And It Was Good

If you've read my blog, say, once, you probably know that I have seasonal depression, officially known as Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). As I've dealt with it over the past several years, figuring out how it affects me, and how to deal with it, I've been pretty surprised at how America views mental health.

One thing I've noticed is that we have a huge stigma against mental conditions such as depression. I know that I do. It's taken me four years to accept my diagnosis and to seek help for it. It's something that I've been determined to be real about, which is why I've been somewhat open about it on my blog.

But blogging about how much I hate winter is different than actually walking into the office of a psychologist and seeking help.

SAD isn't just the winter blues. Seasonal depression brings about the same symptoms that clinical depression does. My SAD makes it so that I have a terrible time getting out of bed in the morning. I just can't make myself do it. I have zero motivation to do pretty much anything. While I'm normally a good student, I can't get myself to go to class or do homework, so my grades suffer. Things that I normally love, such as reading, writing, artistic things, working out, and spending time with friends, have absolutely no appeal to me. I feel as though I've lost myself, like I don't know who this person is who has taken over my body and determined to do nothing with it. I feel listless and sad all the time. I can be more inclined to cry than I normally would be (one day this winter, I cried six times in one day. Normally I'm more of a six times in a year sort of girl). While I've never felt suicidal, I've certainly felt the hopelessness that is associated with suicidal feelings. Those are the days that really scare me. I have difficulty concentrating--test-taking, something I normally excel at, has become difficult if there's any sort of distraction whatsoever. I withdraw from people, and it very much affects my relationships. The few friendships I can manage to maintain change because I become very needy and bad at being a friend back to people. I went a whole month once without doing dishes. I felt like I'd accomplished a huge thing a few weeks ago when I did dishes and laundry in a period of 24 hours. I physically crave sunshine.

And that's what SAD is--it's an imbalance of chemicals in the brain because of a lack of light. My brain doesn't process the hormones that it does create naturally correctly without enough sunshine. It's taken a lot of work for me to wrap my mind around the fact that my SAD isn't "all in my head." I actually just am not getting enough of the "nutrient" that's in sunlight, and thus not getting enough of the right chemicals in my brain cells to function normally. Tanning beds don't cut it (that's a different sort of light, and they make you wear eye shields--getting the light into your eyes is the whole point with SAD). Exercise helps, but I've found it's pretty hard to work out from bed. And it's the getting out of bed (not to mention going to class, doing homework, being on time to work, etc.) that's so impossible, remember?

I suppose it's partially my independent nature that has struggled so much with needing help with this. I don't like to admit that I need help. I remember last year when I really started struggling in mid-winter, I needed to take some time off of work to concentrate on functioning normally. Walking into my boss' office and telling him that I had this "problem" and needed to cut back at work was really difficult for me. And yet every week I deal with students in our office who have learning disabilities and need accommodations for the different ways their brains function. I'm more than happy to help them to accommodate for their disabilities. My brain functions differently too, and yet I couldn't accept that for myself for a very long time.

While I've been taking St. John's Wort, a natural anti-depressant, for two winters now, I finally realized a few weeks ago that I just wasn't functioning well enough. Or at all. I'd missed quite a bit of class, and had a teacher whom I highly respect pull me aside and ask me what was going on. I knew that my depression was placing a lot of stress on my relationships with my closest friends. The crying was really getting to me. I was starting to worry that I wasn't going to pull out of this okay--that even when spring came, my life would have fallen apart enough to have serious long-term consequences.

Through the help of the people I work with at the TLC and their connections in the mental health community here in Lincoln, I got an appointment with a psychologist. As we drove to her office, Ben broke the silence by cracking jokes that would normally make me laugh, but only made me smile, thankful for his efforts. I don't know what it was about getting help--about knowing that the only thing the psychologist could really do was offer me prescription drugs--that felt so awful. I think it has something to do with admitting that it's really real, and it's not going away, and I can't just deal with it on my own.

I knew that I'd come to the right place when the psychologist's face broke into a huge grin and she congratulated me when I told her that I'd done dishes and laundry that week. She understood me. I explained to her that getting help here in Lincoln was important to me because I didn't feel like my parents could support me very well from so far away when it came to this. She said to me, "Katie, do you think your parents have any idea how much this really affects you? I'd guess that you do a pretty good job of trying to act like everything's okay." And she's right. I'm not sure how much I succeed at it, but I try to hold everything together and act like it's all right.

What is it about this legitimate physical imbalance that I can't accept? That society can't accept? If a person has cancer, we give them chemo. If a person has diabetes, we give them insulin. These are legitimate conditions and legitimate treatments. If a person is clinically depressed, they need antidepressants. And yet it's still hard for my pride to admit here that after the psychologist confirmed my diagnosis, she referred me to a nurse practitioner who put me on Effexor, a prescription antidepressant.

The first day on the medicine, I was dizzy and nauseated and drowsy. But after a few days, the side effects went away for the most part, and I started to notice a difference. After three days on the medicine, I woke up after eight hours of sleep, before my alarm went off, and got up easily. I haven't cried since I took my first dose. I've only skipped class once. I've been going to the gym several times a week, and many times I've exercised for a full hour. Best of all, I feel good. I'm myself again, mostly, and I've only been on the drugs a week and a half.

I don't know why we're not comfortable with medical abnormalities in our brains. There's a stigma against mental health in America, and against treating mental conditions such as depression and bipolar, but also against treating conditions such as ADD. Why is it that we're so comfortable with popping pills for the rest of our bodies, but not for our brains?

I'm determined to get comfortable with it. I want to feel the same way about antidepressants that I do about other medications--I'm not going to take them unless I need them, but if I need them, I'm not going to be shy about it. I intend to stop taking my medicine sometime in late March or early April, and start again in mid-September.

Whatever it is about our brains that we can't take seriously, we need to get over it. I hope that by being honest with myself and with other people about what's going on in my brain and how I fix it, I can help others become aware of how real depression is, and that getting help is good.

Let me tell you, getting help is very, very good.