Finally More Than a Punchline

     Last week, I was watching an episode of this new comedy show, Call Me Kat. (It was season 2, episode 2, if you're curious, and it airs on Fox and streams on Hulu.) In this particular episode, one of the main characters named Randi, played by Kyla Pratt, tells her current love interest that she got her tattoo during a time when she was really struggling with depression.

    As soon as "Randi" brought up her mental health, I felt myself bracing for an inappropriate joke about mental illness. I'd seen this sort of thing too many times in comedy shows and movies. I expected "Carter", the love interest, to make an awkward and insensitive joke to "lighten the mood", or I expected "Randi" to make a self-deprecating joke, to beat "Carter" to the punch.  But...the joke never happened. 

    "Randi's" love interest simply asked her if it was any better now. Then "Randi" replied and told him that it was better "most days" and that finding a great therapist and the right medications helped her. And, still, nobody made a joke about it. "Carter" didn't make any unkind remarks, act uncomfortable, or make a joke about her admission that she took anti-depressants or went to therapy. He simply accepted the information and was only concerned with making sure "Randi" knew he cared. I let out the breath I'd been holding. The whole mental health disclosure moment was handled with respect, compassion, and understanding. I had to go back and watch it again. 

    In all the years that I've been old enough to watch comedy TV for a "grown up" audience, I'm not sure I've ever seen a comedy show handle mental illness in this way. I mean, we're probably all familiar with shows like Monk and that infamous episode of Friends in which mental health is treated as a joke. The disclosure of the mental illness or mentioning of the symptom has been, more often than not, treated as the opening of some unkind or awkward joke made at the person's expense or by the actual person in an attempt to be self-deprecating to beat the other person to the punch.

    Call Me Kat could have followed in the same footsteps, but the creators and the writers deliberately chose not to do that. They deliberately chose to make that one scene in the show in a way that was compassionate and understanding and filled with kindness without losing any of the fun and humor throughout the rest of the episode. They chose not to make the joke because, I like to think, the way people think about mental illness is slowly changing. I also think that, if more comedy shows stopped using mental illness as the awkward punchline and started handling it with more openness and compassion like this episode did, it would go a long way toward ending the mental health stigma.

    I'll end with this: For as long as I can remember, the entertainment industry has used mental illness as a joke in comedy movies and shows. Every time someone brings up mental illness in a show or movie, I find myself bracing for the joke, and I'm always still disappointed when the writers go on to make the "easy" joke. It was honestly a breath of fresh air and SUCH a relief when Call Me Kat chose instead to bring up the topic of mental illness and then treat it with the kindness, compassion, and understanding that it deserves. If more shows and movies took the same approach as Call Me Kat, I think it would be a step in the right direction to help end the mental health stigma.

Processing Overloaded...Human Function Disabled

    I'm sure all of us have been in the situation in which a lot of things were happening at once, and generally all the things that were happening should have caused a storm of feelings. Then, for whatever reason, the storm of feelings just didn't happen. We realized that we felt...fine? Then suddenly we're asked to make one small decision, or one small thing goes awry, and that really small thing seems to be the straw that broke the camel's back. Then we're left feeling like we're having some kind of breakdown because of something small like we lost our favorite pen, ripped our favorite shirt, or maybe we couldn't decide what to make for dinner. 

    I recently found myself in that situation. As I mentioned before, I spaced out my therapy appointment for five weeks instead of two. I was dealing with holidays and the emotions the holidays tend to bring up for me. I decided to try going back to church. In addition to all the things that I mentioned before, someone dear to me passed away suddenly. I had also recently found out something that made me feel hopeless. I expected an uptick in my anxiety and to possibly have a panic attack as well as a storm of emotions as I was suddenly buried under all these things, but the anxiety and the rest of the storm didn't happen. Then a few days later, I was trying to choose what I wanted for dinner, and I ended up just crying in the car because that small decision was just TOO MUCH. 

    It felt like my brain was at capacity. It felt like my brain was saying, "Still processing request number one. Please wait until all other requests have processed before submitting another request to the incoming stack. Warning: adding more thoughts and/or decisions at this time may result in a meltdown of the human functions." 

    Since I hadn't taken the time to process all the things that were happening, having to make a decision about dinner felt like the last drop into an overfilled glass that caused everything else to slosh out and make a mess. It wasn't about the dinner itself. It was that I didn't have the mental space left in that moment to do even a simple thing without overloading the processing function. 

