Mental Health Disorders needs to be talked about. Parents are struggling, not knowing if their children are going to manage to be okay due to lack of resources. Mental health DOES exist! There's the good, the bad, and the ugly that everybody needs to take very seriously.
I’m a twenty-three-year-old female, I am a survivor of Anxiety, Depression, and PTSD. They have all tried to kill me at some point. I have lived with Anxiety hanging on to me, since I was a school aged kid. Depression creeped up bad on me after I had my first born. My PTSD? We will get to that later.
Anxiety is worrying about something that might be seen as small to somebody else, but consumes every inch of your thought process, your mind will jump to the worse conclusions, and they will automatically start playing out in your head like a bad movie. The first time I remember having anything to do with anxiety it was over a test at school. Pathetic, right? Not to me, it wasn’t. Internally I lost it. I knew the answers but for some reason I still failed, every time. It’s almost like I would psych myself out, second guess everything I already knew; other times I would just start randomly picking answers because my anxiety was so bad. My palms started to sweat, my head started spinning, the voice of anxiety kept telling me “What if you fail? Everybody is going to think your stupid, and you're going to lose all of your friends, your mom is going to be mad at you, and you're not going to get anywhere in life.” I have never been the same since.
Anxiety is one section, of a living hell. You over think things, you start wondering if you’re worth anything to anybody. When things are actually going well, you just sit there freaked out waiting for the other shoe to drop, instead of enjoying the fact that you are surprisingly having a good day, because they are that rare with anxiety. You will question everything good in life, and wonder if there is a catch to it. If you end up trying to balance a relationship with everything in your life, you will notice small sudden changes and start to question everything in your relationship. You will need lots of reassurance, lots of communication, understanding and a lot of patience. Your partner may not understand what it's like to have anxiety, so they won't exactly know how to help; communication. There’s going to be a lot of “Are we okay?” questions and that’s okay. There is nothing wrong with making sure that you get the reassurance you need to make you feel okay. If your partner blows you off or tells you to “grow up, quit acting like a baby!” you need to get out of there. If your partner actually listens when you bring up some things that are bothering you (I know approaching this can make anxiety spike up too, but it needs to happen; communication.) asking certain questions to better understand how you feel so they can figure out how to help you the best, you will be okay. Talking about what is bothering you to somebody is hard, mostly because you don’t want to be a burden on them. But you have to get it out, if not, all your head is going to do is mess with you until you get it out. It may not even be as bad as you thought it would be, normally with anxiety your brain jumps on the psycho train and rides that to the worse possible scenarios. Your head is basically a living nightmare.
That’s not even talking about anxiety attacks. That is just small everyday stuff that anxiety sufferers deal with. Anxiety attacks are also panic attacks. Episodes of intense panic, there could be an obvious trigger, or it could just be completely random. You would usually start to slowly calm down within about ten minutes. Anxiety attacks are so frightening that some people believe their having a heart attack. There is a lot of different things that could happen while in that 10 minutes. You could feel like your heart is going to jump out of your chest, you could be hyperventilating, feel like you're going crazy, or like your about to pass out, trouble breathing, shaking, feeling unreal, pacing, crying, etc. Anxiety attacks are almost never the same. For me, I’ve gotten so use to them I can usually tell when one is coming. There is a few that sneak up on me, even to this day. I have found that the best way to describe mine, is the energizer bunny.... On steroids. The first thing I notice is my hands won't stop moving, shortly after I'm bouncing my leg, next thing I know I'm pacing, and I'm shaking all over. I start talking really fast and soon start hyperventilating. I start crying because I want my hands to stop shaking and I can’t make them stop. I want all of these feelings of anger, sadness, worry, and chaos to stop, but they won’t. I use to be in and out of the hospital every other day because I wasn’t medicated. My anxiety just kept getting worse and I couldn’t figure out why. I had been put on multiple medications that didn’t help me. I hated taking them anyway, almost felt like I had to rely on a pill to keep me sane. Eventually, I started talking to a therapist, who got me a medication guru. By this time, I was done with medications, I didn’t want them because nothing worked for me. I was done popping pills that doctors would give me to try to feel better, it didn’t work. But, the smart woman told me that if I decide not to talk to this medication guru, she couldn’t see me anymore. Therapy would do me no good, if I wasn’t medicated. I sat and thought to myself, “Well this is a crock of shit. Fine whatever. I’ll do it to keep my therapy going.” What I didn’t realize, is how much it wasn’t a crock of shit. She was right, she is a medication guru. I still have my problems, and my anxiety still spikes from time to time, but not as bad as it used to. To be quite honest I do forget to take them everyday but I'm better about it then I use to be. I can tell when I haven't taken them. Its not easy to accept help when Its offered, but most of the time, it’s the best thing you can do for yourself. There is hope.
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