#Imagining the worst outcome and being right for years. Ocd? No it's the real life

[a-silent-observer]

Not doomscrolling anything I've been on this ride back in 2016 an didn't like it at all. I am just feeling numb. Calmly looking at my belongings and assess what I can pack in a single person suitcase permitted for air travel. We are going to lose everything. (I am not flying to USA now. That's for sure.)

[sacharesearchpractice]

Had a talk with M on Tuesday and it didn’t clear up the situation, if anything it depressed me further. I asked him why there is this rhetoric at the beginning of each brief to take risks! and go out of your comfort zone! when in actuality, if you present work that is “out there” it’s never received well. M seemed to be on damage control, as instead of giving a clear answer, he seemed flustered and just hashed together the response of “these tutors are coming in from industry and in the real world not everyone’s going to like your stuff”. I thought that was a bit of a cop out, as one it didn’t really answer my question and two, I don’t need people to personally like my stuff? but at least make the effort to suggest feedback instead of disregarding the idea entirely. 

What caused me to leave the session early was unrelated to the above issue with tutor and was instead about the new brief. I feel like I’m going mad with the amount of stress that this course has caused this week, having to leave and cry for the second time in a week due to it. I feel like if I bring this up to anyone in the department, more than I already have, they’re going to disregard me as just being overdramatic, or trying to cause problems. I understand that this term has had to be different because of the pandemic and thus everyone’s having to adapt, but this new brief is just awful.

“There’s a mismatch between the image we have of ourselves and how we actually behave. One way to observe this is by taking notes and recording certain activities. This will reveal your unknown-knowns.Look at your activities in everyday life – how many times you sit down and get up, how often you use your mobile, how many doors you open, how many cups of tea you drink, how many calories you consume, the hours of wear you get out of each piece of clothing, the sequence of your morning routines, how much rubbish you generate in a day and so on.Record a series of activities or actions. Arrange these into categories – for example, place, time, duration, physical movements, chance activities, predetermined activities, etcIdentify patterns that display your activities. Find ways to visually interpret your actions in time and space.“ 

Not only is this brief identical to one we were set in second year, I took issue with it the first time around for how oblivious this task is in terms of mental health disorders. I have had OCD since I was six years old, have had numerous CBT sessions at CAMHS and at the psychiatric hospital here, and am on 150mg of an antidepressant to stop intrusive thoughts. My OCD affects every aspect of my life, undetectable to an outsider, but it’s become less severe over time. When it was at its worst, I used to have to perform nightly rituals before I could sleep that would be two and a half hours long at the minimum.

I would be plagued with intrusive thoughts that were so upsetting and anxiety inducing that if I didn’t perform a specific action, I would have a panic attack. Of course, if that ritual worked and protected you from the negative outcome, you have to do it again, but the relief doesn’t feel as good as it did the first time, so you do the action say 50 times instead of 25 times because that will feel better. This repeats, until doing it 50 times doesn’t feel safe enough so you go up to 75 times and repeat and repeat and repeat. If the bad thing you’re trying to protect yourself from does end up happening after all the work you’ve put in, you have a panic attack and then increase by 100, so that the next time, it definitely won’t happen. 

This is exhausting, but imagine this affecting your daily life, day in day out. OCD isn’t all hand washing and folding your towels as the media would like you to believe, it’s not being able to trust your brain and constantly feeling on edge, as if something terrible will happen if you don’t control your actions to keep you and everyone else safe. Living like this, you don’t trust your brain, it tricks you and even though you think you’ve checked the locks on the door, your brain will insist that you didn’t, so you have to go back and check the handle until it feels right. Because you don’t trust yourself, you find relief in other people and constantly asking for reassurance that the thing you’re worried about won’t happen, and you do this because this temporary relief is so nice to hear, but the more you do this, the more of a toll your taking on their mental health, so you feel guilty. 

Hopefully the above account of my own experience living with OCD will perhaps shed some light on why I think a brief where recording your actions and routines is incredibly insensitive. I don’t relish living like this, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. When you’re so tired at two am and all you want to do is sleep, but you’re only halfway through the nighttime ritual and if you don’t do that then something horrible is going to happen, and the fact that you’re tired means that you’ve probably messed up the first half of the ritual anyway, because you weren’t concentrating, so either start again or do another 100 actions to temporarily soothe the anxiety, but then you do that extra 100 and it still doesn’t feel right so you keep going and going and going. 

Anyway, this brief was read out and M was going through it and I just started crying and just had to leave it. I was just overwhelmed I think, I know that I would put my all into it, probably exacerbate my OCD in the process and then have the pleasure of it being thrown back in my face by one of the various hipster, male tutors. I don’t know how I’m going to approach this brief, I don’t want to give it the power to affect me. 

