Originally published by The River City Review inside the West Sacramento News-Ledger on June 2, 2004
A first-person account of how experience can change perception
“What is everything to one person and nothing to everyone else? Your mind.” -Jim Carrey, Batman Forever.
Psychological disorders have a strong negative stigma in today’s society.
Statistics show that answering “yes” to questions such as “Have you ever received mental therapy?” on job applications greatly decreases your chances of being hired. Have you ever stopped to think about what normal means? What’s normal to you? Do you consider yourself normal while you think everyone else needs therapy? In reality, maybe it’s you that has a psychological issue. In our society, many people shy away from therapy, counseling, or any kind of psychological help because of the negative stigma it carries.
But what if a psychological problem becomes too much to handle? What happens when all of your thoughts are mixed around in your head and you can no longer decipher which thoughts are right or wrong? What happens when you become so confused that reality becomes a total blur and you feel as if the world hates you? What happens when happiness is no longer a smile away but miles and miles of tears, pain, anger and frustration away, only to find that in the end you still feel down and end up wanting to get out by committing suicide? This is what happened to me.
Many Americans believe that psychological disorders and conditions are not true and are just a way of explaining the unexplained. I thought this for many years and I was a strong adversary to the clinical science of psychology. Toward the end of my junior year I decided to enroll in Mr. Shriver’s Psychology class here at River City so that I could learn more about the field and see if my opinion had any solid base like I so strongly thought it did.
Before I made it to the class, however, I had my own personal experience with the early stages of a psychological disorder. By the end of my junior year I had become deeply depressed and began showing many of the symptoms of Clinical Depression, a very common psychological disorder.
I got so depressed that I made the decision to end my pain and commit suicide. For me, years of being made fun of and years of being the “fat nerd” in class finally caught up to me. I’d lived a life of aloneness, a life of rejection and a life of having to deal with everyone hating me and by this time I’d gotten to the point where I was tired of all the pain and hurt. I was ready to commit suicide.
Suicide is one of the leading causes of teenage death. In 2001 suicide was the 11th ranked cause of death in the U.S. in 2001 and the 3rd ranked for young people. (AAS, American Association of Suicidology, study) According to that same nationwide study done by AAS in 2001, 30,622 people committed suicide in 2001. That means on average, someone committed suicide approximately every 18 minutes. The statistics also show that it is a lot more common in males than females, and far more common in white people than other ethnicities.
However, “over the last 20 years, the rate of suicide among people over 45 has been falling, thanks in part to doctors’ aggressive treatment of depression in adults. But that gain has been almost entirely offset by a rising number of suicides among the young, especially young males. Suicide among children and adolescents has tripled in the last 45 years; of the 30,000 Americans who kill themselves annually, more than 5,000 are between the ages of 15 and 24.” (Psychologytoday.com).
I planned out my suicide, went over constantly in my mind what I wanted to say in my final piece of human contact, my suicide note, and I even broke off a three-year friendship with my only true and close friend. I had many others but they were more acquaintances, he was my best friend and I quit talking to him.
My thoughts of suicide were no longer a stranger and it began seeming like it was the only way out.
On the day of June 13, 2003 I went to school and took my second period English final in my Honors English class and then I headed to the gym for my third period Weights final. After the exam, we were sent into the gym to play basketball. I sat down in the corner and started going over, in detail, how I would follow through on writing my suicide note and committing suicide that afternoon. About an hour before the period ended, I noticed the only familiar face in the room. That face belonged to my good friend, Sarah Cozad. I walked over to her in an attempt to say good-bye but ended up laughing and joking and for the first time in months, feeling happy. We spent the whole hour together and while I was very nervous, it was comforting to know that I had someone who cared about me as much as she did. The feeling she gave me was one that no other person at the time was giving me. She made me feel wanted and I felt like I could be myself.
With this new friendship building, my thoughts of suicide slowly drifted away. Over the next few months, Sarah and I became very close friends and in September, I told Sarah that I had feelings for her beyond friendship. Sarah and I agreed to take things slow and we went from best friends to boyfriend and girlfriend. Sarah was my only real connection to life that I had left. My life otherwise had become so depressing that without her in it, I felt miserable. For the next two months we were the happiest couple in the world.
Toward the end of November, I started feeling deeply depressed again. My thoughts of suicide were no longer a stranger and it began seeming like it was the only way out. I started experiencing severe mood swings, sleepless nights, and no appetite, along with all the other symptoms of depression. Holidays such as Thanksgiving just were no fun. They seemed like ordinary days and celebrating these holidays seemed pointless because I couldn’t be happy like everyone else and I felt so down. Even when I was around Sarah, it was hard to focus on my love for her. Instead of enjoying being with her, my mind was fixed on the fact that I didn’t get to see her much. Over the next few weeks, my condition kept getting worse. I became very irritable and was always in a bad mood. The littlest things would set me off and I’d go into a crazy rage of anger that would end in a severe cry and thoughts of suicide. I started having trouble in school and my grades reflected it. I couldn’t focus. Work that I was good with became very difficult and work that I had trouble with was just impossible. This was another huge stressor and at times almost drove me to suicide. Sarah luckily kept me going and reassured me that I’d graduate.
One night during Christmas Vacation, I got into a huge argument about my recent behaviors with my family. I went into a panic attack and my sister-in-law convinced me that I needed professional help. After they left I got very upset because I hated admitting to myself that I needed help. I walked into the kitchen and picked up the biggest knife we own and held it to my chest. Crying very strongly and with a tingly, numb feeling covering my whole body, just before I was going to jam the knife into my chest, I thought about my girlfriend, Sarah. The thought of hurting her made me put down the knife and go another route. As the panic attack continued, I started to breathe heavily and I fell to the floor face first. As I laid there breathing uncontrollably I remember thinking, “When will this end?”
