the mental health chronicles

i am in a crisis state, along with everyone else

I need to find a therapist, or maybe even a psychiatrist, but I am too overwhelmed by the idea of starting on this mission that I never do it and I sit here and languish. I am not doing well mentally and I know I need some help but it’s the mental issues I need help with that are keeping me from doing what I need to do.

I write a lot about mental health. Even when I’m not writing about that specifically as the topic, it always somehow ties in to what I’m saying. It’s a big part of my life and it affects everything I do, everything I say, everything I write. It’s not like I’m deteriorating, it’s more like I’m stagnant, mired down in a swamp of bad feelings that I can’t pull out of. I swim around these feelings and ideas all day, every day, and it’s exhausting.

There seems to be an awful lot of people in this swamp with me. I honestly know very few people who aren’t going through some sort of mental crisis. Whether it’s resulting from personal issues, world issues, pandemic issues, or a combination of those three does not matter; it just matters that we are a people in need of help. I see it everywhere I look: people are depressed, they are anxious, full of fear. The last several years have made it hard for reasonable people to exist without any of these feelings. It’s most certainly a mental health crisis that we are not equipped to deal with. And now it is deep winter and we’re dealing with seasonal depression as well.

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It will be two years this month since my husband abruptly left me in the middle of a pandemic. I was already floundering at the time; the separation made things worse and I’ve yet to recover. I don’t know what the timetable is for getting over something like this, but I would like it to be shorter. I know it’s different for everyone, and I know I am mourning my marriage and grief is not linear. That doesn’t make it any easier to deal with. I am also dealing with some physical health issues that, again, I am not taking care of because it’s overwhelming.

I am just now recognizing signs from the last time I had a mental breakdown. I have become near agoraphobic. I leave my house for work and food shopping. Sometimes I go other places, but it is always reluctantly, accompanied by great anxiety. I’ve been calling in sick a lot. I’ve been leaving a deep indent in my couch because I rarely get up from it.

I don’t want to be like this. Nobody wants to be mentally ill. Nobody wants to be in a dark place where they feel like the lights will never shine again. Don’t get me wrong, I still feel joy, I still feel happiness, but I don’t feel them fully, and those emotions don’t last long before I find a way to ruin them. It’s hard to talk to someone about all this, especially when you are a person who tends to look at the world as judgmental, who sees your own problems as a burden to others, who is afraid of what people will think of you.

I’ve had two therapists in the last five years. The first one started off good, but then Covid hit and we switched to phone sessions (she didn’t want to do Zoom). She was often distracted on the calls, and I could hear her washing dishes or playing with her toddler while she was listening to me talk about my despair. Eventually we started talking about her issues more than mine (her boyfriend died of Covid), and I was relieved when she told me she would no longer be taking my insurance. I was stuck in a bad therapy relationship because I couldn’t find a way to tell her I wanted out without feeling guilty about it, and she gave me an out.

I found another therapist and while she was sweet and nice and kind, it wasn’t enough. She did a lot of “I hear you, I see you, your feelings are valid,” but gave me nothing constructive to do to fix my issues. I was just rambling for 45 minutes about how sad and anxious I was and she would just nod and give me “live, love, laugh” platitudes. I sent her a 3am text telling her that I would no longer need her services and it felt so bad to do that, like I was breaking up with her. But therapy with her was making me feel worse, not better.

This country is experiencing a problem with therapy right now. People are having a hard time getting appointments. It seems like there aren’t enough therapists for all the people who need one. I’ve had people tell me they tried to get appointments and got something months from now. We’re falling apart and whether that’s due to the massive amount of trauma we’ve experienced or not isn’t the issue, the issue is that there are more people who need help than there are therapists/psychiatrists available to help them. There’s also that little factor of health insurance; not everyone has it, and even if you do, finding a good therapist that takes yours is an ordeal.

I don’t know what the solution is and I can only look for my own solution. I can try writing it out, talking it out with a trusted friend, crying to sad music, light therapy, vitamin D, self help books (most of which are garbage), myriad other ways to try to work on this myself. I can just smoke some weed and sit on my couch and feel relaxed for a couple of hours. But I worry. I worry every time I reach for my phone in the morning to send an email that I’m not coming in to work. I worry every time I cancel a plan, or go a day without eating, or get up at 2am. I worry about but I also worry about the thousands of people who are in a similar place and can’t get help, or can’t function enough to find help. What are we going to do? How does this get addressed? How do we get people to feel good again?

I am supposed to go to a concert the end of this month. I no longer want to go. I don’t want to leave my house. I don’t want to drive to Brooklyn. I don’t want to be out, in a crowd of people. The stress of having to tell the person I was going with that I want to back out, and to tell the artist, who put me on the guest list, that I am rejecting his kindness is making me feel so anxious. Just go, I tell myself. Just go, other people tell me. But I am frozen with fear.

I am 60 years old. I do not want to spend the rest of my days in darkness. I should be enjoying life, traveling, seeing friends, going out, having a grand old time. But the state of this world and the state of my mind keeps that from happening. And my personal issues don’t make it any better. I need to find some closure on my divorce. I need to purge from my mind the day he told me he was leaving because I keep replaying it.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, and it might be the most scattered newsletter I’ve put out, but I just know we collectively need help. I don’t know how to find it.