So, you’ve realized that you need help, and you want to get help, but where do you start? Do you talk to somebody close to you, do you go to the doctors, do you try to find a counselling service? The truth is, there’s no right way to about getting help. Different sources will tell you different things, but recovery isn’t a linear process. Recovery will send you on a bigger and crazier rollercoaster than your illness ever will, and sometimes it’ll feel like it really isn’t worth it, but it’s all about finding the course of recovery that’s right for you.
In February 2016, I went to see my GP about my mental health problems. I’d been finding comfort up until this point in my closest friends and my incredibly supportive boyfriend, and knowing that there were people close to me who genuinely cared about me and wanted me to get better gave me that push I needed to start caring about my own recovery and drag myself along to the doctors. I left the surgery that day in floods of tears, with a couple of web addresses and an IAPT leaflet (a UK NHS mental health service), feeling disheartened and as if I’d wasted my time.
I felt ready to give up, but with a little help I got an assessment appointment with IAPT, and sat for an hour while a psychiatrist dug around in my past with a shovel that went straight through my heart. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, and many parts of recovery are incredibly difficult, but I did it, and to this day I am proud of myself. I’m proud of myself for telling a stranger things about my past that I could barely even admit to myself. Recovery will give you moments when you are proud of yourself. A blissful, encompassing feeling of pride that makes you remember why you’re putting yourself through this. But recovery will also give you moments where you hate yourself more than ever, because you feel like you should be getting better and better but it’s far more likely that you’ll get better and worse and better and worse or better and worse and worse still and even worse and then better again and then worse again and better again.
At the beginning of May, I was prescribed citalopram – one of the most common antidepressant drugs in the UK. The thing I wish I’d known the most about recovery is that medication is not an instant fix. The side effects that most people get when they first start taking an SSRI (the most common type of antidepressant) are hell.
They are physical and mental hell and they will more than likely make you want to give up. I took citalopram for about 3 months, and they did absolutely nothing for me. They took me to hell and back for a week and then they did nothing, but nobody told me that some medications might not just be right for me. Nobody told me that the way I was feeling when I was taking citalopram was because they weren’t working. I thought that maybe that was the best I was ever going to get, and that made me feel so, so hopeless and defeated that I considered giving up.
I did a lot of things I regret last summer, but the thing I regret most is that I did give up. I stopped taking my medication, I didn’t go back to the doctors, and three days after my 19th birthday, I wanted to kill myself. For the first time in months, I wanted to be dead. I didn’t want to get better, because I thought I was getting better, and I thought recovery meant wanting to die. Nine days previously I found out that despite battling some of the worst symptoms I’ve ever had while completing my A Level exams, I had gotten into the university of my dreams, to study the course of my dreams, yet all I dreamt of then was death. Because depression doesn’t care about achievements and goals, depression only cares about engulfing you until you take your very last breath – unless you decide to take the steps to stop it. I stopped this journey in my tracks, and I let it engulf me.
by Nat White
- Things Nobody Told Me About Recovery -