My Mental Illness Experience (So Far)

Mental illness doesn’t always hit one suddenly like a ton of bricks—but it did in my experience.

What is happening to me?

For years, I had been a happily married homeschool mother, with three healthy children and a stable, productive life. Then one day in 2018, everything seemed to fall apart. Suddenly, I was terrified of everything, even normal activities that I’d been doing for years. Just getting out of bed in the morning seemed like an insurmountable obstacle, and no amount of rest made any difference to the utter exhaustion in which I lived all my days. I had always been an introvert, but suddenly the prospect of conversation of any kind, even with my favorite and most trusted friends, was more than I could bear. “What in the world is happening to me?” I thought. I knew something was wrong, but I had no idea what it was. One thing I was sure of, however. I was NOT going to take psychiatric medication.

I’ll count them, but I won’t take them

Here I’ll need to explain a little about my background. I grew up in a Southern Baptist Church in a small Texas town, and I became a Christian right before I graduated high school. All through my college years and early married life, I attended Baptist churches where mental illness wasn’t discussed very much. However, I did hear one sermon about depression in which a pastor declared that chemical imbalance in the brain is a modern myth and that depression is always the result of a spiritual problem. Even in churches where the subject wasn’t preached about, I heard comments sometimes, and I got the idea that antidepressants were a worldly attempt to solve a problem that wasn’t actually physical. My professional life added to my antipathy towards psychotropic drugs. I worked as a pharmacy technician for eight years before I retired to stay home with my children. Four of those years were spent working in a pharmacy that had a special contract with the local MHMR services. During those years, the majority of outpatient MHMR clients who came into the pharmacy to pick up their medications were on some combination of antidepressants, antipsychotics, and mood stabilizers. I learned to recognize the glassy-eyed look of the drugged mental patient, and I often had the thought deep down, “I don’t ever want to be like that. I will never take psychotropic drugs, no matter how bad I feel.”

Famous last words

There have been several situations in my life in which I ended up doing the very thing that I had previously said I would never do. I swore that I would never live in the country… but then I moved out of town (and loved it). I swore that I would never have animals in the house… but right now as I’m writing this, my dog is lounging luxuriously at my feet. But I’ve never had a harder time eating my words than on the occasion when I knew I had to go to the doctor to discuss my depression and anxiety, knowing that a prescription for medications would be the likely result. After struggling for several weeks, I had found out that anxiety disorders ran in my family, and that multiple family members had had to take anti-anxiety medication for years. So theoretically, I now understood that I had a genuine, genetic health issue, but…that didn’t make it easy to swallow my pride and go to the doctor.

The beauty of biblical submission

In fact, forcing myself to get in the car and go to that doctor's appointment was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. That may sound silly or exaggerated, but I can assure you it is true. It’s hard to explain the shame, despair, and anguish that I was feeling at the time—brought on mostly by my mental issues—but believe me when I say that I’ve never gone so completely against my own desires on any other occasion in my life. If I hadn’t had a husband who was gently insisting on it, and a pastor who had said that he refuses to counsel a person until the sufferer has gone to the doctor and a physical problem has been completely ruled out, I might have simply refused to do it. This was one of the occasions when the Bible’s insistence on a wife’s submission to her husband was a wonderful and life-giving thing in my life. I knew that Jesus wanted me to submit to my husband and to my pastor, and I knew that those men loved me and wanted the best for me. I wanted so badly to just stay home in bed, but despite all my fear and confusion and sinful pride, I could not bring myself to directly disobey my Lord. As a result, with the help of the Spirit I walked into that doctor’s office and told her about my symptoms–and just like that, the hardest part was over.

No quick fix

That doesn’t mean that everything was completely smooth sailing from there. After I began seeing my doctor (who was wonderful, by the way), I didn’t immediately have all the answers I wanted, and it took some trial and error over time to find some medications that work fairly well for me. Some of the “errors” were pretty terrible experiences! But once again, I had a husband who kept encouraging me when I was discouraged and ready to give up, so I stayed the course. Fortunately, I discovered that I don’t have to be glassy-eyed and numb while on medications; it is possible to find a good balance between the extremes of uncontrolled symptoms and overmedication. It has taken time to get accurate and helpful diagnoses as well. Generalized Anxiety Disorder was immediately obvious, and my migraine headaches were not hard to pinpoint, but it took time (almost five years) for my doctor and me to figure out that my biggest problem is Bipolar II Disorder. (That is to say, my biggest mental health issue. My ultimate biggest problem, my separation from God as a result of sin, has been completely solved by the work of Christ.)

Thank God for doctors

I am very thankful that I was able to get medical help for my mental health issues. Although drugs don’t magically fix everything, they do keep me stable enough to allow me to keep raising my children and caring for my husband, by the grace of God. If you find yourself struggling with symptoms of mental illness, I encourage you to first pray for guidance and then visit your doctor.