It came to my attention this morning that today is World Mental Health Day; it’s now late in the evening, and this is the first time I’ve sat down all day, so if by the time you read this, World Mental Health Day has passed, well, bear with me. If you’re the kind of person for whom mental health matters – in other words, if you have mental capacity, and some health of that nature, at some non-fixed point among the good to bad spectrum (so, ya know, everyone) – like, every day is Mental Health Day, so, an international placeholder seems rather stupid. It goes from stupid to irritating when people make perfunctory comments about mental health today, and then the very next day go on like mental health was a trendy afterthought, but nevertheless, here we are. It’s not tomorrow yet, so I’m getting ahead of myself.

It’s fortuitous that today has apparently been pegged with the theme of mental health awareness, because early this morning I read a very interesting article about the science behind antidepressant medications, and a debate about their efficacy, and how they may not work anything like what we’ve thought for decades. I hereby note that I am not a psychiatrist and by no means an expert on pharmaceuticals, nor would I ever dream of giving medical advice (so nobody come at me please!). That being said, I do have a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in educational psychology, so, I have what one might call a more vested interest in these matters than the average shmo. Or, put more frankly, I’m a nerd and find this sort of thing really fascinating.

Okay…here’s the real heart of the matter. I’m about to get real damn honest, about some really personal shit I don’t talk about. But it’s “World Mental Health Day”, so hey, let’s raise some awareness, right? *takes deep breaths* Here goes: I also have a particularly vested interest in news about antidepressant medications because I was misdiagnosed and mistreated with said medications for about a decade.

My brother was diagnosed with Bipolar I Disorder when we were in our early to mid-teens. I won’t attempt to discern whether this is an accurate diagnosis for him, because as I said, I’m not a clinician, and there’s kind of a rule about professionals not treating their own loved ones. I do know that his history with medications is quite a winding path in a dark forest. Anyway, fast forward several years later; my father died in April 2007, when I was 18, and that summer, I grieved by staying up night after night trying to map out all the courses I would take for the next three years of college I had ahead of me, and feeling understandably melancholic during the day. My mother eventually conceded that it would be good for me to talk to somebody, so I went to the VA clinic (because we had health insurance through my stepdad’s VA benefits), and talked a few times to a male social worker who was very nice, but not very helpful (big surprise there). The conclusion he reached way too quickly was that since my brother has Bipolar I, and I was experiencing ups and downs too, but not swinging between mania and depression as severely, I must have Bipolar II – for which I was prescribed Zoloft, and sent on my way. I went through the next few years of my life without any mental health support, followup, or treatment, just kept taking Zoloft and burying my problems like I was expected to. I strongly suspect that my mother needed me to be “normal” because my brother was a big enough hassle for her already.

I stayed on Zoloft for about six years, until I had what amounted to a mental breakdown during my second fall semester in graduate school. My mental health was in the gutter. After an evaluation from the crisis center where they had to determine that I was safe enough not to be put on suicide watch, I had a revelatory meeting with a psychiatrist in which he told me I should never have been put on Zoloft at all. We met for a couple of months, in which he helped me wean off of the Zoloft and try a couple of other medication options. I ended up on Lithium, which my brother was also taking. Whether my Bipolar diagnosis was appropriate or not didn’t enter the conversation at this point; it had become a given, that this was what I was and what I had to deal with. Still, I credit this psychiatrist with helping me figure out that the terrible headaches I’d been plagued with for years, where it felt like a belt being cinched around the circumference of my head, were actually serotonin headaches, caused by the Zoloft I’d been taking. He got me off of Zoloft which gave me the first relief I’d had in ages.

After graduate school, I moved back to my parents’ area for awhile, to work and try to move forward after what had become a difficult conclusion to my graduate school experience. I started seeing a clinician at the local mental health clinic there, the kind that sees way too many patients who don’t have quality insurance – or none at all – so the help they offer is a mixed bag. It was there that, after a new evaluation, I was diagnosed with PTSD in addition to the Bipolar, and boy, was I pissed about it at the time. Of all things, I thought PTSD was the worst kind of stigma to be connected with; in hindsight, it probably scared me to put a name to all the flashbacks and nightmares I was experiencing, because that made it real, something I couldn’t ignore. Still, it was a diagnosis in addition to Bipolar, not in replacement. I went on more medication for a little while, Risperidone for the Bipolar (again, something I knew of because my brother was taking it), and Hydroxizine for the PTSD. I didn’t like how beholden I felt to any of it, but I didn’t know what choice I had – not yet, anyway.

