Mental health has scared me for as long as I can remember. The history of it in my family is complicated and a source of painful memories. I never liked thinking about it. I certainly didn’t like talking about it. I wouldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams that I would someday be talking about my experiences with it publically on a blog. Yet, here we are. To be honest, it is rather liberating to be doing so. Ultimately, I have found that it is worth talking about it knowing that it is helping others suffering also.
When I first needed to be hospitalized ten years ago or so for major depression, I was in really bad shape. Coming to terms with my own mental health condition with my apparent need for medications and therapy was not easy. It was something I resisted and put off for a long time in denial which only served to perpetuate the problems even further.
Fast forward to the summer of 2019. I had made major progress in managing my mental health and it had been nearly 5 years since I had an episode. I had just finished my first year in a PhD program and had taken a summer course on quantitative research methods. I was co-teaching a 9 credit summer seminar that is compressed into an intensive 6 weeks.
Toward the end of this professionally busy summer, I began experiencing sleepless nights, delusional thinking, and panic attacks. These things were all new to me. It all grew more concerning quickly.
I had become convinced that I was being followed by governmental authorities in white SUVs on the road and that I was being hunted down to be killed. I felt unsafe even walking by windows in my own home and began ducking down on hands and knees for fear of snipers taking aim at my head. I started having visions of technologically planted listening devices in the form of spiders. On one particularly terrifying evening I was hearing voices speaking directly to me through the speakers in my room.
It was at this point that I knew I needed help again. My wife asked a dear friend and neighbor to come to the house to be with our children and drove me in the middle of the night to the emergency room. I was crouched down and shaking in the passenger seat to not be seen through the car window.
What on earth was happening to me?
I’d be curious to hear more about how and why talking about this is, as you say, “liberating”. I think there’s something deeply significant about that.