Last weekend my boyfriend and I saw a license plate with the letters “E-A-T”. We joked this was a cool license plate, especially as eating food is one of our favorite things to do. I saw two other EAT license plates that weekend and then FIVE more on Monday. It’s funny how things seem to repeat themselves after they are first revealed to us. I noticed a second trend that same weekend and it was one that I couldn’t ignore. This concept was repeating, telling me I needed to recognize it. Kind of like how seeing “EAT” told me I was hungry. But I digress.
It started Sunday morning as I was sitting on my porch reading Furiously Happy, Jenny Lawson’s brutally honest look at mental illness that also happens to be brutally entertaining and hilarious. As she writes about her mental illness she explains,
“You’re so tired from fighting that you start to listen to all the little lies your brain tells you. The ones that say that you’re a drain on your family. The ones that say it’s all in your head. The ones that say if you were stronger or better this wouldn’t be happening to you.”
She speaks of writing as a way of reminding herself that things will get better:
“…Because it’s so easy to forget that I’ve been here before and come out on the other side, and perhaps if I have this to read I’ll remember it again next time and it will help me to keep on breathing until the medications take hold and I’m out of the hole again.”
An hour later on CBS News Sunday Morning (a Sunday ritual in my household) an interview with Rachel Maddow addressed her experience with depression. She candidly shared how her partner helps her to cope,
"The time when it's hardest is when I have forgotten that this happens to me and so I don't know what it is and she will say, 'You are depressed,' and just being able to identify it and then knowing that it's not going to be forever and that it will pass and that it will ease at some point, helps."
Later that day my coworker, Lisa Allred, shared an article on rumination by Margaret Wehrenberg Psy. D.:
Brain function plays a role in rumination in several ways, but one significant aspect of brain function relates to memory. People remember things that are related to each other in neural networks. And when people enter a 'woe is me' network the brain lights up connections to other times they felt that way. Ruminating is worsened by another difficulty of the depressed and anxious brain: inability to flexibly generate solutions. Brain chemistry makes it hard to switch to another perspective to find the way out of problems, so rumination intensifies. Both anxiety and depression are then reinforced.
One of Wehrenberg's suggestions to activate a positive neural network: "Use family or friends to help you remember. Ask them to help you think of times when things turned out fine."
In just a few hours, here was my third encounter with this concept. The major theme I heard? At times, the throes of rumination, depression, anxiety, and worry, can be covert. Sometimes part of being in that state is not recognizing that one is actually in it. It becomes a person's reality albeit a different one from their "real reality", the same "real reality" of those who care for them.
You may be the one who has to provide the reminders to someone you care about.
I’m not going to write a one-size-fits-all suggestion for how to deal with this phenomenon. That wouldn’t be appropriate. Treatment and support regarding any kind of mental health issue is very individualized. Recognizing it doesn’t make it go away, it’s not that simple. For some recognizing it, trying to do something about it, and yet it still persisting can be heartbreaking. But the three examples above echo that when supporting someone with a mental health issue, it can help to be prepared with knowledge. Knowledge of what to expect. Knowledge that one is not alone in their experience. Knowledge of resources and coping strategies. Knowledge of the fact that they may not be aware of the fact that they are experiencing it (if that sounded confusing to you – then welcome to the world of mental health – it’s never that simple). Knowledge that reminders and support may at times help.
My hope for writing this is to at least bring it to your attention – consider this your first EAT license plate. Maybe you were already aware of this one facet of mental illness; but as was obvious in the three examples above, reminders help. Either way the discussion has to start somewhere…and then continue to take place.
Statistics from NAMI: 1 in 5 adults in America experience mental illness. Approximately 10.2 million adults have co-occuring mental health and addiction disorders.
Want to learn more? Search www.nami.org or http://www.samhsa.gov/
