The Pharmaceutical Band-Aid
Hi again! Welcome back to my guest blog post, where I will be talking about different mental health subjects from my perspective as a patient.
I started off this project as a fun thing to do for my sister, but it is turned into a bit of a letter to my younger self. I have spent most of my life in fight or flight mode, so writing out all my experiences in black and white, outside of flight or flight, has been cathartic and almost vindicating. I think a lot of chronically ill people can be left feeling like society looks at us like losers or that we are weak minded because we cannot just snap out of it. I know at least I have felt that way most of my life, but now writing down everything and re-living it through my adult eyes has in a way connected me so much with my young self. I just want to give her a hug and say “This is going to be rough, but you're going to be ok.”
Last time we left off, I had been successfully medicated at 11 years old and despite some awkward side effects, I was starting to find my footing as a teenager. Something I wanted to touch on in this blog post before I move onto the story of my big move to Norway is another unfortunate side effect of having a mental health crisis as such a young age. The reason it is important to shed more light on this part of my story is because it is something that I have found to be the most detrimental issue for me as an adult and it is something I think gets forgotten when a patient and their loved ones are in survival mode for so long.
So, without being an expert on childhood development, I would wager a guess that a lot of maturing and independence happens between the ages of around 10 years and 16 years old. Children start to form their own identities and the dreaded hormones start kicking in. It is such an important time for kids to start gaining confidence in themselves in a big intimidating world. They start wanting to break free a bit from their parents. When a child is chronically ill, whether it be physically or mentally, the complete opposite happens. They must depend on people even more, and this can be such a terrifying time. Their loved ones also worry about them more and a natural co-dependency can occur just purely because of the circumstances. It can be just as scary for a parent to “let go” as it is for the child to be let go of. This is an unfortunate dynamic that my mom and I fell into. And who could blame us? Or any other families in the same position? At a time where a parent should be enjoying watching their child blossom and find their own identity, they are scared for their lives. Scared of what the future will hold. Confused about how they can help. I cannot imagine how hard it is for parents to watch their kids struggle, not knowing how to stop their pain. At that point you are just trying to get through day to day in survival mode, and there is not room for anything else.
I never reflected on how much my mental health struggles stunted my early development, and how much it could affect me as an adult, until I had a huge “breakdown” in the start of my 30’s. It is still something I am uncovering layers of today at 37. But first, we can rewind back to me moving to Norway.
When I was 16, my mom and I moved to Norway. I had visited a couple times before, so it was not a completely foreign country to me, but I could not speak a word of Norwegian beyond “thank you” and did not know anyone my age there. There were a lot of factors leading to us making such a huge move, most of which are not really important to go into, but let’s just say that uprooting our lives and moving away from my brother and sister wasn’t giving “Eat, Pray, Love” vibes. No one was happy with it, and in hindsight it was a decision made in an extremely stressful situation. The intentions were good, and it was only meant to be short term, but hindsight being 20/20 it turned out to paralyze everyone's emotional growth. It also inadvertently solidified the feeling of never being in control for me. I was back in survival mode, just gritting my teeth and shoving my feelings down in order to get through. At the time, I did not realize that was what I was doing because, to be honest, I was almost a bit excited. The time leading up to the move was very stressful, having to sell my childhood home and bounce from place to place. Finally, we would have some stability, and in Europe no less! Unfortunately, a 16-year-old does not tend to have realistic expectations. This was not going to be an exciting coming of age romcom. It was not a horror movie either to be fair. It was just...real.
We first moved to a tiny ski town, which I know sounds pretty awesome but we aren't talking Whistler Village. We are talking TINY. And COLD. It was such a massive contrast to the business I was used to. We stayed in a cabin in the middle of nowhere and if it was not for me busying myself with being so pissed off at not having a tv I think I would have been terrified of some sort of axe murderer or monster being out in the pitch-black woods outside. Thank goodness for teenage self-centredness! So here I was, having just really started gaining independence and an identity outside of being a mental health patient and I was thrust back into being 100% dependent on my mom again for everything. For translating things for me, for introducing me to people my age, for basically explaining how anything is done in this foreign country. I was looking forward to starting school, which I never thought I would ever say.
