The invisible struggle

“Depression isn’t a war you win. It’s a battle you fight every day. You never stop, never get to rest. It’s one bloody fray after another.”

~ Shaun David Hutchinson

Normally, I try to avoid columns on difficult topics such as mental health. With May being Mental Health Awareness Month, however, it felt important to write something.

That being said; I don’t know about anybody else, but each day I struggle with an inner voice whose sole intention is to bring me down. Sometimes it comes as a whisper, other times it roars. There are times it sounds like myself, other times it takes on the voices of people in my life. Never does it have anything positive to say.

I wish I could say with any certainty when I began to struggle with anxiety and these unwanted intrusive thoughts. Maybe you’ve had those intrusive thoughts, a brief moment when—seemingly out of nowhere—you think about doing something dangerous or illegal. Maybe, they flit by for a brief moment and you don’t give it a second thought.

Unfortunately, I give it a second thought. And a third. And a fourth.

I used to think I was alone in living with anxiety and depression. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, nearly one in five U.S. adults—52.9 million in 2020—live with a mental illness. These can range from anxiety to obsessive compulsive disorder to depression to post-traumatic stress disorder to eating disorders. Some of these are quiet battles, fought behind the scenes. Other times, the physical tolls can be seen if one looks close enough.

In early September 2015, I spent a total of five days in the Behavioral Health Services (BHS) Unit at Ivinson Memorial Hospital. This stay was preceded by weeks of struggling with depression exacerbated by being placed on medication that was not right for me. As the provider I was seeing at the time continued to increase my dosage every few weeks, my mental spiral following the increased dosage was also increased. These declines in my mental health were often highlighted by periods of dissociation, being unable to speak and emotional outbursts.

One day, shortly before being admitted to the BHS Unit at Ivinson, I wrote a suicide note. I convinced myself, at the time, that it was really just an exercise to try and get my thoughts and feeling on paper, but it was actually a suicide note. In all the years that I had struggled with my mental health, this was the first one I had ever written. 

I needed help.

For five days, following my admission into the BHS Unit, the world as I knew it stopped. Hospital food, scrubs, no cell phone and no connection to the outside world save for phone calls through the landline at the front desk. I was allowed to take a few personal items that were determined by the staff could not be used to harm myself or others. One thing that I certainly couldn’t take was my pen, a retractable Pilot V5. 

People who know me know that pens are something that I obsess over, so to not have the pen that I was most used to working with was a struggle. What I was given to use, instead, was a safety pen. Basically just a piece of soft plastic surrounding the ink that one would find inside most ballpoint pens. It was a struggle to work with, at first.

As time passed and I was switched from the medication I was on to a new medication, I found myself learning to work with the safety pen. Was it frustrating? Absolutely. I found, however, that if I just took the time to figure out how to write with it that it was almost like meditation for me. I kept that pen during my entire stay and I took it with me after being discharged.

I still have the safety pen, in a lockbox with important documents, as a reminder of what I went through and how I came out the other side. Every September 15, my Facebook shows a post I made just a day or two after being discharged about the pen and how it represents overcoming obstacles and that sometimes these obstacles cannot be overcome alone.

If it wasn’t for friends and family who honestly cared about my wellbeing, I don’t know where I would be right now. Probably not here, writing this column for you to read. To be honest, if it wasn’t for the support that I’ve been given by those close to me, my name would have probably appeared in the newspaper in a different fashion.

We don’t always know what someone is struggling with at any certain point in their lives and they may not always show it. Some may even feel that reaching out is a sign of weakness. It’s not, but “depression brain” doesn’t let a person realize that. More often than not, some of us who struggle with our mental health feel that we are bothering people when we reach out despite the statements from our friends and family to the contrary.