes, all it takes is really listening to what someone is saying to understand what they mean. Active listening is difficult, and like any skill it takes practice to get good at it, but it reaps dividends not just for helping a depressed friend but for pretty much any other conversation you could have.

Offer support, not solutions. This is a bad habit of mine that I’m constantly trying to curb, but when someone comes to me with a problem my brain immediately kicks over into “solution mode” where I try to attack the problem with the person who brought it to my attention. This often just causes that person to be frustrated and frequently dismiss my suggestions for one reason or another. This frustrates me because I’m too deep into “solution mode” to get what’s happening there. If this person didn’t want my help solving their problem, why did they even come to me in the first place?

The kicker here is that I’ve been on the other side of this conversation, and I know how frustrating it is to bring a problem to someone only to have them immediately go into a list of solution suggestions. It’s so strange to me that it’s so easy to be disappointed in someone for doing the same thing I do all the time when the roles are reversed; if nothing else, it’s proof that we’re just not the rational creatures we think we are.

This might not be true all the time, but for a significant portion of the cases I bring a problem to someone I’m just looking for a safe space to vent — especially in the grips of a depression. It’s comforting to have someone else offer support and understanding, to acknowledge a problem you’re having as difficult to deal with. Sometimes, it helps to know that someone cares about you and that they’re on your side.

Know your boundaries. Having a friend with a mental illness lean on you heavily for emotional support can be exhausting. It’s all right to acknowledge that. Sometimes, we just don’t have it within us to be the outlet for someone going through a tough time — while that can be a difficult realization if you feel partially responsible for someone’s well-being, it’s also important to recognize when you’re getting burned out and unable to cope with the workload.

Having a firm handle on what you can and can’t handle is important for your own emotional well-being, and when you’re getting close to your limit you have to step back to preserve your own peace of mind. It’s noble to want to be right there in the thick of things with your friend, but compromising your own emotional health for the sake of someone else doesn’t solve their problem; it only creates more to be dealt with. If you need to take some time to recharge, tell your friend as kindly and compassionately as possible, and let them know that you’ll be available some time later.

If possible, it might help to find a support group online or in person to join. This can help you learn how to cope with caring for someone better, and that you’re not alone. There might be other resources you can share with your friend or a common support network, as well.

Encourage treatment. Most of us with friends who are dealing with a mental illness aren’t equipped to handle helping them on our own. Part of knowing our own boundaries is knowing when we’re in over our heads and professional help is needed; we wouldn’t offer a diagnosis or treatment for someone with a mysterious pain in their chest, so we shouldn’t do that for mental illness either.

Recommending a visit to the psychiatrist can be a tricky subject. Even if someone has health insurance, there’s no guarantee that mental health services are easily available. Besides the resistance to seeking treatment to begin with, there might be legitimate social, logistical or financial barriers to getting the care they need. Those of us in a bad spiral might see going to a therapist as a defeat, or be reluctant about sharing intimate and painful details of our lives with a stranger. Sometimes, though, it’s the best option we have for getting help.

If you feel your friend needs to see a mental health specialist, see if there’s a low-cost or no-cost resource available and what (if anything) would need to be done in order to take advantage of it. If they’re in a position where they can see a specialist with relative ease, talk with them about their reluctance to do so and see if that can be worked through. While treatment for a mental illness can be a long process that requires patience and trust, it’s worth sticking with. Helping a friend seek the help they need might be the best thing we can do to support them.

Discourage abuse. One big hazard of being emotional support for someone is the very real possibility of being subjected to abusive or manipulative behavior. I’ve known a number of people who feel that their mental illness is a valid excuse for treating the people around them poorly, and far too often the people in their support network enable that behavior by letting it slide. It breaks my heart to see this. No one deserves to be verbally or emotionally abused, and mental illness is no excuse for being an asshole. Letting this go unaddressed hurts everyone involved.

If a friend is engaging in inappropriate or manipulative behavior, it’s our duty as their support to let them know they’re crossing a line — especially if it’s with us. It can be very difficult to do so in a compassionate way, and it may take some delicate handling to do so, but it’s worth it every time. It helps to make sure the behavior is addressed as separate from the individual (“you did a bad thing,” not “you’re being a bad person” for example) so the person doesn’t internalize the action to the point that it’s a part of their identity. And it might help to remember that the behavior needs to be addressed in order to truly help your friend; keeping the goal of the conversation in mind might work to keep it from derailing.

Most importantly, it makes sure that you maintain your equanimity as that friend’s support. Some of us have a tendency to make other people see the world in the same skewed ways we do when we’re depressed. Sometimes we’re driven to these actions by the irrational fear that controlling someone else’s behavior or lowering their self-esteem is the only way we can keep them associating with us. Making sure it’s known that behavior won’t be tolerated AND that the relationship is one built on positive shared values (and not fear or control) provides a clear counter-narrative to that internal monologue, and might help that friend come around a bit sooner than they would otherwise.

Even then, if the abusive behavior continues or a line is crossed that makes the relationship untenable, it’s important to establish your boundary and make it clear there are consequences for those actions. If that means ending the relationship, as difficult as that is, then the relationship must end. Supporting someone else should not come at the cost of your own emotional health. Only give what you’re willing to part with, and make sure your loving relationship with yourself remains intact.

I hope these suggestions help, and offer some small insight into the difficulties of emotional support. I’d also like to take this time to thank all the people who’ve helped me through the worst times of my life, from the bottom of my heart. I wouldn’t be where I am without your continued faith and support, even when I really didn’t deserve it. Thank you Ryan, Kyle, Odis, Brian, Matt, Mat, Cy, Sherri, Crystal, Virginia, Joe, Kaycee, and so, so many others. I think about all of you all the time, and I appreciate all you’ve done.

 
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Posted by on May 23, 2018 in Buddhism, mental-health, Self-Reflection

 

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(Mental Health) My Executive Function

14 May

Myth 150Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is a bit of a misnomer; I think the name is a big reason why ADHD is so poorly understood and controversial as a mental illness. Those of us with the disorder aren’t necessarily hyperactive, and it isn’t always characterized by a deficit in attention. We aren’t bouncing off the walls from one thing to another, never able to finish a project because we have so much energy to burn off and no way to actually direct it. I mean, it’s partially true — but never in the way that people unfamiliar with the disease or its critics imagine it to be. ADHD is, like almost all other mental illnesses, a fairly complex disorder that can have a variety of expressions.

Also like so many other mental illnesses, the exact cause and nature of ADHD is poorly understood. However, there’s been a lot of research for it possibly because it’s such a controversial subject, with a number of scientists spearheading research to better classify it. We do know that ADHD expresses itself differently in children than it does in adults, primarily because undiagnosed children develop internalization mechanisms in order to “hide” symptoms, cope with them in increasingly complex social or professional environments, and attempt to deal with the lack of support or understanding for their difficulties.

We do know that ADHD is primarily a dysfunction of the parts of the brain that govern executive function, which leads to problems sustaining attention, being organized, and procrastinating. It affects planning, prioritization, time management, impulse control, decision making and mood regulation. In children, this can look like they’re incredibly hyperactive and impulsive, with a tendency to lash out and ignore instruction. In adults, this often looks like someone who is a ‘space cadet’ — lazy and unfocused with no capability of remembering the things they need to.