[innie-s]

of mental health visibility

As I’m sitting here in a nice apartment, fresh out of a shower with my hair clean and a face mask on, hot coffee in hands feeling content in my life, it almost seems impossible that only six months ago I was a crying ball of sadness lying on the floor and thinking of ending this misery… It almost seems like a dream I had, that it never happened. But it isn’t and it did. That’s how depression works.

I never though I’d be sharing this online (in this manner), you see, so please excuse a bit of awkwardness. I’ve always been rather open about my mental health state, never really tried to hide it, and yet not many people know or realise. I’d blame that on them not being educated enough but that’s not the problem either, I think. The cause of that lies in a much deeper issue – and that is the invisibility.

You see, there’s one thing to say “I’m ill.” while coughing your lungs up or having a broken leg, and quite another to say “I’m ill.” while smiling and generally showing no symptoms of any discomfort. The invisibility of mental illness isn’t always a bad thing, sure, but it is a bit inconvenient when you need special treatment and people simply don’t believe you. You would never question a physically disabled person needing help up the stairs, but when a person who seems completely okay tells you they cannot do a task because they feel terrible, you’d think them lazy or looking for excuses. Oh, how many times have I heard “Just start – that’s the most difficult thing, from there it’ll flow.” Oh yes. If I could only start. For you, as a neurotypical, having difficulties starting might mean that you have to give yourself a little push or simply sit down and do the thing. For me, it means overcoming five different weights holding me down while constantly hating myself for being like this because look at them, they can do it, why can’t I? It’s sitting down in front of my computer with my thesis open and watching it with dread while shaking and crying because I would love to write the thing that’s been sitting in my head for days now but not being able to. There’s a chain on my hands and they just won’t move, no matter how much I tell them to. My head is spinning a little and the words don’t make sense. It’s finally giving up and starting a new episode of that TV show I was watching or scrolling tumblr until I get to my own posts from the day before. I call that procrastination but it’s so much more, really. It isn’t just putting work off until the last moment, it’s also hating yourself for it more and more every day while being physically unable to do it.

We all understand and accept that the society has a bit of a problem accepting mental illness. We all know that it’s still a bit of a taboo, and although it is spread quite wide we still seem to think that it either doesn’t exist or that it only exists in the most escalated forms of “crazy people who belong to a mad house”. This has been changin lately, for which I am gratefull, but the outcome has been confusing to say the least. Neurotypical adults call their children lazy while completely overlooking symptoms of depression or labeling them as a typical pubescent behaviour (When did it become normal for every other 13-year-old to have cuts up their arms and down their legs? When did it become typical for primary school children to starve themselves because of forced body images? When did it become common to oversleep and romantic to be sad all the time?), we have been called adicted to the internet by people who don’t feel that the only way to express themselves and feel accepted and loved is via internet friendships with people who go through similar things every day. We have been told “It’s going to be alright.” by people who refuse to listen to us and help.

I don’t think our parents understand that when you condition us into thinking there’s something wrong with us, it will stick. I don’t think our teachers understand that calling us lazy or stupid will only ever make us believe we really are. I don’t think adults realise that when they dismiss our symptoms we will grow up thinking we really aren’t ill. There’s nothing wrong with us. We are not lazy and we are not stupid. We are ill. And in many cases we battle that illness without any help, support or guidance and sometimes we lose. Sometimes it’s just too much to deal with and we don’t have the strength to do it. And afterwards adults will say “Such a shame!”, “What a brilliand mind that was.”, “Such potential in that young person.”, and “Didn’t they know they were loved?”.

Now I myself am an adult and rather educated one as well. I can’t say I’ve never dismissed mental illness. I can’t say I came to my knowledge because I cared about others so much I started learning. I wasn’t born educated on the matter and I had to go through some pretty bad experiences myself to even start considering mental illness as a real threat.  I’ve only come to terms with my own issues 4 years ago when they became big enough for me to actually consider therapy. At that time I knew nothing and it took me a bit to overcome the way I was thinking of mental health issues and accept that I might be one of “those people” as I used to think about them (us). It took me quite some time to battle my own prejudice towards the idea of being mentally ill and I still haven’t made my peace with it completely. And still as I face a task I simply cannot do, I question myself. Am I being lazy right now? Do I actually need help with this or am I just calling for attention? Am I being stupid right now? Isn’t it just that I’m incapable/not clever enough/not strong enough to do this thing? I don’t think I’ll ever overcome this need to be “normal” and to prove that I don’t have this limitation.

