My Mental Health Story

***Disclaimer: What is presented here is simply an account of my personal experience. I am NOT a medical doctor, nor am I making any medical recommendations for anyone else. All healthcare decisions must be made under the guidance and supervision of a licensed physician.***

In honor of mental health awareness month this May, I think it is finally time to share my full mental health story. This one feels like a doozy. It is hard to even know where to begin. However, one thing I know is shame can only thrive in secrecy. I am passionate about ending the shame and stigma around mental illness and that begins with more people sharing their stories. Here is mine. 

In terms of where to begin, let’s start at the very beginning. I’ve been told this is a very good place to start (and if you got the Sound of Music reference, I love you and you are my people!). The very first time I distinctly remember feeling depressed (not just sad) was in 3rd grade when I was 8 years old. I was walking in the back of Mrs. Bourne’s classroom, feeling like I was carrying the weight of the world on my tiny little shoulders. I looked down at my saddle shoes and knew deep down that something was wrong. The feeling inside was a deep, aching, all-consuming, empty kind of sadness. Anyone who has suffered from depression knows the ache I am describing. If you have not felt it yourself, it is truly impossible to understand, but if you have felt it, you know. 

One of the biggest challenges I faced as a young child was having undiagnosed ADHD. As a highly intelligent kid, I was still able to get by and get good grades, so my ADHD went undetected in our results driven society. I went to a harsh Catholic school that had very little tolerance for children who did not “fit the mold.” I was a bright, bold, outgoing child who was full of life, but I was also highly sensitive. I had a very hard time sitting still, raising my hand, and focusing on work in class. I was constantly over disciplined, humiliated in front of my peers, and shamed. I tried so hard to fit in, control my impulses, follow the rules, and please my teachers, but I just couldn’t do it. I was confused and frustrated. I knew I was smart and could do my school work extremely well, yet I just couldn’t focus and get it done in the same time frame as the other kids. I knew there was something going on with me and that I was different, but the adults around me turned a blind eye. This confusion tormented me and gave way to feelings of inadequacy. This progressed into a deep and pervasive self-loathing. I hated myself almost as far back as I can remember into my childhood. I didn’t know why. I just did. It was the only “normal” I knew.

I have shared openly about my belief that mental illness stems from early childhood trauma. Recent research and my own life experience confirms this. As Gabor Maté says, there are two types of early childhood trauma. First, there are the things that happened that should not have happened. This is what most of us think of when we think of trauma - physical, verbal, sexual abuse, extreme cases of neglect, the death of a close family member, etc. However, there are also the things that should have happened that did not happen. This type of trauma is more common and harder to identify. Here, we are referring to things like inconsistent bonding, emotional neglect or abandonment, lack of secure attachment to a primary caregiver, and not feeling unconditionally loved, seen, and accepted. The stress of early childhood trauma impacts brain development in many ways. In some cases, this manifests as mental illness. From the moment we are born, we are taking in information from our environment and this information creates our self-concept. Many of us develop maladaptive coping strategies to navigate and survive our early childhood environment and protect ourselves from pain. These adverse childhood experiences impact the chemistry of our brains and determine how we interact with the world, cope with our emotions, see ourselves, and relate to others. 

I am not going to get into the specifics of my early childhood environment here, but needless to say, it shaped me. In my particular case, it left me with a deep ache inside - a gaping hole within that needed to be filled with something. I felt depressed, hopeless, outcast, and isolated from a young age. I began self-harming at age nine and abusing substances at age eleven to cope with the self-hatred and mood swings. I would have done anything to feel better. I went to extreme lengths to numb the pain, even if the relief only lasted moments.

Throughout middle school and high school, my mood swings got progressively worse. I would go from being deeply depressed, lethargic, and unmotivated to having tons of energy, behaving recklessly, and barely sleeping. Intense angry outbursts and meltdowns were frequent. As my mental health deteriorated, my self-harm and substance abuse escalated. I was the victim of multiple sexual assaults in high school, which significantly worsened the state of my mental health, as I began experiencing PTSD.

By senior year of high school, I was convinced the problem was everything and everyone else in my life and if I could just get away and reinvent myself in a place where no one knew me, I would be ok. With this in mind, my top requirement for a college was to go where no one from my high school had ever gone (at least in recent years!). So, I graduated from high school, breathed a huge sigh of relief, packed my bags, and moved across the country to begin again. 

You likely know where the story goes from here because after all, everywhere you go, there you are. I was able to (mostly) keep it together for the first semester of college. I made friends, “reinvented” myself, and was reasonably “happy.” I still struggled with deep self-loathing and mood swings, but the “newness” of everything and the time and space away from my old environment helped. 