In any case, it’s generally accepted that the frontal lobes in the brain handle executive functioning. While there may be differences in the structure or volume of brain matter in this region, there might also be really hyperactive dopamine and norepinephrine reuptake mechanisms there. Since those neurotransmitters are very important for brain function in these regions, this can result in the neurons in that part of the brain working “sluggishly” because there simply aren’t enough chemicals within the synapses needed to promote enough electrical activity. This is why, paradoxically, stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin work so well. They increase the level of dopamine and adrenaline (epinephrine) in the brain. It’s also why folks with ADHD tend to seek out constant stimulation; it’s the brain trying hard to get its fix.

People with ADHD tend to have other mental illnesses, either as the direct result of the physical/chemical issues within the brain or due to the struggle to understand and cope with the illness. Depression and other mood disorders, anxiety disorder, low self-esteem and other issues all tend to pop up; I know for the longest time, before my diagnosis, I thought I was simply broken. I couldn’t make my brain do the things I know it needed to, and my focus would just slide off a task that I knew would require sustained, intense effort. This has been the case ever since I entered high school, to be honest — it was then that I realized I couldn’t simply coast through lessons, but I had never learned how to actually work for the consistently high grades I had gotten before. It was a pretty hard crash, and I never managed to recover from it.

For me, ADHD expresses itself in the form of intense procrastination on projects that I know will be difficult and require sustained focus, detailed effort and a lot of moving pieces. The kinds of stories I like to write are the worst for this, and I genuinely wish I could adopt a style closer to, say, Vonnegut or Douglas Adams or Charlie Jane Adams. But stories with tightly-written plots and thoughtful, nuanced takes on difficult themes often require great care, and I so badly want to make sure that I’m treating these subjects with the mindfulness they require. It’s been a great struggle to fight through a brain that simply doesn’t have the equipment to be as organized and detail-oriented as it needs to be.

It took me a long while to come to grips with the possibility that I had ADHD, mostly because of the stigma and controversy that exists in the media. There’s a steady diet of hot takes out there suggesting it’s a made-up disease, or that it’s especially overdiagnosed in children who are just being regular kids, or that drugs like Adderall and Ritalin are abused by people who are looking to stay up all night and crush that exam or work project.

There’s also a heavy stigma around the use of Adderall. Do you remember that (likely doctored) Calvin and Hobbes comic where Calvin is prescribed medication and it forces him to ignore Hobbes? I’m not going to lie, that scared the shit out of me — the thought that my ability to daydream, to be creative, would have to be sacrificed in order to be productive haunted me for a long time.

calvinhobbes

Seriously, this is nightmare fuel.

But now, of course, I know that’s a false dichotomy. ADHD actually hinders your ability to be creative; if you’re like me, you get hyperfocused on one aspect of the story and (because of my anxiety disorder) fall into a loop where you feel you need to rewrite again and again and again before you’re allowed to move on to the next aspect. Then, you get burned out or distracted and end up with three paragraphs that have been polished to within an inch of their lives.

Medication is absolutely a viable option for treating ADHD, especially in adults, but it’s only one avenue of treatment. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and other techniques are needed in order to unlearn all the bad habits that our own stumbling about to deal with our brains might have introduced. It can also give us a greater understanding of our individual challenges with ADHD and offer ways to cope with them.

Now that I know that my executive function is impaired and that makes it really difficult for me to stay on task, resist distractions, stay organized and deal with my impulses in a healthy manner, I’ve taken steps to address those. Developing routines that teach you how to consciously do what many others can do in their own heads has been a lifesaver; it’s how I make sure I take my medication, meditate, feed and water my rabbit; it’s how I make sure I’ve broken down projects into bite-sized chunks that I can actually handle one at a time; it’s how I make sure I write down just about everything I need to remember and keep on top of my to-do list. It’s still a struggle to get things done, but I’m no longer wondering why things are so hard or what’s wrong with me. There’s nothing “wrong” with me; my brain works differently from most and while that offers certain challenges it also opens up a lot of benefits too.

Hyper-focus, for example, is a tremendous tool. I know that if I’m emotionally invested in something or fascinated on a certain level it’s a lot easier for me to enter a state of flow where that’s all there is in the world. If I can find a way to access that feeling for a certain project, it’s much easier for me to devote a significant chunk of time to it. Learning how to be organized and mindful is also a strange fringe benefit, but it’s served me well. My Bullet Journal and I are super-best-friends, and the organization, mindfulness and productivity it has brought me feels so much sweeter because it’s been so hard won.

It’s also enabled me to recognize problems with executive function in other people. If someone can never seem to be on time, or forget things if they don’t write them down, or constantly misplace things, it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it used to. Understanding myself and how I work allows me to be more compassionate towards the difficulties that other people face. It’s so very hard to be an adult, where it feels like you’re juggling balls and spinning plates all the time, and people only notice the kind of job you’re doing when something goes crashing to the ground. All of us are trying to keep too many things in our heads at once; it’s kind of a blessing to know how impossible this is and stop trying.

Symptoms and issues of ADHD can happen to anyone, but that doesn’t mean that ADHD isn’t a “real” illness. Multiple symptoms have to be present for a long time in order to be diagnosed, and medication can also have a weird ‘calming’ effect. For example, meditation and Adderall enables me to focus much more easily than I would be able to otherwise and I’m much more resilient against distractions.

If you think you might have ADHD — or even just an issue with your executive function — it’s best to learn more about how executive function works, what it looks like when that region of the brain isn’t working as expected, and schedule an appointment with your doctor to discuss the possibility. Even if it turns out you don’t have that diagnosis, there might be other issues or more information that might help you improve your focus, organization, and memory. Regardless of whether you’re neuro-typical or coping with a mental illness, proper nutrition, regular exercise and enough sleep are foundations for better mental health.

This post is a part of Mental Health Awareness Month; all month long I’m writing posts about my personal experience with mental illness, the stigma that prevents conversation and treatment, and bits of fiction that highlight these issues. If there’s a subject or aspect that I haven’t covered, please leave a comment!

 
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Posted by on May 14, 2018 in Diet and Exercise, mental-health, Self-Reflection

 

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(Mental Health) My Anxiety

09 May

Myth 150When I was a little kid our family had an ancient brown Chrysler my mom called “Nellie”. I wasn’t sure if it was actually brown, or if the car was covered in that much rust, but Nellie was a formidable vehicle, a 20-foot land yacht with leather seats that gave you frostbite in the winter and third-degree burns in the summer. The space on the floor in front of the seats was so wide we actually sat there during long drives sometimes, watching the sky speed by through the windows. There are a lot of things about that car I miss, but I did not miss the joy-buzzer sound of its alarm system.

Nellie bleated about everything whether it was a problem or not: the oil gauge would light up even when she was half-full, and so did the gas. The temperature gauge was lit no matter what, so we just learned to ignore it. But the bane of my existence was the “door ajar” alarm, which would sound sometimes even when you just bumped the door with your elbow. Sometimes, during long trips, it would just buzz until we stopped and shut it again — and that wasn’t something a seven-year-old bookworm could do easily. Mom would turn up her Motown tape to try to drown out the noise, but really it just made it worse. Even today, “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” just doesn’t sound right without that buzzy whine.

