Harley Emmons

My Mental Health Journey: Anxiety and Depression I’m starting this post series to: Help anyone else struggling with mental health feel validated. There’s power in finding like-minded people. Document my own mental health and find a better creative outlet. The inciting-incident for my blog goes like this. After flip-flopping between “I don’t need medication, I just need WILL POWER and LOTS OF VITAMINS AND EXERCISE” and “Holy hell, I deserve to be happy. You don’t see diabetics turning down insulin because they think they can power through it”, I finally overcame the stigma found with mental illness and reached out for help. By my senior year of undergraduate, I was on medication and going to a therapist for my anxiety and depression. And it felt pretty good. This continued on after I graduated and moved to Tokyo. I was amazed by my lack of spontaneous sobbing and how well I was rolling with the punches, despite living by myself in a foreign country without my beloved support group from back home. Gradually, I built a life here. Now for the skeptics of treating depression with medication lurking in the corner, no, this does not mean I was in a drug-filled, happy haze 24/7. I still went through the ups and downs of life, good days and bad. The difference was I could reason with any problems and eventually bounce back instead of spiraling into a mound of blankets and self-deprecating thoughts. Then, after a year, the Japanese medical system made it too difficult and frustrating for me to continue on this medication any longer. So, in another fit of “I CAN DO THIS, I BET MY BRAIN IS REWIRED BY NOW” I went off them abruptly. Which, according to anyone with common sense, is a terrible way to stop a medication. If you don’t want your top Google search to be, ‘how do I feel like a person’ then please wean yourself off with your physician’s recommendation. It has been two months since I got off medication and, though I still find myself crying for some unknown reason while cooking, the terrible mood swings and withdrawal side-effects have evened out. Yet, I’m still plagued by: My racing thoughts and the nagging voices in my head that paralyze me. An occasional, sourceless pounding heart rate, as if I just ran a marathon or am dying. The feeling that I should be doing something more important than enjoying life. The one that leaves me suspended somewhere between ‘being productive’ and ‘relaxing’ and keeps me from doing either. The one misinterpreted word or action that my brain will latch onto and beat me with for weeks. The tool it will use to justify why I don’t deserve to happy or loved. For some people, this may sound like really bad poetry; but for others, I hope it resonates with you. I hope you realize that many of these symptoms are something thousands of people suffer from in silence. The stigma of mental illness being ‘all in your head’, untreatable, or embarrassing is alive and well. And, to be less eloquent for a moment, that is bullshit. So, I implore you to be vocal. To ask for help. To talk to someone, even if it’s anonymous. To scream your troubles into the sky from the top of a suburban shopping mall. Whatever works for you. But keeping these thoughts in your head will only let them brew and fester, exhausting your soul. In lieu of screaming from my window–my neighbors are probably already concerned by the number of sappy musicals blasted through the walls–I’m going to try out different methods to naturally quell anxiety and depression and share them with you, dear reader. Wish me luck.