One great thing about Norway is that basically everyone speaks fluent English here, so it is not like I could not communicate with my new classmates. TV is not dubbed in Norway and kids learn English from a very young age, so I was extremely lucky for that. But walking into that classroom on the first day was still terrifying and I felt like I had just landed on Mars. Anyone that went to high school in Vancouver (and most other places) in the late 90’s-early 00`s will remember that the fashion basically revolved around showing as much possible without actually getting in trouble with the principal. Showing our bellies and wearing super low-rise jeans was religion. So, picture me, in MINUS 20-degree Celsius weather in the middle of winter, in a town where kids would literally cross-country ski to school, walking into my new classroom dressed proudly in my low rise Dorina jeans and a shirt that would comfortably fit a 5-year-old. To say I did not fit in was an understatement. No one was directly mean to me, but these kids had grown up together in this tiny town and I just felt like there was not enough space for me. Couple that with my tendency to overshare, thanks to my anti-depressants as I spoke about in my previous blog post, and it just was not a great time. Thankfully, my mom soon figured out that living there just was not working out and we moved to Norway's second largest city Bergen.
At this point I was needing to get my medication refilled, so I needed a GP. So, as I am sure most of you know, different medications have different brand names. For example, Prozac is a brand name for the medicine Fluoxetine. So, my medication was sold in Norway under a different brand name, and when I went to my GP at the time to get a new prescription, the medication was named something else. I was expecting that, but I asked if it was the same medication as the one I was using. I was told “yes it’s the same thing.” It would take me a couple of years and a full relapse in my anxiety disorder to realize that the doctor took it upon herself to give me a similar but DIFFERENT SSRI. When you change medications, it can take a very long time for the effects to really set in, so I did not notice anything was wrong until it was too late.
This led to a MASSIVE regression in my anxiety and gave me the absolute worst panic attacks I had ever had to that point. Suddenly, I was waking up in the middle of the night to myself hyperventilating and shaking from head to toe. In retrospect I can see now that the attacks I had had before this were more anxiety attacks and not panic attacks, so this was my first experience with pure panic attacks. It was absolutely shocking to me that my body could be capable of such blinding fear and such intense physical symptoms. I would wake up multiple times a night and have to run into my mom`s room for “help”. I started fearing going to sleep, so I would force myself to stay awake until morning, and then I would dare to sleep for a bit once the sun was up.
The lack of sleep started giving me other symptoms like paranoia and severe nausea. I stopped eating again. I was not paranoid in the sense that I was scared of things that weren't actually happening, but EVERYTHING would give me massive amounts of anxiety. I could not go outside because I felt like people could see how scared I was, as if there was an imaginary spotlight on me. I remember my boyfriend at the time was at my house and he had ordered pizza and I started having a complete meltdown at the thought of having to open the door for the delivery guy. I could not even pinpoint what I was afraid of. It was not like I feared the delivery guy himself, or that it was dangerous in any way. It was like my brain just fixated on the fear and could not let go. My boyfriend was super confused, understandably, but as supportive as possible and (shocker) I survived answering the door. I remember that time feeling like I was living in a thick fog of fear and exhaustion. This was not the anxiety I had grown up with, my familiar (albeit annoying) companion I was used to. This was a completely different demon. I am thankful that my medication still helped me not have much of a filter though because I was comfortable telling my friends what was going on and they were so supportive.
My mom ended up taking me to the emergency room after weeks of not eating or sleeping and I met with an on-call psychiatrist. I will never forget the rage I felt when this doctor suggested hospitalizing me. I was so convinced at that part in my life that medication was the only thing I needed, that any other type of therapy was unnecessary. After all, what other alternatives had been presented to me previously? I was told that if I did not take medication when I was 11 that I would have to be hospitalized and force fed. That self-belief that I was not capable of being well without medication was completely cemented in me. So when this doctor had the audacity (sarcasm) to offer an alternative I was so smug about thinking that he was an idiot and I was the expert. All I needed was a different medication and I would be fine. Cognitive behavioural therapy? Why would I need that when a pill can take away all the pain. Anyways, I think he quickly concluded that I was going to be extremely stubborn about this, so he prescribed me a very low dose of an anti-psychotic (sometimes helpful for panic disorders) and one of the positive side effects was that it helped with nausea. So much so in fact that they used to use it for people going through chemotherapy. I got home an hour later and took the first pill and BOOM, no more nausea. And no more nausea meant I could eat, which then also helped me sleep. The anti-psychotic effect took my nighttime panic attacks went away immediately and I was “cured”. Great right...?
It was indeed fantastic for a few years, but the danger in throwing pills at something like an anxiety disorder is that you are not getting to the core of the issues. You are putting a Band-Aid on a huge gaping wound, and at some point, it will fall off. At some point, like in my experience later, you run out of band-aids, and you are left desperately trying to figure out how to heal the wound from the inside out. Only now it is even bigger than it was to begin with because so many years have passed where it has been allowed to grow bigger and bigger under the surface. So, what happens then? Tune in next time to find out the many different traditional and untraditional forms of therapy I tried outside of pharmaceuticals.
Thanks again to everybody that has read my blogs and been so supportive!
With gratitude,
Louisa Sherlock
Louisa will be back soon enough to write more blogs!