As ancient as she was, Nellie was a good car — even if her gauge system was completely shot. I think fondly of her these days because I identify with her so much; like her hypersensitive open door sensor, my anxiety trigger will go off for like, no reason.

I am one of about seven million Americans with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, a mental illness that is often found in people with Major Depressive Disorder. People who cope with GAD are natural-born worriers, with anxiety flaring up over just about anything. The anxiety is excessive for the given situation and many of us feel like we can’t control how much we worry. Symptoms often include a feeling of restlessness or edginess, difficulty with concentration or your mind going blank, muscle tension, difficulty with sleep, and/or being easily fatigued. That worry and accompanying symptoms have to be present for at least six months before diagnosis.

GAD is one of those disorders that develops gradually, so the typical age of diagnosis is right around 31. It affects women more often than men, though it’s not entirely clear why. In fact, not much is known about how GAD develops in general; the best guess is that combination of biological factors, family background, and life experiences — especially stressful ones.

In general, GAD is treated with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), mindfulness training and/or medications like SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which prevent your brain from cleaning up free-floating serotonin in your synapses). Cognitive behavioral therapy helped me understand my anxiety disorder much more clearly, and gave me a good framework to deal with it.

I find it helpful to think of my emotions like the gauges and alerts on a car’s dashboard; when they light up, it’s my mind telling me that I need to pay attention to something. Happiness is basically Cruise Control; everything’s good, just keep doing what you’re doing and you’ll be fine. The temperature gauge warns me when I’m getting too hot and need to cool down; the gas gauge warns me when I’m hungry and so on. When the sensors are working properly, emotions are a useful way to bring mindful attention to a situation that might need to be changed. For those of us with mood disorders like depression or GAD, however, the sensors are over-sensitive and tend to light up when they really don’t need to.

Those of us with anxiety disorders tend to have trouble with uncertainty; what’s unknown is dangerous, and our minds tend to jump right into hypothetical catastrophes. So we try to plan or control as much as possible, getting out ahead of any situation that might arise. This can be put to good use in a lot of different ways when the anxiety is mild or even moderate; but when it tips into severe anxiety things get a lot harder.

My biggest stressors are failing at something I really want to be good at, forgetting to do something I’m supposed to, and disappointing someone. For the longest time I refused to move into a position that required more expertise at my day job because I knew in my heart I wouldn’t be able to do it — I’m not detail-oriented enough and the consequences of failure can be pretty high. I didn’t want to be the one person who couldn’t keep up and forced other members of my team to drop what they were doing to bail me out.

Deadlines are a nut I have never been able to crack, especially with writing. I stress about everything when working on a story, and all too often I get caught in a loop where I’ll get stuck on a single aspect of the process, revising again and again and again until I’m exhausted. As the deadline grows closer, that anxiety grows until it feels like I’m physically unable to concentrate on what I need to do: my monkey-brain leaps all over the place, or my mind simply goes blank and I can’t hold on to a thought. Almost always, I’ll freeze in the face of the deadline and watch the opportunity pass me by. Having never tried is almost a relief compared to the imagined hell of really going for it and failing completely.

While this kind of performance anxiety is fairly common, it’s not the reason GAD is so troublesome for me. Like Nellie’s constant open door buzzer, my worry is ever-present and all-consuming. I am in a near-constant state of fight or flight, ready to box any perceived threat or run screaming from it. Right now, as I type this, I’m worried about the following things: the possibility of marijuana addiction; the spectre of a progressively worse anxiety disorder that blossoms into a full blown obsessive-compulsive disorder; all of the people I haven’t spoken to in a while and what they think of me; the last work project I need to turn in; my Patreon; my Pathfinder game; countless other projects I’ve committed to and should be working on; my mother; my brother-in-law; my bank account; my new job; the possibility of dementia at an old age; Trump; Iran developing nuclear weapons; my rabbit; how this post will be received; how much I still need to do before bed; whether or not I’ll sleep well; how much I can get done tomorrow; my upcoming trip to Europe; the possibility of nuclear war or a terrorist attack; my weight; my libido; the length of this paragraph.

My mind gnaws over these worries all the time, from my first thoughts in the morning to those last troubled, fuzzy ones that pop up when I’m lying in bed. I’m constantly thinking about the things that could go wrong, the things that have gone wrong, what’s my fault and how bad it will be when the consequences are due. I’m not going to lie, it’s exhausting; whenever I find something that makes me more relaxed, it’s like discovering Narnia. People who can just wing it, or not care about what happens, are straight-up aliens to me.

But simply knowing that my brain has this hypersensitivity to stress helps me deal with that. It means that building a less stressful life is not just an idle dream; it’s a necessary component of self-care. I’m a bit more watchful for the symptoms of high anxiety, like unfocused near-panic just waiting for something to latch onto or the tendency to take a small annoyance and make it exhibit A for a major problem that we’re screwed if we don’t solve. And when I catch myself feeling overwhelmed, I know that I need to take a breath and a step back, then force myself to take things one step at a time.

Still, it’s a struggle. Knowing that my amygdala is intensely hyper-active doesn’t necessarily make the effects any easier to deal with, especially when they prevent you from doing so much. Anxiety frequently overwhelms the techniques learned through CBT because there’s no one thing that causes it; it really is an omni-present entity, a background static that makes it really easy to be thrown into a state of high anxiety and all that comes with it.

While I’ve been dealing with depression for long enough that I feel comfortable with the coping mechanisms I’ve developed for it, Generalized Anxiety Disorder has proven to be much more difficult to deal with. It prevents me from trying new things readily, or producing stories that I would want to show people. It makes it harder to be relaxed or confident; it affects my ability to be social. I wish it weren’t so, and I wish I had a better way of managing it, but that’s the way it is.

Over 40 million Americans — roughly 18% of the population — has some kind of anxiety disorder, whether it’s GAD, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or a Specific Phobia. We are a very anxious country, and it shows. I think one of the best things we can do for ourselves and our neighbors, coworkers and fellow citizens suffering silently under this epidemic is foster an environment of safety and acceptance wherever we can, however we can. Making sure those of us who are anxious have concrete feedback that the consequences aren’t as bad as we fear for failure sure helps, but it also helps to ease the ‘background anxiety’ in our culture. That might be the most important thing we can do: removing fear from our lives and our communities as best we can.

This post is part of Mental Health Awareness Month; I’m writing to share my personal experience with my mental health and hopefully ease the stigma around the very real illnesses I and millions of other people cope with on a daily basis. If you’re interested in helping with this work, here are a few things you can do: support the National Alliance for Mental Illness; visit The Siwe Project, which aims to reduce the stigma of therapy and mental illness in the African diaspora; visit and support The Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective (BEAM); and, if you like, chip in a dollar or two through Ko-fi for the blog. I appreciate your support, no matter what form it takes.

