My Decision to Try Mental Health Meds

 As someone with a lifelong history of anxiety, also affected by the profound sleep loss that often accompanies new parenthood, it took years for me to realize that I was increasingly unwell and needed professional help.  I told myself: it's just that I have a very difficult baby who won't sleep (and who was diagnosed with autism years later).  That seamlessly transitioned to our second baby, two nighttime wakers, two in diapers, and two who needed constant supervision and exhausting emotional management.  Nothing on earth was more important to me than their well-being, and I was lucky to have a caring husband actively sharing that load with me.  But my sanity was cracking more and more, and I was stuck in a hyper-vigilant obsession, micromanaging the kids' environment, demanding the kind of impossible perfection from myself and my husband that doesn't just solve problems but somehow prevents them instead.

Even then, an awareness in the back of my mind recognized that my intense emotions were out of sync with both my values and the circumstances. I was nearly unable to leave the kids in anyone's care; I would wake up at night in a sweating panic at the vivid harm that came to my kids in my nightmares; I could not even cross the street at the same time as my husband so that at least one of us would survive a car crash to care for the kids.  

As the sleep deprivation gradually ended, I did not experience a corresponding increase in well-being.  Instead, I continued to feel I was hanging by a frayed thread.  I went through each day feeling that the next small inconvenience could irreparably shatter me, but maybe enough planning and purchasing could hold it off a little longer.  My kids grew, and so did my anxieties on their behalf.  And as they reached preschool age, then school age, my own childhood homeschooling trauma mixed with my husband's elementary school bullying trauma, suffocating me with feelings of impending doom. Every small problem felt like a complicated high-stakes crisis, and every little stumble in life felt like it happened on the edge of a cliff. 

I began to notice that there was no warmth of positive emotion in my life, only numbness that alternated with rage or relief.  Life was a performance that felt like it required Olympic-level synchronized swimming skills, but I was barely treading water enough to stay alive.  Despite my best efforts--which included both talk therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy, connection with other new moms, and lots of research on parenting--I remained trapped in the same harmful emotional patterns that didn't fit my circumstances.

Eventually my breaking point came, and I found myself with one last desperate idea that I hadn't tried yet.  I made an appointment with a psychiatrist, whose work I supported in theory for "other people", but obviously my problems were my fault.  Diagnosed with major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), with a family history of OCD tendencies, I got a prescription for Prozac/Fluoxetine and a group support class on the effects of GAD.  Even then, I struggled to make the decision to start taking the meds I was prescribed.  I worried I wouldn't feel like myself; I worried that I needed my hyper-vigilant anxiety to keep my kids safe; I worried that there would be unpleasant side effects that I could avoid if I could somehow just try harder without meds.

I was only able to start the meds a week later when I realized that I could do it for my kids.  With our genetics and family history, I faced the painful fact that my kids could potentially struggle with their mental health in the future. My own personal risk--being the first person I knew of who was trying mental health meds-- could make more types of support feel accessible for my kids in the future, if needed.  So I opened the bottle and took the first pill, committed to trying it for the weeks it might take for the meds to have a noticeable effect. 

What did I notice? At first, it was a mild three-day headache and some occasional brief feelings of nausea.  But then, as my body adjusted to the meds, I noticed that my rage could deescalate without an explosion and crash.  Then it was the warmth that flooded my heart when I was hugged, and that my mental barriers did not automatically repel every positive comment as "undeserved".  Gradually, my nervous system felt safe enough that my deeply buried vulnerable self could start to peek out.  I started to learn in my GAD class that my rage was a protective emotion that covered the more vulnerable underlying emotion of my fear.  Rage hid the fears, and rage tried to exert impossible levels of control to prevent the fears from coming true, sometimes through complicated hyper-vigilant plans/procedures.  It was a common problem with GAD.  But for emotional health, the real underlying emotion of fear needed to be acknowledged and released through tears. 

I also noticed a surprising effect that meds had on my social anxiety.  If I'd had to guess, I would have expected the anti-anxiety meds would make me stop constantly questioning whether I really belonged in my various social circles.  I hated that I was always second guessing and seeing mixed messages that kept me on edge, never feeling truly safe or accepted or good enough.  With meds, I was startled to discover a confident new perspective that felt right--actually, I did NOT really fit in with many of the people I was trying to fit with, and nothing was wrong with me OR them.  I wanted different things from friendship than they did; I enjoyed different things than they did.  For the first time in my life, I could observe this without being overwhelmed by shame at my social "failure' or by catastrophic thoughts about me ending up socially isolated forever because something was fundamentally wrong with me.  

Another unexpected outcome from meds was that I had the emotional capacity to face that we were living in a city that was not a good fit for our needs or sense of well-being, and not a good long term fit for our kids.  We were in a densely populated region with highly competitive families with tightly scheduled kids.  In contrast, we were a one-income introverted family who could not enjoy ourselves in crowds, needed massive amounts of downtime...and really, did we want our kids to learn to drive in the angry shit-show traffic there, or regularly breathe wildfire smoke?  We had not intended to live in that area forever when we first moved there as newlyweds, but the idea of uprooting our lives to start over in a new area was full of terrifying unknowns.  But as my husband and I went through the complicated process of choosing where and when to relocate, my inner mantra was "I can get through this."  Quite the change from my pre-med vibes.  

And finally, once I was not out of my mind with stress, tightly wound all day and night, I found myself able to pick back up my childhood love of reading fiction just for fun.... and from there, I read my way into the fantasy romance genre for the first time--the absolute best thing to ever happen to my marriage and sexuality (and my husband agrees). 

The reality is, although now it's been 7 years since I started taking mental health meds, it's clear that I've desperately needed them ever since I was a teenager.  There were some lost years that I needed to grieve, decades of so much unnecessary pain and suffering.  Yes, I had developed some social skills and coping strategies by sheer force of will, but my nervous system was completely fried....and then, motherhood! It's not exactly known as a sanity booster.  Now with meds, I find that I can actually influence my thought patterns because I'm not caught in the inescapable current of fight-or-flight mode.  I can finally use some of the skills I learned in CBT, talk therapy, and from my own reading.  

And best of all, I am able to feel known and loved, and to show my kids genuine warmth and delight.  I deserve it, and so do they.