I can’t believe it’s been a year since I began my journey toward overcoming my mental health issues. I’ve come a long way from the Carrie I was last year, but I am still struggling. I’ve decided to talk about what I went through not only to help my healing and recovery but to help others in theirs. Nobody likes talking about mental health, but we need to. We need to educate people in order to erase the stigma and reform mental healthcare. I’m going to put a trigger warning here, I will be talking about some tough things, such as rape, dark thoughts, and depression.
Slowly Drowning
In 2011, when I had just become a fully licensed pharmacy technician, I started having issues. I was having trouble focusing, and remembering things and was extremely irritable. My job performance was suffering as a result. I had several customer complaints against me and wound up in the back office having my job threatened by the district managers. I tried talking to my manager at the time about my issues and was told, “That’s the job you knew it when you took it, deal with it.”. I ended up having a breakdown at work. I screamed at a patient and then fled to the back room where I started sobbing. I knew then that something wasn’t right with me. My doctor put me on Ritalin thinking that my ADD was the reason for some of my issues, but it didn’t really help. Around this same time, I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism and put on medication. I eventually started seeing a therapist, and she told me that the symptoms I had could be caused by my low thyroid. Thinking that was the problem( and because couldn’t afford the $135.00 dollars per week) I stopped therapy and went off the Ritalin. My symptoms did get better, but they weren’t gone. Throughout my thirties, I went through a series of traumatic events, and I began to feel like my life was out of control. I was just waiting for the next bad thing to happen. There were nights that I would cry out to God to let me die so I didn’t have to suffer anymore. I wasn’t suicidal, but I would have been ok being hit by a bus. I began to have what I thought was anxiety and my doctor gave me Xanax to help me sleep at night. It worked ok, but I was still having issues. Things got really bad last year and I hit my breaking point.
Last year saw the arrival of the covid vaccines. The pharmacy I work at started receiving Pfizer shots in early February. The company I work for, let’s just call them RA, decided that we would have 200 appointments a day 5 days a week while also accepting walk-ins for people 65 and over or who were at risk. In total, we did about 240 shots a day, on top of all our other work. I went from a 30-hour work week to a 40-hour work week overnight. RA provided two extra pharmacists to give the shots all day, from 10 am to 8 pm, but no additional tech help. It was a nightmare! We were so overwhelmed and exhausted. All the symptoms I had in 2011 came back in full force. I couldn’t concentrate, or remember things. I was so stressed and so angry that I couldn’t calm down. My heart rate would go up so high my hands would shake. Night shifts were the worst, some nights I’d drive home park my car, cry for 30 minutes, and then go inside. I started suffering from burnout, and my whole life stopped. I was too tired to do anything, I didn’t touch my blog, I didn’t go out on my days off, the only chores I did was laundry and my diet consisted of whatever I could get into my mouth the quickest. When I wasn’t working I just wanted to lay in bed all day. I was so angry all the time, that it got to a point where I actually wanted to lose control and go crazy. I wanted to smash things and hurt people so that someone would see that I wasn’t ok and help me. I fantasized about beating up my patients and smashing shelves. The anger got worse after a traumatic family situation in May. I was so angry at my adopted Dad for what happened that I began fantasies that I was stabbing him to death. In November, I snapped. I screamed at my adopted dad words I won’t type here and told him he couldn’t cry if I killed myself. I then collapsed on the floor of my bedroom and sobbed so hard I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t do this anymore and I knew I needed help.
The road to recovery
Like most people, I didn’t know how to get help through my insurance. I thought I had to go through the EAP or the Employee Assistance Program that my company worked with. I called them and was given three free sessions. They gave me a list of approved therapists, and I called several, some weren’t accepting new patients, some had a waitlist and others didn’t even call me back. Talking to the therapist, when I finally got one, helped but three sessions weren’t enough. She was the first person I saw who said she believed that I was suffering from chronic depression and that medication might help me. I wanted to continue therapy, but not only did I find out that EAP just cuts you off after three sessions, but the therapist I was seeing was not in my network. So I started again, I called my insurance, got a list of mental health professionals, and started calling. Now, I started trying to get help in August of last year (2021) and I finally found a therapy center to help me in early November. I saw a psychiatrist who put me on antidepressants and put me on a waitlist for therapy that was booked out till June of this year (2022). However, God answered my prayers and I started seeing a therapist in March. I have been diagnosed with chronic depression and social anxiety. The medication has helped me tremendously, but I do struggle with things here and there.
Moving forward
My therapist pointed out to me the other day just how much has changed for me in a year. I got help for my depression, decided I was ready to date again after more than 10 years, started writing fanfiction again, and published it online. I even tried out a new church. These things may not seem like a big deal to you, but they are huge to me. The depression fog, as I call it, is gone and now I’m ready to step out of my comfort zone and experience stuff. I remember my new therapist asking me when I first started seeing her how I saw myself and the first thing I said was, “I’m not really pretty” followed by a lot of other negative things. If you ask me that question now the answer is, I am a pretty woman whose normal isn’t normal to everyone else, I’m silly, fiercely loyal, and incredibly faithful. I’m still a work in progress, and I still have moments when I feel depressed, but there have been some great improvements. I just keep going one day at a time.
A call for change
Getting help should not be so difficult, I was lucky to get help as quickly as did, some people are still waiting and others have just given up on it. I’m telling my story to help others and to keep the discussion of mental health going. Maybe if we talk about it enough, loud enough we can get a reform on mental healthcare. If you are struggling right now please know you are not alone, and please don’t give up on finding help. If you have thoughts of suicide please contact your local suicide hotline. If you want to talk to me, you can email me or you can follow me on Twitter.
Love and Blessings,
Carrie