 
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Posted by on May 9, 2018 in mental-health, Self-Reflection

 

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(Mental Health) My Depression

07 May

Myth 150Back when I was 14 or 15, my sister ran away from home for a month and it straight-up wrecked me. We had no idea where she was or if I would ever see her again, and it was the first time we had been apart for that length of time. Growing up, we were pretty close; she protected me from the neighborhood bullies because she was a little spitfire and I told her stories and made our meals when Mom was occupied. We had often made a game of running away together, planning our escape route and the best time to steal away; but this time, she left without me and I had never seen it coming. She was one of the only people I felt I could rely on.

During that month I was in a haze. I remember being even more quiet than usual, and it felt like I was moving and thinking through cotton — slow, muffled, distant. When I got home from school, I didn’t know what to do or what I had the energy for, so I would sit on the floor and stare at the back of the couch until it was time to go to bed. Looking back through decades of experience, I can say that was the first time I ever had an episode of major depression.

Major Depressive Disorder is a mental illness that affects over 200 million people worldwide; it can strike anyone at any time, but it tends to affect women more than men and first diagnosis frequently happens between 20 – 35 years old. Common symptoms include a persistent, inescapble low mood; anhedonia, or an inability to experience pleasure — even with things that you used to love; feelings of guilt and worthlessness; insomnia; fatigue; loss of appetite. There are a number of depression disorders, besides. Atypical Depression, for example, tends to manifest earlier and sufferers will respond to good news with an increased mood, but also eat more with low moods and tend to sleep more during episodes. People with atypical depression also have a very high sensitivity to social rejection.

There’s Persistent Depressive Disorder or dysthmia, a less-severe but chronic state of depression lasting for over two years. There’s Bipolar Disorder, where a depressive state “swings” into a normal mood or manic state. There’s Post-Partum Depression, in which a woman experiences a disabling episode of low mood after giving birth. There’s Seasonal Affective Disorder, where bouts of depression happen during a particular season. All of these conditions can cause real difficulties in the lives of people who are coping with them. They affect our ability to be consistent with our work, attentive in our relationships, resilient with our setbacks, content with our lives. These mood disorders make it hard for us to maintain an even perspective about ourselves and the world around us, even with treatment.

That’s because depression is a disease that affects the brain, the one organ we rely on to interpret all the stimuli we get everywhere else. Because the brain is so complicated we’re not entirely sure how depression is caused, but we do know there are several areas of the brain that tend to be affected. Neurotransmitters — the chemicals that stimulate brain activity and give us the ability to think, feel, and make connections — tend to have a harder time working in depressed people, and some areas of the brain are different. The hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for long-term memory and recollection, tends to be smaller in depressed people; the amygdala, a group of structures associated with base emotions like fear, sadness, and arousal, tends to be more active as well. This combination, especially in depressed people, could explain why it’s easier for us to remember past events that are associated with intensely negative emotions while we tend to forget the things that counteract the internal narrative that preserves our low self-esteem.

Because depression can be caused by either having too few neurotransmitters, or having receptors that are too sensitive or not sensitive enough to them, or an overly-aggressive reuptake system that sweeps them our of our synapses, it’s difficult to say with any clarity which treatment works best; every one of us who deals with depression has a distinct mix of physical, neurological, genetic and environmental factors. Some of us that respond well to medication might have a lot of trouble with talk therapy, while some of us who can manage quite well with lifestyle changes and behavioral therapy might suffer intense side effects with medication. For most of us, some combination of therapy and medication often does the trick — though it can be a process finding the right therapist and/or medication. No one treatment is better than any other; the best treatment for your depression is the one that makes it more manageable for you.

Depression can manifest differently depending on your age, gender, environment and cultural background, but there are no hard and fast rules. Men tend to be more irritable or have trouble controlling anger; women might become more withdrawn; young people might become more reckless or less able to concentrate. It can be really difficult for Black Americans with depression to receive proper treatment for a host of reasons — we are often expected to “fight through” emotional pain, and the cultural stigma about mental illness is still fairly strong. There is a distrust of doctors, especially psychiatrists, and there is too little value placed on openly discussing our feelings. Beyond that, the dominant culture often misreads the expression of a mental illness and either misdiagnoses it or misses the diagnosis completely. While the field is just starting to take a culturally competent approach to mental health care, it still has a long way to go.

It can be easy to dismiss depression as an “imaginary” disease simply because the factors that determine its causes, diagnosis, and treatment are so complicated and can often feel subjective. I understand how it can look from the outside that those of us within the mental health space are just stumbling around in the dark, guessing at definitions and such. But just because something isn’t well-understood doesn’t mean it isn’t real; just because our understanding about something is fuzzy doesn’t mean that thing can’t be pinpointed exactly.

I’ve been dealing with depression for my entire life, and I’ve only recently been fortunate enough to have the ability for treatment. I’ve attempted suicide twice due to my depression, and I still fight through it every day in order to live the best life I can. I know that I’m more likely to have depression because I’m the child of a schizophrenic, and the hereditary link between that mental illness and offspring is well-established. I’ve seen every one of my siblings suffer with their own issues; I know one of my nephews will need to learn how to cope with it. These are facts.
My personal experience with depression has taught me a few things about how to relate to it. All the stuff they tell you about sleep, diet and exercise? Absolutely true, with perhaps sleep being the most important. Being active really does help, especially if it gets you outdoors and in the sun for some time. I can often feel when an ’emotional trough’ is coming on, because it becomes harder to concentrate and I find myself unable to be interested in things; when this happens, I can ‘prepare’ for what’s coming by making sure I focus more on self-care than productivity. It doesn’t stop it from happening, but it becomes easier to ride out.

Depression, for me, is intensely associated with self-worth. I become paralyzed by the idea that I have nothing worthwhile to say or that I can’t say anything in a way that engages or affects other people. I feel stupid and boring and permanently, unfixably broken. It becomes too much effort to do more and more basic things, and my world shrinks steadily because so much becomes unreachable. Cooking something to eat feels like an ordeal; talking to someone to explain how you feel is impossible; doing something for the joy of it feels pointless, and doing something productive feels inconceivable.

My worst spells have all heavily featured unchecked emotional eating (candy and salty chips in alternating waves), being unable to leave my bed or couch, and an overwhelming desire to just sleep forever. Being active, sticking to my routine, finding something to stimulate different parts of my brain — that’s something other people can do. I can’t. Sometimes, even breathing feels painful and exhausting. I need some kind of stimulation, like a TV show or music, but the stimulation doesn’t bring pleasure — just a reprieve from my own thoughts.

Thankfully, I haven’t had a really bad spell in about ten years thanks to Prozac and cognitive behavioral therapy. But I know that it’s unlikely I’ll be off medication at any point in the future, and I’ll need to constantly work on myself to develop better habits and coping strategies. For many others, depression can be a more-intense but less-chronic condition. Some of us have very long cycles that enable us to be fine for years before something knocks us back into that headspace. Some of us will have to wander in the wilderness for a very long time before we find a treatment that works for us.

No matter what, it’s important to remember that depression is a real illness and those of us who cope with it must do so with significant complications. We might not be able to put energy into practices and routines that would help our brain chemistry. We might not be able to afford proper treatment or medication. We might not have a support network to rely on for the things we need. We might have cultural barriers that prevent us from seeking the help we need or getting the proper treatment. It’s a hard enough illness on its own; combined with social, economic and environmental factors it can be that much harder to deal with.