Then came 2010 which was, without a doubt, the worst year of my life. It kicked off with my first real east coast winter, complete with months of zero sunshine, which ravaged my already fragile mental state. I knew talk therapy was no longer enough and in March, I saw a psychiatrist for the first time. Upon being diagnosed with an alphabet soup of mental health disorders, I was given an entire pharmacy of medication to treat these conditions. At first, I was relieved. There was a comfort in these labels and it felt like confirmation of what I had known deep down for years. I had no idea how challenging it would be to get on a stable and effective medication regimen. I returned to school to finish out the semester, but I was plagued with tons of side effects that made going to class and getting my work done virtually impossible. Despite being heavily medicated, I ended that semester with a nearly month-long manic episode and felt more defeated and hopeless than ever before. 

When I came home for the summer, I crashed into a deep depression. I felt alone, isolated, and worthless. I hated myself and hated my life. I had contemplated suicide a million times before, but I never felt as serious about it as I did in those days. I had convinced myself that the world and everyone I loved would be better off with me gone. I felt like a burden to everyone in my life. Of course, my family and friends loved me. Lack of love in my life was not the issue here; however, I hated myself so much that I could not receive the love that was available to me. At that time, each and every day was so hard and so miserable. I did not see how I could survive one more day like this and in my mind at the time, there was just no way it was ever going to get any better. Looking back now, 11 years later, I can see that the way I felt then was only temporary, but that was not my reality at the time. All I could see and feel was the hell I was living in and I could not take it anymore. 

On June 4, 2010 - exactly one week before my 19th birthday - I attempted suicide. I intentionally overdosed and was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. The doctors saved my life and I woke up in the ER feeling even more defeated and worthless than before. After recovering in the hospital for a few days, I was 5150ed and transported to a psychiatric facility. I ended up spending a week there and I turned 19 behind locked doors, surrounded by padded walls. Few things are more demoralizing than spending your birthday in the psych ward. I am at a loss for words to describe how low I felt at that point in my life. 

After surviving my suicide attempt, I pretty much vowed that if I had to live on this miserable planet, I would stay drunk or high every minute of every day so I didn’t have to feel the pain of living. The next 3 years are honestly a blur. I was on a ton of psych meds, but still experienced severe episodes of depression, mania, and crippling anxiety. I woke up often in the middle of the night sweating, crying, and shaking due to night terrors and flashbacks. I truly lived in misery for those 3 years. I was in the grips of my addiction, getting high around the clock, and truly did not care if I lived or died. I never actively tried to commit suicide again, but I took huge risks daily with drugs and alcohol and most nights, when I went to sleep, I hoped I would not wake up the next day. 

By spring 2013, I knew I had hit bottom and was at a crossroads. If I kept living the way I was living and using the way I was using, I was going to die. There was no doubt in my mind. As much as I thought I wanted to die, there was this tiny voice inside of me that whispered otherwise. From somewhere deep within me, there was a drive to save my life. So, I asked for help. I confessed everything to my parents. I told them about my drug use, my mental health episodes, and how desperate I was. To this day, I honestly don’t know what came over me. I cannot believe I said all those things to my parents! Somehow that day, for the first time in a long time, my life became important to me. I made the decision to get sober and stop at nothing to get better. After another week-long stay in a psych ward in my college town, I arrived at rehab on May 2, 2013.

This is where my mental health recovery really began. Removing substance abuse from the equation went a long way toward stabilizing my moods. I was forced to learn healthy coping mechanisms for the first time because I no longer had substances to turn to. The biggest mental health milestone from those early days was letting go of self-harm. I have not engaged in cutting or any other self-harming behavior since April of 2014. That brings tears to my eyes to type. I didn’t think I would ever be able to release that. I had been self-harming since I was 9 years old and although it brought me so much pain and shame in the aftermath, it was the only thing that never failed to bring relief in the moment. I never thought I’d be able to live without it, but I have for 7 years now.

A topic I am very passionate about, but have had a hard time figuring out how to publicly address is psychiatric medication. I first want to make it clear that I am an advocate for whatever works. If medication is working for you and you are satisfied with it as a part of your treatment plan, that is great. We each need to make our own informed decisions about mental health treatment. No treatment plan is better or worse than any other. However, based on my personal experience, I do not believe a lifetime of medication is the only mental health solution. Medication is one course of treatment, and one that I leaned on for years. However, if there is a whispering within you that there is another way, I am living proof that there is.

