No Such Thing

When people talk about mental health treatment, whether it's medications, supplements, diets, coping skills and management strategies, or even an old wives' tale that worked for them or someone they know, they tend to talk in absolutes. They say things like, "X always works." Or "X works for everyone." Or even, "Z never works."

When I had to be evaluated by a crisis counselor in the beginning of my mental health treatment, he was stunned when he found out I had tried Lexapro and it hadn't worked for me. He literally said, "But Lexapro works for everyone, so I don't know why it didn't work for you." (And, yes, I felt like it was somehow my fault the medication that "works for everyone" didn't work for me.)

We shouldn't speak in absolutes about things in general, but we really shouldn't speak in absolutes when it comes to mental health treatment. It would have been much more accurate and felt much less like he was blaming me for something I had no control over if the crisis counselor would have said something like, "We see a lot of success when we use Lexapro to treat X, Y, and Z." If he would have said something like that, I wouldn't have spent weeks afterward feeling like I had done something wrong and like there was something extra that could be wrong with me that would make my OCD and panic disorder harder to treat.

It wasn't my fault that the medication that "works for everyone" didn't work for me. I have absolutely no control over how a medication interacts with my brain. I have no control over whether or not I experience side effects or whether or not a medication works for me at all. You can do everything right: take as directed, switch up the time of day you take a medication like I was directed to, do whatever else the prescribing professional tells you to do, but still, sometimes that medication just doesn't do what it was designed to do with your brain. That's why (generally) more than one medication exists to treat the same condition, and why finding the right treatments is a trial-and-error process. 

Everyone's brain is different. Even in two people with the same mental health condition, we often see different symptoms and different triggers, and we see that the mental illness feels different for each of those people. So, of course, when we think about how the same mental illness looks different from person to person, it makes sense that a thing that "works for everyone" doesn't actually exist. How can it when each person's brain and each person's experience with mental illness is different?

I'll end with this: There is no such thing as a medication, supplement, diet, or a set of management techniques and coping strategies that truly works for everyone. Every brain is different. Just because something with a high success rate doesn't work for you doesn't mean you did anything wrong or that something else is wrong with you. Finding the treatment or the right combination of treatments is a trial-and-error process, not a one-size-fits-all experience.

Just Because You Don't See It

Even at my worst with my mental health, I was still able to get up, go to college, and keep up with my homework. I was still able to have fun on the weekends. Even now, I'm able to get my work done and be decently productive at home by making dinner, keeping up with my exercise, and keeping up with my household chores, even on my bad days.

I am a person with high-functioning mental illness. That means from the outside looking in, I don't appear to be a mentally ill person. From the outside looking in, I appear to be just a regular perfectionist, who is perceived as "normal" by many societal standards. People who aren't my mom, my therapist, or my cousin Amy typically don't see me struggling with my mental illness unless it's a REALLY bad day for me, or I'm exhausted to the point that I can no longer hide the fact that I'm struggling. 

The fact that people don't see me struggling and the fact that I am still able to be generally high functioning tends to make people think that my mental illness is much less significant than it actually is. They tend to assume that, because I do a good job of functioning "like a normal person," my mental illness doesn't interfere with my life. They think of it sort of like how people have high blood pressure. As in that the issue is there, but it doesn't stop a person from living their life the way they want to live it. 

This is another big misconception about high-functioning mental illness. (The top misconception is that high-functioning mental illness doesn't need treatment.) High-functioning mental illness absolutely interferes with people's lives. Many people with high-functioning mental illness struggle just as much as the people with mental illness that aren't considered high functioning. The only difference is that people with high-functioning mental illness are better at concealing the struggle.

Many people with high-functioning mental illness, like me, exert a tremendous amount of energy to appear normal in public settings and in front of people outside of our immediate comfort zone. There are often a lot of moments throughout the day when we "power through" symptoms for the sake of getting something done. There are also quite a few moments when we have to take a second to think, "How can I manage this symptom of my mental illness right now in the least noticeable way?" (A lot of times for me that looks getting up and moving around or taking a couple of seconds to focus on breathing or doing some grounding techniques quietly in my head. For others that's being busy all the time, which is actually ignoring your mental illness and not actually managing it, which is unhealthy.) Then we try to engage in better self-care and symptom management at home.

I think of people with high-functioning mental illness as ducks treading water. We see the duck's body, appearing to just sit or glide across the water, relaxed and serene. What we don't see are the duck's feet, paddling and kicking in a frenzy to keep the duck afloat underneath the calm surface of the water. That's what it's actually like living with high-functioning mental illness. All the struggling and the work to be high functioning with our mental illness is there, but most people don't see it.

I'll end with this: Many people live with high-functioning mental illness. This means that people outside of their immediate comfort zone or their therapist don't typically see them struggling with their mental illness, which can lead to the idea that their mental illness doesn't really impact their lives or that it's less severe. This isn't the case. People with high-functioning mental illness still struggle just as much as everyone else living with mental illness. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean someone isn't struggling.