I’ve recently read a bit of a stinker of a short story horror collection which references mental health - in a rather inaccurate and misleading way.
As someone who’s has to battle their own mental health demons every day I’m all for linking mental health to horror; it’s ripe for metaphor and allegory, but I thought it might be of help to give an overview of mental health issues I’ve suffered which are depression, anxiety and PTSD.
I’m not an authority (or a qualified medical professional!) and we all have our own experience with mental health issues, but these are ones particular to me, which I have found are commonly shared.
Condition example:
My condition robs me of motivation with a ‘what’s the point?’ vibe. It also comes with an anxiety that has me overthinking simple choices to the point of being unable to leave the house. E.G: If I had been invited to a social event I would panic about it even though I am a largely gregarious person, and end up not going. This is made harder by the fact that a lot of social events are things I would go to by myself. The problem is twofold; one of generalised anxiety and motivation. The anxiety usually wins and so I would end up staying home and then beating myself up for months from guilt, self-loathing and similar. Constant comparisons to people ‘more successful’ than myself form an unhealthy barometer of achievement or worthwhile-ness, feed into the anxiety, and the more incidents where I would ‘flake out’ from a meeting leads to feedback loop of self-loathing and guilt.
I used to do things merely for the sake of them, but ‘now*’ I need a ‘reason’ to do them. So, for example, I am never late for work (luckily, I love my job) and am immune from my condition in regards to it, but if you asked me to sit down and write, or paint, or clean my house, I’ll procrastinate and procrastinate and often not even start. I used to be creative and create sculptures, songs, and theatre just for the sake it, whereas now I have to be doing for someone else, to get any real impetus.
(*I consider myself broadly ‘fixed’ although the condition never really leaves; you have good days and bad; the difference is I now have tools to apply to combat the depression’s anxiety and motivation element.)
Anything with numbers is a real struggle - this is linked to my PTSD which comes from the liquidation of my company (in which I was a Director in name only, and manipulated by two older professionals in an unsustainable business) - and my having to work with an accountant from 8AM - 1 AM for three weeks. This has a negative knock-on effect on my personal budgeting and accounting for my freelance work/tax returns.
Finally, one of the overriding factors is money. Without sharing too much personal info, I have struggle to cover monthly expenses for 15 years now. The relentless debt (cold showers, no gas, constant chasing by debt collectors, being taken off Direct Debit and put on keycards for electricity and gas is crippling) cannot be divorced from mental health and is, I suspect the biggest contributor to the massive problems the C21 has with mental health.
Diagnosis:
The actual diagnosis can be very long, or I suspect even never. I had not realised the condition I was in until 2013 and then found out I had been battling it (unsuccessfully) since 1999. The first thing I did was go to the doctor who referred me to the IAPT NHS service (IAPT = Improvement for Access to Psychological Therapies) and also prescribed an SSRI (Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitor). The one I take is called Fluoxetine in the UK, more commonly known as Prozac (a product name in the US) in North America.
IAPT referred me first to a local CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) practitioner within the NHS. CBT is an effective method of retraining your thought patterns which after time become habitual or routine. This was helpful as far as it went, but it did not address historic incidents of PTSD.
After CBT (12 sessions of 50 mins long which can be targeted or general) my therapist said she suspected there were ‘other things’ going on, and I was referred to a counsellor. This was ineffective at offering me any kind of healing; I met with a lovely counsellor once a week for 6 sessions but felt I was not getting any tools or resources, or healing. In fact I just felt I was setting aside 1 hour a week to moan about my life, which made me feel worse, and increased my low self-esteem and self-loathing.
After that expired in 2015 (so, 2 years from my initial diagnosis) I carried on with just the anti-depressants and the CBT tools. I felt calmer and a little more productive, but I knew things ‘weren’t right’. This came to a head when my anger and bitterness (quick to rise to anger due to my condition, even though my detail emotional state was being scared throughout everyday life for no reason) had me fighting on public transport; the last time it happened was so bad, I realised I needed help after berating a pregnant woman in an awful way after she made racist assumptions of my students. I felt terrible as I exploded in front of them, and instead of setting an example, became the thing that my job (intervention programme with behavioural-disordered kids) was meant to help prevent. This obviously had massive impact on my self-esteem afterwards as I was so disappointed in myself.