    Instead of being able to choose what I wanted to eat, I cried because that was the only option my brain left me with, and the crying turned into an anxiety attack. I cried on the way home, and then I cried for nearly an hour at home until I medicated. I spent the next three days medicated and binge-watching Marvel movies and series while I allowed everything time to process. I cycled through all of my emotions: the anxiety, the sadness, the anger, the grief, the hopelessness, and then I took a nap because all that was exhausting.

    After I took the time I needed to process and I allowed myself to feel all the things, I felt human again. My emotions no longer felt extreme and out of my control. I felt like I was able to think and make decisions again. It was a rough two weeks, and then because I didn't take the time to check in with myself about how all the stress and emotions were processing, it was an even worse three days.

    I sometimes forget, that after something stressful or emotional happens, just because I feel fine doesn't mean that I'm actually fine. I forget that the emotions and stress are still there, just under the surface of my conscious awareness, and that I still need to allow them their time to come up to my awareness and move along. That is, I forget until my brain says, "We have reached capacity. Disable the Human Function. Activate extreme emotional response. These feelings need to go somewhere, NOW." 

    I'll end with this: When we have a lot of stressful, emotional things going on in our lives, whether we live with a mental health condition or not, it's so important to remember that just because we feel fine at the surface level, that doesn't mean we're completely fine. Even if we feel completely fine, it would be a good idea just to go a little deeper and check in with how we're feeling and processing everything that is happening. If we don't check in, we run the risk of our brain forcing us to take a break to process everything whether or not we have the time or desire to do so. 

Pushing the Limit

    It's hard for any of us to admit that we have any kind of limitation on what we are able to do or to mentally carry, but it seems to be particularly hard when that limitation is related to a mental health condition. Sometimes, the knee-jerk reaction to this "invisible" limitation can be to try to push the limits of what we can do or carry, just to prove to our mental illness that it doesn't have the control. From a different perspective, it can also be SO tempting to push our limits after we've been in therapy for a little bit and we've healed to the point that some things that may have been triggers for symptoms of our mental illness seem less triggering than before. I know, we get excited and think, "X happened, and even though I expected to get anxious/depressed/triggered, I didn't/it wasn't as bad as I expected! So, just how far can I actually push this limit now? Let's find out!" 

    I recently found myself in this situation. In my last appointment, my therapist gave me the option to have another session in five weeks instead of our usual two weeks. She also gave me the option to have the usual bi-weekly appointment in a different time slot. I was feeling brave, so I took the option to have an appointment in five weeks to see if I could push my limit. This would also probably be a good time to mention that the holidays are typically a more anxious time for me, but I was doing so well and feeling so brave, that I decided to push my limit a little bit.

    I also decided during this time that I could go ahead give going to church another try, despite already feeling anxiety about the holidays and a little bit anxious about the longer time between my appointments. I went one week, and I made it to late afternoon before all the issues I mentioned in my last church-related blog post crept back in. This time, instead of taking weeks to recover, it took days, and I felt mostly back to normal. The shortened recovery time made me feel like I had improved slightly, and so I decided to push a little more. So, I went back a second time, hoping I would be fine. By the next day after the second trip, I was a crying, anxious mess, and I had started not to like myself again just like I did before. (It's been a couple of weeks since that last trip, and I'm still anxious and riddled with guilt. I'm slowly improving, but it's been rough.)

    So, not only was I dealing with the usual holiday and pandemic anxiety, I was then also dealing with my religiously-based OCD ramped up to full power like it hadn't been in years...and I had put my therapy appointment out for five weeks instead of two. I had pushed my limit too far in too many directions at once in my eagerness to see just how far I could push it because I noticed some slight improvement. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but looking back, I can see my mistake. I tried to carry too many things at once without taking the time and care I should have to make sure I processed all the things.

    I'm not saying to be overly cautious and to never try pushing your limits. All I'm saying is, push your limits SAFELY because pushing your limits too far too quickly can have unpleasant consequences. Talk to your therapist about whatever limit it is that you want to push. Then, only push one thing at a time. If the first little push goes well, and you're still in a good place with your mental illness, after you discuss it again with your therapist, then you could push back on another limit your mental illness has given you. 