So please, if you can, be easy with the people who are dealing with depression. Recognition and encouragement are vital to shift not only our perspectives, but the perspectives of those around us as well. People with depression aren’t hopeless or crazy; more likely, we’ve just never been given the chance to get the knowledge and help we need.

This is part of a series of post for Mental Health Awareness Month. For more information about what you can do to help build awareness for this often-neglected aspect of our personal health, go to this website: http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/may.

 
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Posted by on May 7, 2018 in mental-health, Self-Reflection

 

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(Buddhism) We’re All Mad Here

12 Feb

Buddhism 150I’ve been thinking a lot about anger over the past month and a half. Ever since Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, MO way back in 2014 I’ve been increasingly political with my online presence — and the candidacy and ultimate inauguration of Donald Trump has pushed that side of my digital identity much more to the forefront. Politics, and the anger it generates, has crept into every aspect of my existence here. Largely, this has been due to social media and the breakneck speed with which outrageous news is being circulated there. There have been entire days spent tweeting and retweeting about the latest controversy in the furry fandom, in sci-fi and fantasy publishing, in Washington; agreeing with or challenging comments from folks about them; trying to find just the right point to make that might win hearts and minds. But now, four years later, I’ve hit outrage exhaustion: what’s left in its wake is a weary, frightened resignation. This can’t continue the way it has. We need to seriously think about how our current Internet culture is encouraging, even normalizing, constant and unreasoning anger.

First, let me say that we have a lot to be angry about. The police brutality we’ve seen through Brown and a parade of other victims hasn’t abated. The Trump Administration has been openly corrupt, incompetent, and vicious in its attacks on marginalized populations of just about every stripe — and it’s been largely aided by the Republican Party. Our ability to solve problems with even bipartisan support has become impossible. Meanwhile, authoritarianism, xenophobia, anti-social and anti-environment behavior has spread through the United States and the rest of the world in ways I wouldn’t have thought possible even back four years ago. There are far too many people who think we’re going in the right direction — or, at least, that there aren’t actually any problems with what’s going down right now.

This is an incredibly scary time, and it can be incredibly frustrating to see just how many things are going wrong and how few people care. In light of what’s happening to our country and the world, I think anger is a completely acceptable response. We’re right to be angry. But we’re not doing the right things with our anger, and that’s the problem.

One of the best things I learned from my group class for Anxiety Disorder is thinking about emotions like the lights on your dashboard. We don’t chastise our cars for telling us that our oil is low, that we need a new battery, or that we need gas. Those alerts are telling us that we need to attend to something in order to keep our cars running smoothly. Emotions are the same way; they’re our mind’s way of telling us that something within us needs attending to. In my case, the ‘anxiety’ dashboard light is way too sensitive but that’s another story. If we shift our thinking about our emotions to this framework, categorizing them as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ no longer makes sense. They’re simply calls for action.

Anger, in particular, can be a very difficult emotion to allow mostly because it’s so immediate and powerful. It drives us to do things at the moment we later regret, and I’m no different. Last year alone I can immediately think of three or four different occasions where my anger got the better of me and caused a difficult situation to become that much worse. When this happens again and again, we begin to mistrust that emotion. We see it as a problem, as something that we must ignore or excise in order to be healthy. But that’s just as damaging as flying off the handle.

It is important to allow yourself to be angry. It is important to understand that anger, like any other emotion, is a call to pay attention to something inside yourself. Exactly what that is might be different from person to person, but for me it’s a sign that one of my values has been offended or, as Tara Brach so wonderfully put it, a deep need is not being met. When we feel ourselves getting angry, if we sit with the feeling and follow it towards its source, we can learn surprising things about what we value and what we need. Once we’ve made that discovery, we can frame our reaction around that instead of making sure whoever angered us is ‘punished’. That impulse to punish is what happens when our desire to make the world a better place is carried through thoughtlessly.

I know that I have a problem with anger; it flares up fast but dies just as quickly. Over time, I’ve learned to wait out the emotion without taking action through it. Most of the time, whatever angered me won’t seem like such a big deal once I’ve calmed down. These past few years, though, I’ve been getting angry over things that are very much a big deal. These offenses to my values aren’t easy to get over, and when there are new offenses every day — sometimes multiple times in one day — it feels impossible to take a step back and calm down. Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr all seem to be designed for stoking that anger, keeping the coals hot, because we pay attention to the things that anger us. Algorithms designed to keep us on websites for longer have hijacked our focus and severely eroded our ability to deal with anger constructively.

It’s very important to take a beat when we find ourselves getting angry, if only to ask ourselves a few basic questions. Why does this make me so angry? Who benefits from my anger? What can I do to really address what’s causing this response? Tara Brach calls this “the u-turn”, a necessary and conscious choice to direct our attention inwards instead of outwards, to sit with our anger and learn what it’s asking us to attend to. Sometimes, before we can even do that, we have to forgive ourselves for being angry, or give ourselves permission, or just reckon with the unpleasant physical and mental sensations that come with it. Either way, none of that happens without taking a pause.

This can be very difficult on social media. Twitter moves so fast, and often taking a moment to consider our responses can mean that the conversation moves on without us. But this isn’t a bad thing; that can teach us that not every exchange or idea needs our input. Sometimes, it’s better for everyone involved to let the moment go.

Once we understand the mechanisms that trigger our anger, we can do better about expressing that anger in a way that fosters connection and collaboration. Tara Brach believes that anger, at its source, is about us — what we need, what we care about, how we express ourselves. I agree with that, but up to a point. While there are so many things in the world that should not be, we also have greater control over our personal experience than we think. Anger might be a completely justified response to an external stimulus, but how we handle our anger can be brought under our control. It’s not easy, and it’s not always possible to know the best way to express it, but with time, effort, practice and patience we can get better at it.

This has all been brought up through a few different things. One, Tara Brach’s wonderful talk on “Anger: Responding, Not Reacting“; two, an episode of the “Where There’s Smoke” podcast that explores how social media has become a Skinner box for impulsive, expressive rage. I highly encourage you to take a listen to both of these whenever you have a chance — and let me know what you think. How can we express our anger more productively? How can we change our behavior on social media to tackle the things we find most important without contributing to the ‘noise’ of outrage culture?

 
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Posted by on February 12, 2018 in Buddhism, mental-health, Politics, Pop Culture, Self-Reflection

 

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(Fandom) My Mental Health Game Plan for FC 2017

11 Jan

Myth 150Further Confusion 2017 begins tomorrow! I’ll likely be in downtown San Jose Thursday evening registering at con because I completely spaced on pre-registering like some kind of silly guy — hopefully the wait won’t be too terribly long! If you see me staring at my phone and playing Marvel Puzzle Quest, feel free to pull me out of my addiction and say hi!

As you know, I’ve become increasingly focused on the intersection of mental health and fandom culture. Like so many subcultures — especially in the United States — these issues can often be overlooked and poorly understood. While we’ve taken great strides in illuminating what these issues are really like, there’s still a lot of work to be done to make sure those of us who are coping with mental illnesses have the tools and support we need to take care of ourselves. I thought it might be a good thing to talk about my own experience, and what I plan to do for self-care at the convention.