As I previously mentioned, given my area of study, I actually really enjoyed all of the professional side of this stuff, so I started reading more about diagnostics, particularly the diagnostic criteria for Bipolar I and II. The more I read about it, the less I thought it suited me. I remembered how I’d briefly felt liberated when I went off of the Zoloft, before ending up on other meds. When I told the psychiatrist I had wanted to wean myself off of most of the medications I’d been put on, she was very skeptical about it, but I was moving out of the area and would no longer be her patient soon, so she gave me detailed instructions about how to do so (one of them, I don’t remember which one now, needed to be tapered in a very specific way). I had enough refills of these medications should I need to get more while seeking a new prescriber, should I need that.

I finally weaned myself off of these medications right around the same time I found my current therapist, who is not a psychiatrist (which means she does not prescribe medications). In her initial appointments with me where she had me go over my reasons for seeking her out, my general history, my medical and mental health history, she concluded that I definitively had PTSD – and indeed, not just PTSD, which stems from one notable traumatic event, but C-PTSD or Complex PTSD, which develops from a prolonged traumatic experience (or several). She also concluded that I definitively did NOT have Bipolar Disorder, and had been misdiagnosed ten years prior, and endured inappropriate and unnecessary pharmaceutical treatment for a condition I never had in the first place. She was, and is, able to continue treating me because I do have a clinical mental condition, but it isn’t the one that got the ball rolling (although the root cause is the same, it was just dressed up in different wrapping before). To be told, to have it confirmed, that I was not now nor was I ever Bipolar brought a relief that was second only to the physical relief of getting off the meds.

Sometimes I wonder what those ten years of my life would have been like, had my mentality not been literally clouded by drugs I didn’t need (let alone had I had proper therapeutic support for the condition I actually had!). I can tell you that the clarity that has come to me from getting off that medication is nigh indescribable. To be able to see things as they are, and not whatever fuzzy, numbed, watered-down version of it you’re barely able to grapple with when you’re fogged up by that stuff, has had resoundingly positive effects on my life, just as the decade of erroneous treatment had resoundingly negative effects. Please do not misunderstand me; if you have a legitimate and appropriate diagnosis for whom such treatments are beneficial and effective, that is excellent, please continue to get all the help and support you need to be your best self! All I’m saying is, that was not me, and the occurrence of such errors in the mental health field is distressing. Mental health misdiagnosis is a mistake whose long-reaching impacts sprawl out like ripples across still, deep waters.

These days, I take only one medication related to my mental health, and I came to it in a roundabout way. Several years ago, I was experiencing a random bout of severe insomnia, where I didn’t sleep for almost a month straight (no particular reason, my sleep cycle somehow just got all out of whack), and after I’d tried every over the counter option out there with no luck, my primary care physician prescribed me something called Trazadone, which actually is an antipsychotic but can be really helpful for sleep. When I told him I suffered from nightmares a lot due to PTSD, he felt very confident that this was the right thing to prescribe me, as it assists with giving a person deeper, dreamless sleep. Sure enough, it did the trick, and continues to help me on occasion – I don’t take it every day, I take it as a PRN (which is clinician speak for as needed). My husband and I refer to it as my “anti-nightmare medicine” because that’s why I take it these days, though initially it really was just to help reset my sleep cycle.

Otherwise, the best mental health treatment I have found – other than my amazing therapist – is to take my mental health back for myself. There’s a sense of control that returned to me when I got off of those medications, a sense that I wasn’t defined by any diagnosis or clinical system, and that renewed sense of identity was crucial for me. (That ownership of one’s own mental health can be achieved whether one is taking medications or not, for the record; again, I’m not blindly saying one shouldn’t take meds, take them if they help you!) Regardless of what the diagnostic code might be that insurance companies need to use in order to decide how little they’ll pay out to support their clients, the bottom line is that my mental health is not theirs, or some product of family history, or my brother’s symptoms which point to a diagnosis of convenience, or anything else. I’m not reduced to a prescription or a label, or worth only as much as a few minutes of time with a harried, overworked clinician in dismal public health clinic after dismal public health clinic. I’m a – how did I put it, at the beginning of this post? – person with mental capacity, and some health of that nature, at some non-fixed point among the good to bad spectrum. My mental health is mine.