    I'll end with this: I know, when we notice improvements in ourselves in relation to our mental illness, especially after we've pushed back on one of our limits, it's so tempting to keep pushing the limits. We feel better and brave, and we get eager to see just how far we can push our mental health limits. This can lead us to push too many limits too far too quickly, which can land us in a spiral. Always remember, to maintain that mental wellness that has made you feel better and brave, you have to be careful with yourself. Push your limits, one at a time, slowly, with the OK and the help from your therapist. Taking your life back from your mental illness isn't a race, it's a slow and steady journey.

Too Far Gone

    There seems to be this idea around dealing with mental illness and mentally ill people that some people are so mentally ill and have been for so long that those people can't be helped. It's this idea that some people are so far lost down the rabbit hole of darkness that mental illness creates that nobody can ever save them. I hear that idea supported more often than you'd think when people say things like, "Well, that person is too far gone. There's no help for them now."

    The people that live with mental illness often think this about themselves, too. We often simultaneously believe that we're "too far gone" to be saved while also praying that what we believe about ourselves isn't true. Believing that you're too far gone into the darkness created by your mental health condition to ever be saved from it is a scary place to be, and it's made even scarier when we hear people saying our fear out loud, even if it's about somebody else they believe can't be helped. 

    The whole idea that I was "too far gone" to be saved was one of the reasons I was afraid to go to therapy. I was afraid the therapist would confirm my worst fear and then send me packing to continue a life of misery that I wouldn't be able to fix or escape unless I did the unthinkable. But...then I went to therapy, and neither of my therapists ever thought that I was beyond help. With the help of my therapist, I was actually able to pull myself up out of the mental illness rabbit hole.

    I wasn't the only one that was able to accomplish this seemingly impossible feat. I saw other people that I cared about pulling themselves out of the rabbit holes of substance abuse and mental illness, too, after they had been described as "too far gone". That reinforced the idea for me that nobody was ever "too far gone" to be pulled back out of the darkness. Many of them had even spent more years than I had being down in that rabbit hole, and it still wasn't too late for them to be saved even from themselves. 

    The thing with mental illness is that it lies. I know I say this a lot, but it's true. Your mental illness will make you think terrible things about yourself, including thoughts of how you're too far gone or have been mentally ill for too long to be helped. That's just not true. That's never true.

    Let me put it like this: Before you ever think a person, including yourself, is ever too far gone to be saved, ask yourself, "Is that person dead?" If the answer is, "No. That person is not dead." Then they can still be helped. As long as you are alive, you can still be pulled out of the dark rabbit hole of your mental illness. It doesn't matter how long you've been dealing with that mental health condition. It's never too late. You just have to be alive. 

    I'll end with this: A lot of people think that there is some kind of limit to how far somebody can go out into the land of mental illness and/or substance abuse before they can no longer find their way back. A lot of people living with mental illness and/or substance abuse often think the same thing about themselves. If you're thinking that, your unwell brain is lying to you. It doesn't matter how long or how severely you've been struggling with your condition. You can always be helped. As long as you are alive, you're never "too far gone" for help. 

Proud Work in Progress

    I've always been the kind of person, that when somebody compliments something I worked on, or even when my therapist praises the progress I've made, I'll say something like, "Yeah, I did that, but I still want to/need to (insert goal or desired amount of progress)." I've always sort of felt like, whatever progress I made didn't deserve recognition because I hadn't reached as far as I wanted to go yet, and I could only truly be praised or celebrated or complimented when I reached the goal I had in mind. I mean, you can't say how great something is while it's still in progress, you have to see it finished to decide, right?

    I do that sort of thing a lot when it comes to dealing with my OCD and panic disorder triggers. I'll do a small exposure, and then if I don't feel like I exposed myself to whatever the trigger is for as long as I imagined I would, the mission feels like a failure. My therapist is always quick to correct me. She always points out, "Yeah. You got anxious/left/turned off the thing, but you still did it. It doesn't matter that you didn't do as well as you expected yourself to, the main point is that you did it. Then you recognized your limit, and you stopped. That's good. That's progress, and it deserves to be acknowledged."

    I actually say things like this so much in my sessions that my therapist says things like, "Did you hear what you just said?" Or, "Do you realize what you just did?" Then she always goes on to explain to me that, any progress at all, even if I fell short of a goal I had in my head, still deserves to be acknowledged and celebrated. She always lets me know that, even if I know I still have work to do in an area of my life or in dealing with my mental health, I'm still allowed to be proud of how far I've come.

    I've been in therapy for six or so years at this point, and that idea still feels weird to me. I'm supposed to be proud of and happy with how far I've come when I still have so far to go? The answer, according to my therapist, is yes. YES, I AM. 