I cope with chronic depression that manifests as emotional and physical exhaustion, deep feelings of guilt and shame, and a deep-seated belief that I simply have no redeeming qualities. I can’t communicate in a way that people find interesting or relatable, I’m too aloof and fake warmness that I don’t feel, and I’ll never be able to get myself together enough to fix any of this. When I’m at my worst, a fatalism takes hold; there’s no point to trying anything because I know I won’t be able to sustain the effort or finish anything I start. When depression takes hold, I believe that I am stupid, lazy, boring and annoying.

I also cope with generalized anxiety disorder that manifests as an almost pathological avoidance of things I find difficult. For the longest time, I never finished my writing or tried to do anything I really cared about because I was certain of failure. I would make commitments as a way of forcing myself to do the things I was afraid to do, but when the time came to do them I found myself physically unable to concentrate on them. At work, deadlines crept by with work half-finished or completed with only the most basic objectives. I developed a habit of putting things off until it was simply impossible to put them off any longer. My relationship with work has been atrocious for most of my adult life, and it’s something I’m only now beginning to fix; of course, that means a lot of the goals I set for myself aren’t met.

I also cope with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder; this manifests in an extremely distractable nature and an inability to focus on any one thing for too long. If I find my current project too difficult, then I’ll find something else to do by falling into Twitter or Wikipedia for a certain length of time. At conventions, this is especially bad; I’ll often leave conversations in the middle of a sentence to say hello to someone passing by. The visual and auditory stimulation in most meeting spaces can be too much for me to handle because of so many distractions. The more my attention shifts, the more effort it takes to get back to the task at hand. In a convention setting, it often feels like I’m being pulled by a string towards whatever feels the most stimulating. It’s a real problem.

These conditions interact in various ways all the time; my low self-image brought on by my depression makes me extremely anxious in situations where something’s at stake, and my instinctive reaction is to distract myself (or anyone else) with something that can grab our attention long enough to make us forget whatever it was we were doing. Convention days, as fun as they are, can be exhausting. I’m fighting against my own brain to keep focused, ignore the voices that tell me I’m fucking things up, and settle down to have the deep conversations I’d really love to have with the people I meet.

In order to make sure that my problems with focus and anxiety don’t cause huge problems at conventions, there are a few things I need to do every day to give my brain its best shot at coping with its flaws. Here’s my plan for the convention.

Remember my medication. I take Prozac for depression, Adderall for ADHD and ashwagandha (an herbal supplement) for my anxiety. All three help me immensely in keeping an even mood, and I feel tremendously fortunate to have access to them. There is a lot of misinformation about medication for mental health, and while it’s true that finding the right prescription is a bit of a process, when a medication works it helps your brain work better. Period. We don’t demonize medication that regulates our blood pressure, insulin levels, or cholesterol — we shouldn’t demonize medication that regulates our brain chemistry.

Get enough sleep. I’ve been going to enough conventions to know that I will never catch every cool and fun thing there is to do and see, so I’ve shifted my focus to having quality experiences over staying for a long time, hoping that a good time is right around the corner. Sleeping for seven hours — even during a convention weekend — helps me reduce my inclination for stress, keeps my brain sharper and more resilient, and makes it less likely that my mood is going to crash sometime in the evening. I don’t mind being the old man who starts thinking about bed before midnight; the convention will be waiting for me in the morning.

Pay attention to my appearance and grooming. My taste in clothing and personal style has changed a lot over the years, but one thing that remains constant is the connection between how I look and how I feel. If I’ve missed a shower or go out without shaving or brushing my hair, I feel a lot more self-conscious and prone to the negative self-talk that triggers my depression and anxiety. On the other hand, putting on clothes that I like and making sure I’m so fresh and so clean makes me feel better about myself and makes me less likely to spiral through the day. It’s an often overlooked aspect of self-care, especially during conventions, but it makes enough of a difference that I’m going to start planning my outfits for FC right now.

Take social breaks. There are times where my social battery gets awfully low during a convention. I’m overstimulated, and the constant noise and movement makes it impossible for me to calm down. During those times, I might take a walk to a coffee shop or find a relatively quiet corner of the convention to chill for a moment or two. While it’s awesome to hang out with as many people as possible for as long as I can, the fact remains that I’m an introvert; I’m going to need to hide somewhere and recharge at some point. And there’s no shame in that.

So that’s my game plan for the convention — keep current on my medication, make sure I sleep enough, make sure I look and smell great, and take some time for quiet contemplation. This should get me through the weekend with enough focus and energy to have the best time, and I’m genuinely looking forward to the craziness of the next five days.

Now, it’s over to you — what practices, tips and tricks do you recommend for convention survival? What sort of things do you do to keep your mood up? Are there any particular issues that you have to prepare for ahead of time? Let me know!

 
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Posted by on January 11, 2017 in Furries, Self-Reflection

 

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(Personal) Cracking Myself Open

11 Jul

Myth 150One of the earliest memories I have about my mental illness is breaking down in the middle of lunch in sixth or seventh grade. Things were not going well for me. I was a shy and awkward kid who loved reading fantasy books. I was really sensitive, so I didn’t hold up to bullying very well. And I had gotten into trouble enough that in addition to homework and everything else, I had to write a sentence “I will not…something something something.” 1000 times.

I was sitting alone, trying to think of what impossible task I should do over lunch and how I could justify putting off the others, when I just needed to put my head down. It didn’t help. Tears welled up and I let them fall. My entire body locked up. All I wanted to do was curl up tighter. Someone found me, stood me up, and asked me if I had eaten anything. Then they marched me up to the lunch line.

It felt like my entire body had fallen asleep. I didn’t have full control over the way I moved, so I just lurched around like Frankenstein’s monster. I couldn’t stop crying. There was no way I could eat, or speak, or open my mouth. When the lunch lady asked if I needed anything, all I could do was sob and shake my head and lurch back to my seat.

To this day I have no idea what to call that episode. A panic attack? A nervous breakdown? Who knows. But it happened again when my sister ran away from home, and again shortly after I dropped out of college and moved to Arkansas.

I’ve been dealing with depression and anxiety for my entire life. Most of the memories I have of my childhood are unhappy ones, where something in my brain just snapped and a response rose from within me that I still don’t understand. What’s more, I can remember similar things happening to the people around me; my father’s mind going after his divorce, retreating further into himself; my mother disappearing for hours to sleep off depression; my sister’s mood swings; the strange rumors that dogged certain neighbors. When I was growing up, our understanding of mental illness was little more than being able to identify “crazy” behavior; if someone did something “crazy” once too often, then they were branded. And there wasn’t anything they could do to shake that off.

Even now, knowing what I know about my family history and the struggles that my siblings and I face, I see that for the most part that understanding hasn’t deepened much. My sister is on medication that makes her incoherent or sleepy. My brothers still do things they don’t understand. And, now that she’s reaching the end of her life, my mother is beginning to forget things and become confused.

It’s taken me a long time to come to grips with my mental illness, to accept it and learn how to incorporate it into my self-image. But there are so many black Americans and others in the diaspora who either can’t or won’t for a constellation of reasons. Most of us simply can’t afford treatment for mental health issues, and wouldn’t know where to begin even if we could. There is a stigma, even now, around therapy and medication that makes it difficult to encourage folks to seek out. There is still this narrative that those of us with mental illnesses are just “weak” or “whining” and only need to “get your mind right” to overcome them. We know so little, but we have such strong opinions.

