(I fully expect a lot of people to be rather venomous after reading this. Go ahead; I have a thick skin.)

It should be a surprise to no-one (read: a previous entry) that I suffer with mental health problems; more specifically depression, anxiety and SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder, or winter depression). I’m glad I can talk about it to people who are in my life, and those that can talk about their coping techniques to get through the day. I’m far from unique in my issues, but once again I find myself at the point where I just look at the world and get a little bit angrier at it.

World Mental Health Day is supposed to be a day when we bring mental health to the forefront of the public mind, talking about the stigmas surrounding it and the ways those that suffer with mental issues can get treatment. It’s supposed to be something that just sits in the back of all our minds after we see it, and  for those that are undiagnosed to possibly use it as a crutch to get over the mogul of suffering in silence and actually ask for help. But what I don’t like is seeing everyone trying to celebrate mental health issues, that they’re completely normal to have. Mental disorders are not normal. Mental disorders are anomalies that, were we an animal species, would be taken care of by Darwinism.

What I’m specifically talking about here is the tumblr-centred SJWsphere where everyone is a special snowflake just because they diagnosed themselves on WebMD, or are going to a therapist without having been referred there by a medical professional. It honestly infuriates me, because I know several people who have been diagnosed and are awaiting treatment because their local health services can’t deal with the influx of people who are waiting (I personally had to wait three months just to talk to someone after my evaluation, without being triaged based on severity). In fact what they’re really missing is a solid upbringing and a moral centre that has any gravitational pull beyond the self-centred ‘me too!’ culture that has enveloped some of my generation, some of the generations prior, and most of the generations henceforth. The ones that truly need help are the quiet ones, because in the big picture they’ve made themselves quiet to make sure that nobody will miss them, or they are too incapacitated from said mental health issue to speak up. It is their signals that are lost in that white noise of ignorance and narcissism.

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I have been having issues with my body for quite some time. I’ve almost always had an issue with my weight, and of course recently I’ve had issues with depression that have been diagnosed and worked on. Well, neither of them seem to have made any recent progress so I’m trying different ways of dealing with them this time.

My weight has always been an issue for me, apart from when I was doing a paper round and I was exercising hard for about an hour each day while earning next to nothing. When a certain someone (1 million Kinah, I know [it’s an inside joke]) says behind your back that you look like you’re “pregnant with triplets” it tends to stick, regardless of the source. I’ve been watching what I eat, and writing it down. That daily routine of checking my weight means that I’m constantly on it, though I am slipping just as regularly. Eventually it will stick, though without exercise I’ll constantly be fighting this battle. I don’t want to be fighting this forever, I want to get fit and in the last week and a half I have lost 11lbs. I reckon most of that was just weight from my stomach being a literal conveyer belt of food, but progress is progress.

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It took a lot of cajoling and ultimately a threat for me to actually reach out for help, and then reach out a second time. The first time things didn’t go as planned and I had been lost in the shuffle for both therapy and an evaluation for depression. The tipping point was my partner at the time essentially bartered our relationship for it, that she couldn’t be with me any longer with how I was, and honestly I couldn’t blame her.

I went into therapy and started taking the pills. I was given Citalopram, an anti-stress drug; the best way I can explain it is that it narrows out your emotional range. If emotions are a scale of one to ten, it felt like I was constantly in four to six. It worked but at the price of feeling any of the extremes. It’s similar to Prozium in the film Equilibrium, a film I highly recommend. The therapy was cognitive behaviour therapy, and despite what some say, if it works for you, then it works for you. Sometimes all you need is to look at yourself and talk about why things are how they are, and look at that as your starting point of change.

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