    Here's the thing about progress for most of us, but especially for those of us that live with mental illness: progress is an ongoing journey that continues for our whole lives. Humans usually don't reach a point of progress at which they say, "Okay, I'm finished with this growth business. I've made all the progress I'm going to make in my life. I'll stay like this from here on out." When we usually begin to see growth in one area that we identified and have been working on, we pick out other things that we want to grow about ourselves or in how we deal with our mental health, and we begin work on those areas. This process goes on and on, because the more you grow, the more you can find other areas that you want to work on and improve because improving generally makes us feel good about ourselves. The goal or desired level of progress and growth just keeps changing. So, if we're not proud of ourselves and happy with ourselves while we're growing, when are we ever going to be proud of ourselves and happy with ourselves?

    I can tell you that I'm still not where I want to be in terms of progress and growth. I'm still a work in progress, and I'm probably always going to be a work in progress. That's okay. I'm still proud of where I am today because, I can tell you, it's a far cry from where I was five years ago, or even a few months ago. 

    I'll end with this: If you're anything like me, you're probably too hard on yourself sometimes (or, a lot of the time). It can feel so hard to celebrate yourself and be happy with yourself and the work you're putting into yourself when all you can see if how far you have left to go instead of how far you've come. The thing is that, especially with mental health, the whole process of progress and growth can be lifelong. So, if you're not celebrating yourself while you're a work in progress, when are you going to celebrate yourself at all?

From the Outside

    I had always thought of myself as someone who had a lot of experience with mental illness. Both of my parents had clinically diagnosed mental health conditions. I watched my grandmother take anti-anxiety medication for the entire part of her life that I knew her, and I watched her still battle her anxiety even with her medication. I had other friends and loved ones who had checked into in-patient treatment for mental health concerns, many of them more than once. I also personally knew people that either struggled with suicidal ideation or had actually attempted to take their own lives. 

    Up until my own struggle with OCD and panic disorder began, I felt like I understood what it was like to have a mental health condition. I had seen my loved ones struggling and suffering with mental illness, and I thought that since I had also struggled and suffered with difficult things throughout my life, that meant I understood what they were going through. I thought all suffering was the same because from the outside looking in, suffering just looks like suffering, if that makes sense.

    Prior to the beginning of my own struggle with mental illness, all of my "experience" with mental illness had been from the outside looking in. As you can imagine, when I suddenly found myself on the inside of that struggle looking out, it was a completely new experience. Sure, I had seen mental illness in other people. Sure, I had a basic knowledge of the causes and symptoms of various mental health conditions thanks to my bachelors degree in psychology. But...neither of those things prepared me for what it was like to feel a mental health condition wreaking havoc on my mind, body, and life. 

    I had ideas of suffering and mental illness, but I honestly couldn't wrap my mind around how this "thing" could interfere so much in the lives of people so as to make it nearly impossible to get out of bed, to leave their homes, to be a functional human being, or to stay alive even, no matter how hard they tried. From the outside looking in it's so easy to mistakenly just see people that maybe aren't trying hard enough or to see people just "giving in" to their mental health condition, or people who chose "a permanent solution to a temporary problem" instead of people that have expended tremendous amounts of effort trying to be as functional and as normal as possible until their stores of energy are depleted.

    Then, it happened to me, and like many of my friends and loved ones, I found myself thinking, "Other people really don't understand what this is like. I didn't...until now." From the outside looking in, I had never experienced the kind of suffering that comes with mental illness. (Nobody tells you that it's a different kind of suffering. Not worse, better, or more traumatic...just different.) I had never experienced that kind of fear that comes with not knowing if I could trust myself and my own thoughts. I had also never experienced the kind of prolonged anguish that can make a person think it would be a blessing not to wake up the next morning until I was living in it. 

    From the outside looking in, it's so easy to pass judgement on the way people deal with their mental health. When you aren't trapped on the inside of that struggle it's so easy to say that you would have handled something differently or that you never would have allowed your mind to run away to whatever place someone else is in. You don't know what you'd do though, until it's happening to you. None of us behave as logically as we imagine we will in any given situation where fear and pain are the dominant emotions or when survival mode is activated. 