Many people have suggested therapy to me. And I have suggested therapy for many people myself. I believe therapy can be a very helpful thing. Yet I never went myself and I’ve been called a hypocrite for it. My deal with therapy is simple – will it help a person who is open about their problems, doesn’t bottle them inside, is honest to themselves even if the truth is sometimes uncomfortable and has trust issues the size of the sun? What can therapy of a self-conscious person do – will it help me if I dont need to talk about it (I vent to friends/the internet therefore I dont need any other person listening to me) and dont need advice (I know what to do with myself and I’ve been helping myself for years now)? Would therapy give me something more, can they help more? I don’t pretend I can do this alone but I also don’t feel the need to pay a professional just to tell me what I already know. There’s also the fact that I will not talk, I will not open up about this, I will not show weakness. I will not trust a person who does this as a job, I will never believe they care about me personally, why would I go there to sit and stare at the wall? The day I will go to a professional is the day I will feel so low I’ll accept that I need medication.

There’s a bit of an issue with medication. Meds are for the crazy ones, yes? The moment you get pills you’re automaticaly labeled as a basket case. The moment you have a note saying anxiety/depressive disorder, OCD, psychosis of any kind, personality disorder, etc, that’s that. You’ve been labeled. It all became real. And people will treat you differently, not because they want to be rude but because they pity you and don’t know what else to do. There’s a popular opinion that you have to get better to stop using the pills, yes? As if your brain has a better chance at healing than, let’s say, your respiratory system (will you tell an asthmatic to try and stop using their inhaler?), your pancreas (will you tell a diabetic to try and stop injecting insulin?) or your eyesight (will you tell me to try and stop wearing my glasses?) Can you imagine coming up to a disabled person and telling them to just stand up and walk, see, I can do it, why couldn’t you? No? Then why do you tell me to just start thinking of nice things and find something to do and soon I’ll be feeling better?

And you know what the worst part of this is? That the people who need the medication live with the same prejudice. And so they don’t go to a doctor or they refuse to take the pills or they stop taking them the moment they feel better because they think the deal is to stop needing them. It is not. You are allowed to need them and there’s nothing wrong with accepting help, be it from a person or a little bit of hormonal boost. God knows sometimes I feel like asking for them (and I just might this year before exams and writing my thesis, actually).

But then I get better, as I am now, and I start questioning whether I’m actually ill or if I’m just pretending. And that’s how I know I haven’t escaped any of the prejudice I just desribed and I will have to try a little bit harder to get rid of the idea that I’m really just a poser. Doesn’t help that my own mental health is fine compared to some of the people I know. I’ve never tried to kill myself. I’ve never thought of hurting myself. I already said I’ve been helping myself for years now – and it’s true. I recognize when I’m low and an episode is about to start and I get help (seeing as I’ve found the source of my episodes I also know how to get rid of them). And sometimes they’re bad enough to last days but usually it’s merely minutes and then I’m okay. And everytime I come out of them stronger and stronger and I havent had one in such a long time I don’t even remember what they feel like.

(February. I had the last one in February when I failed an exam and I realised I wouldn’t be able to finish my bachelor’s this year. That one almost broke me, I’ve always had this idea that uni will be the first thing I won’t fail and then I went and failed it. There was a possibility for me to make it – it would’ve been hard, it would’ve cost me a lot – mostly my mental health. And so I didn’t. I didn’t fight, I gave myself a month to heal a bit and to realise this isn’t the end of the world and I didn’t dissappoint anybody except myself – and then to forgive myself. And I came to the conclusion that it might not be ideal but it’s what it is and it’s okay. Maybe I would’ve been able to fight through it. But I felt like I wasn’t and I gave myself a free pass on that one. And I don’t regret my choice for I feel healthy, calm and comfortable now.)

I still get mild ones, mostly before exams. I’ll never get rid of that, I’ll always have a bit of a struggle with procrastinating and then hating myself for it. I used to hate myself for quite a lot, and then I worked that out. I stopped blaming myself for my problems and I came to peace with the reasons of them. I had issues with many things and I’m happy school is the only one left. I have hope that I’ll get over that one as well, sometime, maybe. It’s fitting, really, as school was the first one I recognized and the rest only appeared once I started digging into it.

I’m a lucky person. I know what to do to myself, how to help myself and sometimes even how to help others. Not everyone has that. Some have pushed the idea so deep into their mind that they simply cannot find it anymore, some think it humiliating to show weakness, some reject the reality and some don’t, they realise what’s happening to them and they don’t know how to ask for help or have conditioned themselves into thinking they don’t deserve help, that they’re not worth it. And the few who come and ask for help sometimes find that the help they’re getting isn’t enough.

What I wanted to accomplish with this text (Essay? Speech?) is not only spreading awareness of mental health issues but also to show the people who have it that they’re not alone and even a person who is presenting themselves as strong as I am can suffer from it. I wanted you to realise you’re not weak for experiencing this in whichever form and strength you do. And that there is help to get and it’s not humiliating to ask for it. And if you read this and you feel like it has nothing to do with you, please consider your friends, parents, coleagues, spouses, children. I strongly believe you have a person who’s going through it somewhere around you, and they might be needing your help.