May is the start of Mental Health Awareness Month and I’m sure many would agree, in that department, right now, we’re all taking a hit.
Whether it’s even recognized or not, most people I know are struggling, in some form. Maybe it’s insomnia. Maybe it’s the lack of routine or social structure or human contact. Maybe, financially, you feel like the world is heavy on your shoulders.
Most of you know my father died by suicide in 1991. I was fourteen.
It wasn’t until years later, I learned he had been struggling for years with depression. He had undiagnosed sleep apnea, which produced chronic fatigue. Mental health disorders were in his family, but back then, nobody talked about what they were or how to truly treat them.
After years of untreated symptoms, he succumbed to his illness on December 2nd.
I phrase it that way, because it’s important that we finally begin to see mental illness as that-a disease, and illness in the brain deserves the same treatment as the heart or kidneys or lungs.
When Corona started and I knew I would be out of work for awhile, I had a crushing feeling in my body for the first couple of weeks. I’d wake up in a panic. While I was ok financially for a time, I didn’t know how long this would last.
I began to have thoughts about being able to take care of my family. What if I couldn’t? What if I got sick?
The panic came in waves. Luckily, I have people in my life I could talk to about it and helped. My lifelines are strong and I’m thankful. I’m also thankful that my brain works in a way where I can process a powerful, overwhelming, terrifying thought and then sit with it, and work through it.
My dad couldn’t do that. The kind of depression he had was all encompassing. And what I mean by that is, before he died, he lost his marriage, his job and his will to live. His depression was so dark, and so painful, he thought his only option was to not keep living.
In the moments when I would wake up in panic and fear about money and the future, for the first time since he died, I thought,”oh my god-is this what he felt but this feeling never left him?”
That moment was so real and so painful because it was so overwhelming to wonder if he lived in a state of panic like that and I wondered for how long.
As the weeks of Corona stretched on, I would hear people say,”the suicide numbers will go up” and “the cure can’t be worse than the problem-we must get back to our lives as usual”.
Over the last several days, we’ve also started to see the suicide numbers go up for doctors and healthcare workers. The amount of PTSD they will experience through COVID will be unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetime.
Here’s what I want to call bullshit on-over 40,000 American lives are lost every year to suicide and every year cuts are made to mental healthcare.
The GOP has tried relentlessly to undo Obamacare and for some of its flaws, people who have mental health conditions were oftentimes turned down for coverage, before its enactment. Hundreds of thousands of people every year would miss necessary treatment, simply because they could not get coverage.
So while I understand we have to begin to live our lives again in the new form of whatever our “normal” will look like-let’s not pretend it’s because we now care about mental health, when history shows, we don’t. They are the homeless. The forgotten. The uninsured.
If we’re going to really play that game, and the cure can’t be worse than the problem, when the GOP talks about mass shootings not being a gun problem but a mental health problem, why do they continue to try and cut mental healthcare for every American? Doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense with that convenient theory, does it?
I don’t know what the answers are. I don’t know what we’ll look like on the other side of Corona, but I do hope, as we’ve all struggled together in some form, we remember that some will continue to struggle, long after we’ve gone back to “normal”.
As May begins our mental health focus, my ask is that when you want to get busy or make change, you help elect people who care about this, even when we’re not fighting a battle we can’t see anymore, because thousands of Americans will continue to battle, long after we don’t hear COVID, every day…
sharkmomma 