January 31st, 2019

Talking

I am resentful of the Awareness paradigm Bell Let’s Talk represents. Not that we shouldn’t work towards destigmatizing mental illness–of course we should, and it’s important to do so every day, but one day is a start. But putting pressure, even just a form of social peer pressure, on individuals to share their mental health problems as the HIGHEST GOOD is a bit of an issue for me. The idea that individual creating awareness by sharing their mental health issues and stories in extremely public venues–something that may be cathartic, painful, or just fine, depending on the individual–is the most important thing we can do in the community for mental health is very convenient for major corporations and the government. While decreasing stigma is of course so good and valuable, the most important thing is that everyone who suffers from any illness get appropriate and timely care without struggle, delay or judgment. If your employer or your government stands in the way of that care, all the awareness in the world is going to be a minor comfort. Both are important, I guess–but the scale is off.

Anyway, fine: here’s my mental health story. I’ve always struggled with anxiety to some degree and I suppose I always will. Most people who know me register this as personality quirk and that’s mainly how I would think about it myself, most of the time, but in my late twenties it got out of control. I wouldn’t term it “crippling anxiety” because I was still able to do most of what I wanted to do, but anxiety was draining all my joy from everything I did. I was white-knuckling my whole life.

Because of a variety of circumstances–but mainly because I was a student at the time, and had access to student mental health services–I had to wait one week from the day I asked to see a therapist until the day I saw one. I was asked if I was in crisis and it would have been less if I had said I was. The therapist I was assigned was a psychiatrist–an MD–and at the end of my first session she offered to prescribe me some anti-anxiety medication.

Prescription medication was one of the many things I was afraid of (how present-day RR laughs) and I asked if I could try some other things first and then just save meds as a last resort. She said sure–she offered me some options that had fantastically different timelines and didn’t push for any one option. We tried cognitive behaviour therapy and general “talk therapy” and basically, once a week for a year I had 50 minutes of her time to try to work out some coping strategies and talk about how I was doing with that.

I did ok. I never went on the meds and I gradually stopped feeling like I was one breath away from flying apart into shards. I don’t how much of that was the therapist and how much was the work I did and how much was just getting to a more stable point in my life, something that would have happened anyway. I give her a lot credit, though, both for how things improved for me but also just for getting me through that very difficult period.

I never paid for any of that–it was all covered under OHIP and made available to me through the university. It was easy for me to go to appointments, easy to refuse meds, easy to change my mind if I’d decided I wanted them. I never had to justify how much better I was getting or how many more sessions I deserved to have (until I graduated).

That’s my mental health story. I haven’t needed professional support since that time, but I know both that it can work for me if I need it to in the future and that if that happens it’s going to be a lot f*cking harder to get it and make it work out and it won’t be nearly as seamless as it was 10 years ago.

I offer this little story not in the spirit of “awareness” of mental health concerns because I think we all know what anxiety and talk therapy and all the rest are. But maybe you never heard an example of a system working so beautifully for someone who needed it. I want people to be aware of THAT–that it can. I honestly don’t even know if the services I was provided with continue to be as generous and easily accessed in 2019, or if they will be in future–certainly Mr. Ford’s cuts have to come from somewhere.

I’ve volunteered a little bit with people with mental health struggles and I know that sometimes people just aren’t helped, or they get helped by someone like me, people who have maybe 40 or 50 hours of training max. That’s not fair and that’s not supposed to be the society we’re living in. We can do better.