I went back to the doctor and said I was now taking action (and I live and work in a rough area of London, the capital of UK’s knife-crime) and making choices that were putting my safety in order and I needed proper help.
I was referred to a new therapy style called DIT (Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy) which gave me my life back. This is more traditional kind of therapy and it requires many investigations into past hurt and how emotional responses have been put in place due to single influential - and/or repeated - incidents in developing parts of our life - mostly childhood. 16 sessions are planned and you are thereafter given one or two end-review sessions.
Without doubt the DIT therapy was the most helpful and has given me the tools to deal with my depression and associated MH challenges. As said upthread, there are times when things will become bad regardless of your healing, things that will trip you up and it’s important to know for most of us it’s an ongoing condition that you manage, rather than cure. Whenever I meet someone who is open about mental health struggles, I feel there’s a verbal shorthand for emotions from the shared insidious experience of depression which (thankfully) those who’ve to suffered it, cannot understand.
Symptoms/Conditions associated with Depression:
1) Sleeping Problems
2) Controlling Anger
3) Low Mood
4) Bereavement
5) Anxiety
6) Obsessions and/or Compulsion
7) Stress
8) Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
9) Shyness and social anxiety
Thoughts and Feelings:
(The emotion and - what thoughts lead to that emotion.)
1) Sadness or depression - thoughts of loss, romantic rejection, death of a loved one, job or a personal goal
2) Guilt or shame - You believe you’ve hurt someone or you’ve failed to live up to your own (arbitrary) moral standards. Guilt comes from self-condemnation, shame involves condemnation from others if they find out about what you did.
3) Anger and resentment - You feel someone is trying to take advantage or treating you unfairly.
4) Frustration - Life falling short of your expectations and the insistence that things should be ‘different’.
5) Anxiety, worrying, fear, nervous, panic - You think you’re in danger form something that is about to happen.
6) Inferiority/inadequacy - comparing yourself to others’ successes and making a judgement that you are not as good as them (be it talent, attractive, charming, intelligent etc)
7) Loneliness - You’re bound to be unhappy because you’re alone and you aren’ getting enough attention.
Often expressed as twisted thoughts:
1) All-or-nothing thinking - if a situation fails in one area, you see it as a total failure
2) Overgeneralisation - You see single situation as an example of how in your life ‘everything’ goes wrong.
3) Mental Filter - pick out a single negative detail and focus on that (even if the positive outweigh it)
4) Discounting the positive - reject positive experiences because ‘they don’t count’
5) Jumping to conclusions - putting negative interpretation on things when there are no facts to support that. Two categories are Mind Reading: without checking it out, you conclude that someone is being negative to you; Fortune Telling: You predict that things will go wrong or turn out badly.
6) Magnification - Exaggeration of your shortcomings and minimisation of your positive qualities.
7) Emotional Reasoning - your emotional reasoning informs the outcome. E.g. Flying’s dangerous so therefore the plane is going to crash.
8) Should statements - ‘I shouldn’t have made that mistake’ etc. Should statements directed against yourself lead to guilt and frustration; against others or the world leads to frustration and anger.
9) Labelling - an extreme form of all-or-nothing. E.g I made a mistake so I must be a loser. Someone upsets you, you label them as an SOB for example.
It's important to understand that emotion is key to state of mind in moods; what someone feels is completely valid even if it is not what we might feel. We have to address the incident/situation that caused such emotions to manifest. Once you find these patterns, it demystifies it massively (for me, at least)!