Talking about my personal struggle with these things is still frightening to me, even though I do it so much. But it’s important that I do. Within black circles, and geek circles, and even Buddhist circles, there is so much misinformation about mental illness and what people who deal with them are like. If being open about them can help to dispel that, then that’s what I have to do. For my family, for my friends, and for my community.

If you are dealing with a mental health issue, please know that you’re not alone. There are more of us than you know, willing and able to lend a hand. If at all possible, do what you can to lessen the stigma around these issues — especially in minority groups. There is no shame at all in having a chronic mental illness, or in seeking treatment for it. There is no shame in doing what you need to do in order to be the best person you can.

 
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Posted by on July 11, 2016 in mental-health, Self-Reflection, Uncategorized

 

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(Mental Health) When Depression Strikes You

08 Jun

Myth 150Chronic depression is one of those things that can be very difficult to deal with, mostly because those of us who suffer from it exist in two states. When things are fine, we might think that we’ve rounded the bend and things will never be as bad as our last valley again. And then, when we find ourselves descending towards another crash, we have no idea how to stop it or make the cliff feel any less steep. I think most of us have an “out of sight, out of mind” attitude towards things that are big problems; when we’re not actively battling our depression, we prefer to forget we have it.

But the fact is that chronic depression is a disease; an invisible one, one whose symptoms might not show up for days or weeks or months, but a disease that most of us will have to cope with for a major part of our lives. When a diabetic has his glucose levels under control, the diabetes isn’t cured — it’s just managed so that the symptoms aren’t making it difficult to function.

I think it’s useful for those of us with mental health issues to think of our illnesses like that. The symptoms might not be bad enough to prevent us from functioning most of the time, but it’s still doing its thing under the surface. There are things that we can do to help ourselves manage it; taking care of ourselves can make depressive episodes less frequent and less severe. I can’t guarantee that we’ll ever be completely free of it, but we can develop a number of coping mechanisms to help.

Learning how to live with depression is a process. Sometimes it might feel like we’re making no progress at all; sometimes it can feel like we’re sliding backwards into our worst places. But it’s important to have patience with the process and with ourselves. There is nothing fundamentally broken about us; there is nothing that we can’t handle. There are just a lot of considerations we must make that most others might take for granted. This can be a gift of practice; learning how to appreciate many aspects of our life that we wouldn’t even notice otherwise.

Here are some of the things I’ve learned to do over the course of several years. You might find that different habits work better for you, and that’s fine. It’s not important to do every single thing that people recommend for you. It’s important to find your own way of managing your mood and getting to a place where you feel comfortable and capable within your own skin. Take my advice, or discard it and forge your own path. But please try. It’s worth it, I promise.

Sleep. This is single biggest piece of advice I would recommend for people dealing with mental illness: sleep well. I can’t overstate the importance of rest in helping yourself to get on a more even keel. If you don’t have a sleep routine, or you’re having issues with getting regular or quality sleep, I really do think this should be a top priority. Sleep allows us to settle our emotions and builds our ability to cope with fluctuations in mood or changes in our environment that would cause anxiety. It is one of the best things we can do to care for ourselves.

Building a good sleep habit takes time and practice. The chemical imbalance that can lead to depression also impairs sleep function, so we end up sleeping too little or too much. However, keeping a regular sleep practice is a great foundation for routine that we can use to help us weather those times. Listen to your body; notice when you start to feel tired or your brain tells you it’s time to get to bed. Notice when you’re most likely to wake up without an alarm clock. If at all possible, build your sleep time around your own circadian rhythm. If it’s not possible, determine when you need to get up and count back nine hours — start getting ready for bed at that time.

It’s not easy, and it’s not quick, but it is effective. Once you’re sleeping regularly, your body can begin the work of stabilizing itself.

Eat well. I know in a lot of situations this can be exceedingly difficult. Even for those of us in the United States, we might live in a food desert where fresh produce or lean meat might be hard to come by. Many of us simply don’t have the money or time to make our own meals. I get it. But making sure we at least eat food that gives us a good balance of proteins, fats, carbohydrates and fiber will give our body its best shot at managing itself.

If possible, eat three squares a day that includes lean protein, unsaturated fat and complex carbohydrates. Think a turkey sandwich on whole wheat bread, multigrain chips and fruit. Try to limit caffeine intake after 2 PM; we all know that caffeine plays havoc with the ability to sleep and too much of it will definitely exacerbate anxiety issues. Drink more water, and cut back on sodas and sugary drinks.

You hear this kind of advice all the time, and I know how much of a drag it can be to try and follow through. But it’s definitely important. The better fuel you give your body, the better it will be able to function. That’s the simple fact. And I know that the instant you begin to control your diet it feels like you’re swimming upstream, and we just can’t put in the effort all the time. But try. And keep trying. Notice how you feel — how you really feel — after you eat. Does the food sit heavy in your stomach? Do you feel gassy or bloated? Greasy? Light? Satisfied? Focus on the foods that make you feel good — not just emotionally, but biologically. The more you listen to your body, the more it will tell you what it needs. To be a god-damn hippie about it.

Exercise. I know, I can hear the groaning from here, but trust me — being active when you can really helps. Just going outside or getting the blood flowing helps just about every part of your body, including your brain. When you find the activity that works best for you, your brain learns how to release endorphins that tell you that you’re doing a good job. And again, pushing yourself to pay attention to your body will help you recognize how it speaks to you — how it tells you that it’s in pain, or needs food or water, or what kind of shape or mood it’s in. Learning your body is the first step to being comfortable with it, realizing and accepting its limitation, and appreciating the things you like about it.

Most people think of exercise as a slog; huffing on the street during a grueling run, or sweating through some terrible routine that you can’t begin to keep up with. But it really doesn’t have to be; it can be any activity that gets you moving and makes you happy. For me, it actually IS running. I get a wonderful high and a sense of accomplishment after putting in my miles. But for you, it might be anything from playing tennis, basketball or football to playing Dance Dance Revolution or Rock Band on your XBox. If it gets your heart rate up and your body moving, it’s fair game. Do it as regularly as you can without hurting yourself.

Therapy. This is another suggestion that takes on almost limitless forms. For you, it might be therapeutic to write your feelings down in a journal or talk to the spiritual leader of your congregation. It might be reading, walking in nature, talking to a therapist or taking medication. Whatever works for you, seek it out and do it; develop a self-care routine, arm yourself with coping mechanisms, engage with the world and community around you however you see fit.

Again, I understand how difficult this might be for some of us. We might live in places where mental health professionals are hard to find or prohibitively expensive; we might not have access to an understanding or capable support network; we might not know where to begin to develop a framework of self-care. But if you’re reading this, you probably have access to the Internet and that gives you a leg up. Research things that might help you and try them out; describe the results when you use them, and determine if it would be useful to keep doing them. Seek out communities online if you can — there are a number of websites and forums for those of us dealing with depression and anxiety. Don’t be afraid to ask for help if you need it. Try.

