HI! Welcome to Mental Health Monday's! :D
As a mental health professional, I want to bring awareness to different mental health disorders and break the stigma associated with them. I believe that with education, exposure, and vulnerability, the stigma behind different disorders will be lessened. I will be focusing on a different topic/disorder each week and am looking to find people who are currently diagnosed with a mental health disorder to feature and tell their stories. I will start with my journey first. Comments are always welcome!
When does anxiety become too much? As you may know, a little bit of anxiety and stress is normal and healthy and can actually drive us to do better. A perfect example of this is getting a little nervous for a work presentation. However annoying these nerves may be, they make us recheck our presentation for errors, driving us to deliver a better, more thought through presentation. However, one person may experience a healthy amount of anxiety over something as straight forward as a common work presentation while another person may perseverate on everything possible that could go wrong that day, and this anxiety interferes with their daily living, inhibiting their ability to get anything done or sleep for more than a few hours without waking up in a panic.
I can clearly remember when my anxiety became crippling and I was given a diagnosis of OCD. When I was in elementary school, I was obsessed with my hair being PERFECT. I don’t mean having it look good for school, I mean crying if one hair was out of place and making my mom redo my french braids 4 or 5 times before telling her it was ok, to immediately undoing the braids once I got to school if they did not uphold to this standard of perfection. Then came the hair straightener: was it unplugged? Did I turn it off? Oh no, I have to take a picture to PROVE to myself I turned it off (this was in middle school when I had a stylish hot pink Razr phone to take pictures on) and relentlessly check this photo throughout the day. I would still rush home to make sure I had turned it off or text my mom just to triple check. By high school, I was taking pictures of the locks at home before I went to bed, after checking them 3 or 4 times to make sure they were locked. I told my teachers I needed to go to the bathroom, only to check to make sure my (empty albeit textbooks) locker was locked.
Why did I have these patterns of obsessive thoughts and checking? After going to see a psychiatrist because I truly couldn’t go a few minutes without these thoughts interrupting my day, I was diagnosed with OCD and prescribed an SSRI to help manage the symptoms.
Throughout the years, I have learned to manage these symptoms and still take medication. However, OCD learns to manifest itself in other ways-obsessive thoughts about health concerns: checking gas pumps for needles after hearing one story about someone who planted disease contaminated needles into gas station pumps. Don’t even get me started on the bed bug obsession-I am just now starting to manage those thoughts. I would check my bed EVERY night to make sure I didn’t see anything black, wash and dry my clothes on the highest setting after working in a social service center and having a client present with bed bugs, which was fairly common. I showered in scalding hot water, burning my skin to rid of the imaginary bugs.
Anxiety and stress can be good, helpful, and healthy. It’s when it starts interfering with your life and consuming your every thought and action that it becomes unhealthy. I am lucky to have supportive family and friends, who help ground me and check my obsessions. I have admitted this is something big that interferes with my life. I sought help, and I would recommend if you are relating to this post that you do too. I have found a combination of medicine, therapy, and desensitization exposure have really helped me. I still have bad days, but I don’t let them define who I am. I am not the OCD woman, I am a woman with OCD and anxiety.
Sending tranquility,
Jules
(Piece originally written by me on itsourbeautifullife.com)