Happy to talk to anyone on board here, or PM, on the matter but it will only be of my run ins with MH issues. I feel no embarrassment about it and think discussion is important to de-stigmatise MH issues, and fiction is such a strong voice for such goals.
pH
As someone who’s has to battle their own mental health demons every day I’m all for linking mental health to horror; it’s ripe for metaphor and allegory, but I thought it might be of help to give an overview of mental health issues I’ve suffered which are depression, anxiety and PTSD.
I’m not an authority (or a qualified medical professional!) and we all have our own experience with mental health issues, but these are ones particular to me, which I have found are commonly shared.
Condition example:
My condition robs me of motivation with a ‘what’s the point?’ vibe. It also comes with an anxiety that has me overthinking simple choices to the point of being unable to leave the house. E.G: If I had been invited to a social event I would panic about it even though I am a largely gregarious person, and end up not going. This is made harder by the fact that a lot of social events are things I would go to by myself. The problem is twofold; one of generalised anxiety and motivation. The anxiety usually wins and so I would end up staying home and then beating myself up for months from guilt, self-loathing and similar. Constant comparisons to people ‘more successful’ than myself form an unhealthy barometer of achievement or worthwhile-ness, feed into the anxiety, and the more incidents where I would ‘flake out’ from a meeting leads to feedback loop of self-loathing and guilt.
I used to do things merely for the sake of them, but ‘now*’ I need a ‘reason’ to do them. So, for example, I am never late for work (luckily, I love my job) and am immune from my condition in regards to it, but if you asked me to sit down and write, or paint, or clean my house, I’ll procrastinate and procrastinate and often not even start. I used to be creative and create sculptures, songs, and theatre just for the sake it, whereas now I have to be doing for someone else, to get any real impetus.
(*I consider myself broadly ‘fixed’ although the condition never really leaves; you have good days and bad; the difference is I now have tools to apply to combat the depression’s anxiety and motivation element.)
Anything with numbers is a real struggle - this is linked to my PTSD which comes from the liquidation of my company (in which I was a Director in name only, and manipulated by two older professionals in an unsustainable business) - and my having to work with an accountant from 8AM - 1 AM for three weeks. This has a negative knock-on effect on my personal budgeting and accounting for my freelance work/tax returns.
Finally, one of the overriding factors is money. Without sharing too much personal info, I have struggle to cover monthly expenses for 15 years now. The relentless debt (cold showers, no gas, constant chasing by debt collectors, being taken off Direct Debit and put on keycards for electricity and gas is crippling) cannot be divorced from mental health and is, I suspect the biggest contributor to the massive problems the C21 has with mental health.
Diagnosis:
The actual diagnosis can be very long, or I suspect even never. I had not realised the condition I was in until 2013 and then found out I had been battling it (unsuccessfully) since 1999. The first thing I did was go to the doctor who referred me to the IAPT NHS service (IAPT = Improvement for Access to Psychological Therapies) and also prescribed an SSRI (Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitor). The one I take is called Fluoxetine in the UK, more commonly known as Prozac (a product name in the US) in North America.
IAPT referred me first to a local CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) practitioner within the NHS. CBT is an effective method of retraining your thought patterns which after time become habitual or routine. This was helpful as far as it went, but it did not address historic incidents of PTSD.
After CBT (12 sessions of 50 mins long which can be targeted or general) my therapist said she suspected there were ‘other things’ going on, and I was referred to a counsellor. This was ineffective at offering me any kind of healing; I met with a lovely counsellor once a week for 6 sessions but felt I was not getting any tools or resources, or healing. In fact I just felt I was setting aside 1 hour a week to moan about my life, which made me feel worse, and increased my low self-esteem and self-loathing.
After that expired in 2015 (so, 2 years from my initial diagnosis) I carried on with just the anti-depressants and the CBT tools. I felt calmer and a little more productive, but I knew things ‘weren’t right’. This came to a head when my anger and bitterness (quick to rise to anger due to my condition, even though my detail emotional state was being scared throughout everyday life for no reason) had me fighting on public transport; the last time it happened was so bad, I realised I needed help after berating a pregnant woman in an awful way after she made racist assumptions of my students. I felt terrible as I exploded in front of them, and instead of setting an example, became the thing that my job (intervention programme with behavioural-disordered kids) was meant to help prevent. This obviously had massive impact on my self-esteem afterwards as I was so disappointed in myself.