Sleeping regularly, eating as well as you can, doing active things you find enjoyable and engaging in a therapeutic practice are all basic things we could all do to help stabilize our mood as much as possible. Again, these are a lot easier said than done for many of us, but please — do what you can when you can. Seek out help and support where you can find it. And keep trying. What helped me most with my depression is seeing it for what it is. It allowed me to engage with it, really understand it. And by doing that, I understood myself a lot better. Self-awareness is perhaps the most powerful tool we have against our mental illness. It helps us learn how to cope with it and to live happy, full lives even while we struggle.

If you have depression, anxiety or another mental illness difficult to endure and tough to make people understand, I see you. I’m with you. I want to help. And I’m not the only one.

But the best way to get help is to help yourself. We can support you, but we can’t “fix” you. There’s nothing to be fixed. You’re a human being, wonderful and complete just as you are. You deserve to live, to be happy, to be loved. For people like you and me, it takes more work and care. But it makes the results of that work so much sweeter.

 
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Posted by on June 8, 2016 in Buddhism, Diet and Exercise, mental-health, Self-Reflection

 

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(Mental Health) When Depression Strikes a Friend

06 Jun

Myth 150Last Monday, I posted a quick primer on what happens physically and chemically to the brain when depression strikes. On Wednesday, I talked a little bit about what that feels like for me. I wanted to state (again) that depression and other mental illnesses are incredibly varied and complex; there’s not a single cause or expression of it, and everyone’s experience and struggle with it will be different. However, I’m hoping that talking about it will give people a better idea of what it’s like to live with it.

Today I want to talk about how we can help loved ones who are depressed, especially when they’re in the middle of an episode. It’s fairly common for people living with depression to have periods where they’re managing OK and things are at some kind of baseline, then fall into an abyss when chemicals or external factors shift. Even when they’re doing everything possible to manage themselves, this can happen. It’s no one’s fault when it does — that’s just the nature of this illness.

It can be exceedingly difficult to watch someone you’re close to go through that. You can see them start to think horrible things about themselves and the world around them; to sink down into a hopelessness that causes a complete negation of who they are; to watch them say or do things to make the situation actively worse. Because we’re a social species, and because we genuinely care about these people, their despair can frequently become our own. And because most of us don’t know exactly what’s wrong, any attempts to fix it at best do nothing and at worst only pushes the person further down that pit. Helplessness becomes frustration, and frustration can become anger.

As someone with depression who’ve also dealt with a number of loved ones going through the same thing, I get it. I’ve been on both sides of this equation. I know what it’s like to be in the mental space that says I’m a terrible person living in a terrible world and nothing will ever get better. And I know what it’s like to speak with someone like that, to try to make them feel better, to feel the panic and maddening frustration when everything in my bag of tricks simply doesn’t work.

So this is as much for myself as it is for anyone else in these situations. It can be hard to remember a few things that may help us relate to someone in the grips of depression a little better. If you have your own recommendations, or would like to share your experiences, or would like to offer feedback on mine, please feel free.

First, please remember that your friend is in the grips of an illness. This is an actual disease that affects the way your loved one thinks; those thoughts can lead to words and actions that are difficult to deal with. Most of the time, all we’re going to see is what our loved ones say or do. As with most invisible diseases, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are a host of interrelated thoughts, experiences and body processes that lead to that result that we’re not aware of. It’s important to keep that in mind — your loved one is having trouble coping with what is happening with them, and that often leads to behavior that doesn’t make sense or can be outwardly intensely aggravating.

In times like these, I’ve found it helpful to try my best to keep in mind that this person is effectively disabled and treat them as such. We wouldn’t expect someone in a wheelchair to just grab something off the top shelf, and we wouldn’t expect someone who’s diabetic to just eat something that would send their glucose through the roof. During episodes where our coping mechanisms fail or we enter the depths of our illness, please don’t expect us to just behave normally or think differently or be something else. It’s exceedingly difficult, if not impossible.

When we talk about everything that’s gone wrong in our lives, it’s often not that we have no idea how to solve these problems (though that may certainly be the case). It’s that depression or anxiety looking for a reason to exist, latching onto anything it can find to take root and become more permanent. I don’t want to say that a depressed person complaining about their lot in life has nothing to complain about; what I am saying is that what’s going wrong feels insurmountable and unsolvable when we’re at our worst, whether it’s true or not. For us, that perception is reality. Life is fundamentally broken, and it can’t be fixed.

I think this is what lies at the fundamental disconnect between a depressed person and a loved one. There is that seemingly unbridgeable gulf between our perception and theirs. To someone in a depression, no one understands just how awful things are, how wretched and permanent. To someone watching depression from the outside, this loved one doesn’t understand just how much they are loved and have people willing to help them if they would just get up and try.

I believe the best thing we can do for our depressed brothers and sisters is to accept them as they are, in that moment. When I’m in that valley and I talk about how terrible things are, I’m not necessarily looking for a fix; I’m looking for understanding, for the comfort that comes with connection, for someone to take my hand and say “I hear you, and I know that you are suffering.”

That can require an extraordinary amount of empathy. So many of us don’t like sitting with difficult emotions, even if we’re the ones feeling them. We look for ways to stop being angry or sad or uncomfortable as quickly as possible, and because we’ve never developed the patience or compassion for ourselves to allow these emotions to exist within us when it appears in others we simply cannot tolerate it. We want THEM to stop it as quickly as possible, too.

So when a depressed loved one comes to us with their difficulty, we treat the situation like we would treat it in ourselves. How can we fix this? How can we distract from this? How do we stop this? The short answer is that we can’t. We must simply accept it, be in that difficult space, find a way to bear it, however we can.

That load is lessened so much when there is someone willing to be with us in those moments. Just hearing someone say “I know this is awful. I am here for you.” can make an unbearable, permanent situation feel like something that is “only” difficult. Hearing someone try to offer solutions to my problems can have a paradoxical alienating effect; I know that they’re only trying to help, but the attempts to offer solutions only underscores the fact that they don’t understand me. Sometimes, it forces me to admit that I don’t understand myself at those times.

Like a cold, or a bad flare-up of arthritis, or some other chronic disease, depression is not necessarily something that can be fixed. When it happens, we can only manage it as well as we can. Because it affects the way we think, speak and act, those of us in the thick of it are often unable to do what we need in order to manage it. As part of the support network, sometimes it falls to us to find ways to make that happen.

Empathy, patience and understanding are necessary for this. I understand that so many of us have that in limited supply, mainly because we’re dealing with our own issues. Taking on the suffering of someone else is not easy, even in the best of times. But whatever we can offer to someone else has a tremendous effect.

Finally, please be sure to take care of yourself. I know how difficult I was on the people around me during my worst depressions, and I know that a lot of these people burned themselves out giving and giving and giving without making sure they were OK as well. Do what you need in order to be OK; get good sleep, eat well, talk to someone about your experiences and difficulties, if you can. It’s impossible to care for someone else if you don’t care for yourself first.

Wednesday, I’ll offer advice on what we can do, as depressed people, to care for ourselves. All of this is first drafty, but I hope it’s helpful anyway. It’s important that we at least begin these types of conversations.

 
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Posted by on June 6, 2016 in mental-health, Self-Reflection

 

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