Some Thoughts On Writing and Mental Illness

Every night I take 25 mg of Valdoxan before I go to bed, nudging my brain towards a healthier normal. Every morning I start tracking data on my preferred stress, depression, and anxiety management app, marking hours of sleep and minutes of exercise and whether I’ve had contact with the outside world.

Every week I’m learning to pay more attention to the default narrative in my head, and the defence mechanisms set up because of those narratives, so I can better at identifying which are actually useful and which need to be dismantled. Every couple of months I get a blood test to see if the Valdoxan is doing unhappy things to my liver enzymes.

I still have bad weeks. I was in the midst of one seven days ago. My stress responses still need work, because they’re currently front-loaded with the message: for the love of god, procrastinate to the point of self-destruction. I was stressed last week, but I hadn’t even processed that until the stats on my app laid it all out for me and I was like, oh, that’s why I’m sleeping two hours a night and obsessively playing computer games I hate for twenty fucking hours a day. 

There were very few parts of my blogging gig for Queensland Health that felt personal, but working on this one was fucking hard, for the simple fact that I went through every goddamn thing on the list.

It was about this point, last year, that I first realised things were getting very bad.

I did what I thought were proactive things to deal with that at the time. Some of those were good – including the conversation that eventually led to me going back to university on a PhD scholarship – but some where just slapping a band-aid over a gaping wound. I told myself I could just work harder, do better, and everything would be fine.

It would take another four or five months, a shitload more stress, and some pretty insistent friends and family to actually get me to consider the fact that there was something up with my mental health.

The funny thing about blogging for Queensland Health was the sheer amount of time spent looking at data and statistics that I’d otherwise ignore. When it comes to mental illness, the stats I keep coming back to were these:

• 45% of Australians are going have some experience of mental illness in their life
• 1 in 5 women and 1 in 8 men will experience some level of depression
• Only 35% of people with anxiety and depression will access treatment

Stigma around mental illness, and a general lack of knowledge, tends to make up a big part of the 65% doesn’t access help. Given my general reluctance to go see a GP when I needed it, or even recognizing I was going through something where help would be useful, I totally get how that happens.

I had the advantage of knowing multiple peeps with depression and anxiety issues, talking to them about what was going on, and still had myself convinced that it wasn’t something I was experiencing right up until the doctor suggested antidepressants and counselling.

And even after you learn about depression and anxiety, there are all sorts of ways the stigma fucks with you: don’t talk about it too loudly; don’t talk about it too often; don’t talk about it with the wrong people. Don’t bore the pants off people with you and your problems.

And really, fuck that shit, because it becomes part of the problem.

Depression is not a light switch that flicks on and off. It’s not a clearly deliniatied line where you go from okay to not okay the moment you step over. Regardless of how it’s used in clinical settings, depression is colloquially used to group together a whole bunch of mood-related disorders, of differing levels of intensity, that affect people in different ways.

Part of the reason I wondered around without looking for help for so long was the relatively lack of exposure to people whose experiences mimicked my own, or who experienced symptoms at levels of severity I didn’t quite relate to.

Beyond that, I’ll admit to another slice of foolishness: I worried about writing and depression. Not in an I’ll-never-write-again way, ‘cause hell, I got this far, nor in a I’m-a-writer-and-I-cannot-work-if-I’m-not-depressed, ’cause…well, I can tell you how much work I did while depressed and anxious and it pretty much amounts to fuck all.

No, I worried because my brain was wired to worry. I worried about getting treated the same way I worried about that stupid thing I said when I was eleven, or the same way I fretted about saying something stupid in that email I just sent, and the same way I obsessively rehearse conversations with people I’ve hurt or pissed off, as if I’ll somehow be able to make it all okay by taking back that conversation and inserting the one in my head instead.

Which is, I worried to the point where worry filled 90% of my waking moments, because worry felt like control to me.

And when my GP suggested that I was actually not okay, I worried in a what-will-this-actually-be-like-and-how-will-depression-affect-things way that sent me looking for other writers who talked about their experiences. Reading about other writers talking about their shit helped a lot back then, which is why I occasionally pop up and talk about my experiences here.

So let me be clear: Shit went wrong. I got help. I’m still getting help and working shit out. It’s an ongoing fucking thing.

And writing is better because of it.

But I am just me, and let’s be clear, in writing terms I am small beer. Since I’m an rigorous bookmarker of useful links, here the short list of folks who write a hell of a lot more than me (with a hell of a lot more success), whose posts about their own mental illness helped a lot when I went on medication last year:

• Scott Lynch – Good Brain, Bad Brain
• Mary Robinette Kowal – Sometimes Writers Block is Actually Depression
• Chuck Wendig – Hello, I have Anxiety. How are You
• Lev Grossman – Writing and Antidepressants: A Match Made in Purgatory, and Writing and Antidepressants, Part Two
• John Green – My Nerdcon Stories Talk About Mental Illness & Creativity
• Kameron Hurley – When the Writing Sprint Goes Wrong and Why I Choose to Write Publicly About Anxiety

Note the incredible diversity of conditions, experiences, and coping mechanisms out there. Mental health is not one-size-fits-fucking-all.

For all my resistance to getting help, and my occasional nervousness about medication and frustrations with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, going to my GP and letting them know I might not be okay was the best goddamn thing I’d done in about ten fucking years.

Don’t talk yourself out of getting help if you have even the vaguest suspicion you might need it. It’s really not worth it.