I went back to the doctor and said I was now taking action (and I live and work in a rough area of London, the capital of UK’s knife-crime) and making choices that were putting my safety in order and I needed proper help.
I was referred to a new therapy style called DIT (Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy) which gave me my life back. This is more traditional kind of therapy and it requires many investigations into past hurt and how emotional responses have been put in place due to single influential - and/or repeated - incidents in developing parts of our life - mostly childhood. 16 sessions are planned and you are thereafter given one or two end-review sessions.
Without doubt the DIT therapy was the most helpful and has given me the tools to deal with my depression and associated MH challenges. As said upthread, there are times when things will become bad regardless of your healing, things that will trip you up and it’s important to know for most of us it’s an ongoing condition that you manage, rather than cure. Whenever I meet someone who is open about mental health struggles, I feel there’s a verbal shorthand for emotions from the shared insidious experience of depression which (thankfully) those who’ve to suffered it, cannot understand.
Symptoms/Conditions associated with Depression:
1) Sleeping Problems
2) Controlling Anger
3) Low Mood
4) Bereavement
5) Anxiety
6) Obsessions and/or Compulsion
7) Stress
8) Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
9) Shyness and social anxiety
Thoughts and Feelings:
(The emotion and - what thoughts lead to that emotion.)
1) Sadness or depression - thoughts of loss, romantic rejection, death of a loved one, job or a personal goal
2) Guilt or shame - You believe you’ve hurt someone or you’ve failed to live up to your own (arbitrary) moral standards. Guilt comes from self-condemnation, shame involves condemnation from others if they find out about what you did.
3) Anger and resentment - You feel someone is trying to take advantage or treating you unfairly.
4) Frustration - Life falling short of your expectations and the insistence that things should be ‘different’.
5) Anxiety, worrying, fear, nervous, panic - You think you’re in danger form something that is about to happen.
6) Inferiority/inadequacy - comparing yourself to others’ successes and making a judgement that you are not as good as them (be it talent, attractive, charming, intelligent etc)
7) Loneliness - You’re bound to be unhappy because you’re alone and you aren’ getting enough attention.
Often expressed as twisted thoughts:
1) All-or-nothing thinking - if a situation fails in one area, you see it as a total failure
2) Overgeneralisation - You see single situation as an example of how in your life ‘everything’ goes wrong.
3) Mental Filter - pick out a single negative detail and focus on that (even if the positive outweigh it)
4) Discounting the positive - reject positive experiences because ‘they don’t count’
5) Jumping to conclusions - putting negative interpretation on things when there are no facts to support that. Two categories are Mind Reading: without checking it out, you conclude that someone is being negative to you; Fortune Telling: You predict that things will go wrong or turn out badly.
6) Magnification - Exaggeration of your shortcomings and minimisation of your positive qualities.
7) Emotional Reasoning - your emotional reasoning informs the outcome. E.g. Flying’s dangerous so therefore the plane is going to crash.
8) Should statements - ‘I shouldn’t have made that mistake’ etc. Should statements directed against yourself lead to guilt and frustration; against others or the world leads to frustration and anger.
9) Labelling - an extreme form of all-or-nothing. E.g I made a mistake so I must be a loser. Someone upsets you, you label them as an SOB for example.
It's important to understand that emotion is key to state of mind in moods; what someone feels is completely valid even if it is not what we might feel. We have to address the incident/situation that caused such emotions to manifest. Once you find these patterns, it demystifies it massively (for me, at least)!
Happy to talk to anyone on board here, or PM, on the matter but it will only be of my run ins with MH issues. I feel no embarrassment about it and think discussion is important to de-stigmatise MH issues, and fiction is such a strong voice for such goals.
pH