There is not enough discussion in the mental health community about side effects and how these medications impact your quality of life. The push to normalize psych meds is great. There should be no shame, stigma, or negativity around taking medication that improves your mental health. Period. However, medication can easily be romanticized as an easy solution to a complicated problem. Furthermore, early on in my journey with treating mental illness, a lifetime of medication and talk therapy seemed to be the only “solution” presented. In the western medical model, you are essentially told upon diagnosis that you have a chemical imbalance in your brain with genetic origin (meaning you were born with it) and it will never go away. You can treat and manage it with medication and therapy, but you will need to be on medication for the rest of your life if you want to be stable and balanced. From this perspective, you can never actually heal, recover, or be cured. 

Of course, relief from severe mental health episodes is key and medication can provide temporary relief. However, in my case, medication management completely took over my life. Instead of truly living, I was simply managing side effects. My daily life revolved around calculations of how many hours needed to pass between the time I took my meds at night and when I needed to be awake and coherent enough to show up for work the next day. I was micromanaging time frames and side effects and my mind was consumed with the stress of this. I constantly felt sick with headaches, nausea, vomiting, and hot flashes. I was literally taking medications for the sole purpose of treating the side effects of other medications! The treatment felt worse than the disease in many ways. Furthermore, even on extremely high doses of up to 7 medications, I was still experiencing episodes. The severity was reduced, but I was not completely free of them. Over time, the efficacy of one cocktail of meds wears off and adjustments need to be made. It is a frustrating and exhausting cycle.

I have discussed this in detail in other blog posts (click here to read about my healing journey and click here to read about my experience with releasing old identities), but 2016 was the most pivotal year in my mental health recovery. I was introduced to the idea that healing was possible. Life without medication was possible. Long term stability and true happiness were possible. I was incredibly resistant to the idea at first due to my identification with being sick and broken. However, I really did not like taking so many medications and I was still neither stable nor happy. So, I researched. And I read. And my mind opened. 

I began seeing a therapist who believed healing, not management, was the goal of our work together. With her guidance, I practiced breathwork and did EMDR sessions. For the first time, I processed trauma by feeling emotions and accessing memories I had suppressed my entire life. I committed to this path of healing and my life began to transform.

Beginning in 2015, under the guidance of my psychiatrist, I began to slowly taper off my medication. I changed my diet completely, cut out caffeine, exercised, meditated, and  developed a healthier sleep schedule. My psychiatrist told me constantly that I was willing to do things most people were not in order to get off medication. I knew there was a more beautiful, authentic, joyful, and free life waiting for me on the other side of this hard work. That was enough motivation for me. By March of 2016, I was completely off of all my psych meds. My psychiatrist loved to remind me of the statistics and how likely it was that I’d have an episode and end up back on meds within 3-4 years. I would listen and nod. I understood that from where she sat, with her body of knowledge and the lens through which she viewed me and my diagnoses, this was her truth. It did not have to be mine. (Once again, this is purely my experience. I went off medication slowly and responsibly under the guidance of a licensed physician. I am NOT a doctor and this blog post is NOT here to provide medical advice. All medication and healthcare related decisions must be made under the guidance of a licensed healthcare professional.)

Here I am, over five years later and I have not had another major episode. I have not needed to go back on medication. I am joyful and free the vast majority of the time. I still have my hard days, my breakdowns, and my challenges like everyone else. I am still human and I will always be a work in progress. As I shared in my blog post recapping 2020 (click here to read), last year was incredibly challenging for me on the mental health front. The isolation, lack of support, and losing touch with my purpose during parts of the COVID-19 pandemic had detrimental effects on my mental health. 2020 was the first time since going off medication that I even considered it as a possibility again. I had a three month stretch where I was incredibly depressed and had a very hard time showing up for life. I reached out for help and I had people there to support me. I went back to therapy. We had a few sessions and worked through more of my trauma that was surfacing and making me depressed. That was enough to get me through the difficult months. Ultimately, it was my creativity and my love of sharing healing practices that brought me out of that depression. THE DEEP was born in the fall of 2020. Creating and sharing that gift with the world reconnected me to my purpose and gave me a reason to wake up every morning and start my day. Eventually, the depression lifted, and I returned to feeling happy, joyous, and free most of the time. 

To me, “mental health” is the freedom that comes from healing. It is the ability to access authentic joy. It is honoring whatever emotions are coming up in the moment, knowing that everything is temporary. It is being a brave warrior who is willing to face your past traumas to feel, process, and release them. It is learning and implementing new coping mechanisms for when difficult moments arise. It is showing up differently in your relationships. Above all, it is remembering the truth of who you are - a whole and complete being with inherent worth. You have never been anything less.