The next thing I remember was my family standing over my body and making assumptions that I had taken pills to commit suicide. They called 911 and paramedics left after I decided I didn’t need medical help. This was the worst thing I’ve experienced in my entire life. At that point I decided without a shadow of doubt, I needed help.
Over the next few months I actively pursued psychological help. With the help of Mr. Shriver, Mrs. Testerman, Mr. Allen, and Mrs. Tyler I started to take the steps of fixing my situation. My doctor gave me Paxil, a commonly used anti-depressant drug. The thought of having to take a drug to be normal was against my beliefs. It seemed so wrong to have to depend on a pill to be able to function. I didn’t want to do it, but Sarah convinced me it was the only way and I ended up taking it. It took about a month and a half before it finally kicked in but when it did, I started feeling like myself again.
There are several types of antidepressant medications used to treat depressive disorders. Neurotransmitters generally have fewer side effects than the others. Although some improvements may be seen in the first few weeks, antidepressant medications must be taken regularly for 3 to 4 weeks (in some cases, as many as 8 weeks) before the full therapeutic effect occurs. In many cases patients stop medication too soon when they don’t get the desired results. This can be very dangerous and is one of the leading reasons that patients end up committing suicide.
I was also referred to see a psychologist. Going to see a psychologist was against pretty much everything I believed in at the time. Although I had learned a lot in Mr. Shriver’s class, I still shared the popular negative stigma of psychology being a bunch of people trying to explain the unexplainable. With much work and struggle, and lots of support from Sarah all the way, I finally went to see a psychologist. The psychologist started cognitive treatment with me and we began working toward retraining my mind into the proper frame of thinking.
It was mid-February now, and things were starting to look up for me. Over the next couple of months, my life became something I could only dream of before because I had gotten so depressed that happiness seemed to be too far out of reach. I was happy at almost all times, I started feeling like my normal self for the first time in years and I got engaged to Sarah.
After four sessions with my psychologist, I stopped my therapy due to transportation issues and I even quit going in for weekly check-ups with my primary care physician. I felt like I didn’t need these things anymore because my life was looking up, but I was wrong.
Toward the end of April, I started experiencing multiple panic attacks or anxiety attacks. I was very emotionally unstable and would burst into tears over the smallest and most insignificant things. This was not only having a huge impact on my relationship with Sarah, but on my life and my schoolwork in general. I decided I needed to get help again. In early May, I returned to my doctor and told him I was experiencing many severe symptoms of anxiety disorder, the leading psychological disorder in America. Approximately 19.1 million American adults ages 18 to 54, or about 13.3 percent of people in this age group in a given year, have an anxiety disorder.
My doctor informed me that in many cases, one disorder could actually be the underlying cause of another. He told me that what most likely is the case with me is that I’ve always had anxiety, but as it got stronger, I developed depression because of it.
I was taken off Paxil slowly, which wasn’t pleasant because it sent my body into withdrawals on top of all of the other symptoms of the anxiety I was already experiencing. I am currently taking a new medication, Wellbutron, a less common medication, which is stronger than Paxil. I am also in the process of getting into a Psychiatrist because my doctor is only qualified to go so far on medication for mental health.
While I’m not sure, what lies in my future, I am now a believer and no longer have a negative stigma toward therapy and psychology. Some say it’ll be hard for me to get a job, and I’ll carry the negative stigma of receiving medication and therapy with me for my whole life but I don’t care. I need help and got it and as a result am doing a lot better than I ever was before. Also, I know that the research and work of people in the field has helped me deal with my issues and kept me from committing suicide.
I think no one can fully understand the work of psychology until they have experienced a psychological disorder themselves. While a high number of Americans have or will develop a disorder in their lifetime, not everyone will experience a psychological disorder, so the stigma is probably here to stay. In my opinion, people who are so closed-minded are that way because they are just ignorant. I hope that in my lifetime, scientists and psychologists will find a cure for these disorders and reduce the number of suicides committed each year due to these disorders. I now know that psychological disorders are just as real as cancer or AIDS.
Right now, it is a matter of managing the problem and staying on top of it. I have a lot of support and Sarah and I were both inspired by all of this to study Psychology. Sarah even plans to pursue a Ph.D. and become a therapist.
Finally, I hope that people can admit their ignorance toward psychology so that this negative stigma will eventually end, and more victims will come forward to get help so that they themselves won’t die. Too many people are of the mindset that someone who has been to or is currently seeing a doctor of mental health is crazy and that causes a lot of people to shy away from treatment. This is not necessarily true and in my opinion, people who get help are heroes. They are the strong ones; the weak ones are the people that look to suicide as their doctor and go out the cowardly way.
At this point, I look back and can’t help but think where I’d be if it hadn’t been for Sarah, Mr. Shriver, Ms. Testerman, and all the other people who supported me through these times. I look to my future now and wonder where I’ll be tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. I have no idea, but I do know wherever it is, I’ll have Sarah by my side. I’ll have the people who care about me most by my side and most of all I’ll be getting help.
Editor’s Note: The Review is a high school publication at River City High School in West Sacramento, Calif., for which Daniel Wilson wrote and edited between 2000-2004. The stories published in this category appear in their original form with the only corrections being removal of hyphens for line breaks and the fixing of typos. Some additional minor edits have been made to this article for clarity.