    I'll end with this: As cliché as it sounds, mental illness is one of those things that it's impossible to truly understand until it happens to you. Sure, you can have experience dealing with other people's mental health, but that experience is that of an observer watching from the outside of the struggle and the suffering, untouched by it. That experience is completely different to the experience of the person with the mental health condition who is trapped on the inside looking out, who can't have distance from it. From the outside looking in, it's so easy to view a person's struggle with mental health through the societal lens of the stigma that tells us that those people are lazy or dramatic or attention-seeking instead of simply seeing people that are trying their best with the internal and external resources that they have at any given moment. 

Just Listen to Us

    Figuring out life with mental illness can be hard, especially in the beginning. We have to figure what our triggers are. We have to figure out how to manage symptoms. We have to figure out what treatments work best for our brains. We have to figure out how to have difficult conversations with loved ones, bosses, and even potential partners about our mental health conditions. We have to figure out what bits of our old lives we get to keep and what bits we have to change for our own wellness. Basically, we have to figure out how to navigate life all over again with this new, scary thing that we have to take into account for practically every decision we make.

    The whole process is frustrating and painful, and it has probably been a trial and error process for us, but then....we figure it out. We figure out how to identify and handle existing and potential triggers, how to manage the symptoms, how to live as fully as possible while we keep an eye on our ever-present mental health condition and travel along our wellness journey.

    While we're figuring things out for ourselves, our loved ones are also trying to figure it all out alongside us. They see us struggling. They see us at our worst when our mental illness is wreaking havoc on us and our lives, and they hate it. Our loved ones would more than likely do anything to make our suffering stop, but they have no idea how to make it stop. They can't take away the mental illness, and so this might lead our loved ones to try to protect us from our mental health condition. 

    In an effort to help us manage our mental illness, our loved ones can sometimes make mental health decisions for us to avoid certain situations because they assume the situation will be a trigger. Sometimes, even when we insist that we would be fine in X situation, our loved ones will stand firm and say something along the lines of, "No. That will definitely make you (insert symptoms here). I know it will. So we just won't do that/watch that/talk about that."

    While we understand that this protectiveness comes from a place of love, it's not the most helpful attitude to have when dealing with someone else's mental health condition. Just because we have a mental health condition doesn't mean that we're like children that don't know what's best for ourselves or how to take care of ourselves. We've put in the work in therapy to learn these exact things.

    It would be so much more helpful if they just asked us, "Are you okay if we do this/watch this/talk about this today?" and then ACTUALLY LISTENED TO US when we gave them an answer. If we've been living with our mental illness for some time, and especially if we've spent some time in therapy, we know our mental health boundaries. We know when it's a good time to challenge our mental illness and when it's a good time to leave or avoid a situation to be kind to ourselves. So, if we say we'll be fine in a situation, we mean it, because we wouldn't risk creating a bad mental health day just to prove a point. If we legitimately feel like it might be a bad day to be exposed to anything we can opt out of, we'll tell you that. 

    Also, if something has been a trigger for us in the past, that doesn't mean that same thing will ALWAYS be a trigger for our mental illness. We can and do work through some things like that in therapy so that we don't make avoidance the default coping mechanism. You can always ask, "I know this has been a trigger in the past, but how do you feel about it now?" instead of assuming that it's still an issue. We know that if we want to maintain wellness it's best to answer questions like this honestly instead of giving you the answer we think you want from us.

       On another level, just assuming that something will be triggering and then telling us that you know a certain thing will be triggering isn't a good idea. If we aren't careful, thinking about why you think something would be triggering (especially when we're dealing with intrusive thoughts) can create a trigger where there wasn't one before. 

    Loved ones can still be protective, and we appreciate that in the right context. Save the protectiveness for when someone is arguing that our mental illness isn't a real illness or when we confront someone for using our mental illness as a "quirky" personality trait. That's when we need it. We don't really need it when we're just making decisions about what we can handle in regard to our mental health condition. Odds are, after some time in therapy and after we've (mostly) figured out how to navigate life with our mental illness, we don't need you to try to protect us from ourselves or our mental health conditions as much as you still think we do. (But we love you for wanting to.)

    I'll end with this: I know, you want to figure out any way you can to protect someone you care about from the suffering that comes with their mental health condition. However, when it comes to trying to help someone manage their mental illness, making the decision for them to avoid certain things without talking to them about it isn't the most helpful thing you can do. We're so glad you want to help, and honestly, the most helpful thing you can do is listen to us about dealing with our own mental health condition. It's okay to just ask, "Do you feel okay with X?" instead of just assuming you know best because you love them.