My Mental Health Journey: Embracing Struggles and Finding Strength

My Mental Health Journey: Embracing Struggles and Finding Strength

Mental health has been a significant part of my life for as long as I can remember. At just ten years old, I faced a traumatic experience that shaped much of my struggles. From that point on, anxiety became a constant presence—overwhelming and relentless. I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, which helped me understand why my mind always felt like it was in overdrive.

Along with anxiety, I developed social anxiety. Since that traumatic event, I’ve struggled to speak in group conversations, feeling as if my voice was stuck inside me. This continued into adulthood, though I’ve made progress. While I’ve learned to navigate social situations, it’s still something I work on every day.

As I got older, I realized anxiety wasn’t the only challenge I faced. In college, mood swings and depression took hold, eventually leading to my diagnosis of bipolar disorder type 2. My hypomanic episodes came with impulsive behaviors—gambling, buying lottery tickets, and seeking reckless distractions. There were times I’d impulsively go to clubs, acting in ways that felt out of control. These highs and lows were exhausting, but with therapy and medication, I began to understand how to manage them.

Life threw even more challenges my way—serious illness in my family, the loss of loved ones, and an internal battle that grew heavier over time. By 2020, when I got engaged, I hit one of my lowest points. Despite the excitement, I was caught between joy and deep despair. That year, I attempted suicide. It was a breaking point—but also a turning point. Therapy helped me see that even in my darkest moments, there was still a path forward.

Marriage brought its own challenges. My husband and I had to learn how to communicate, how to support each other, and how to navigate the complexities of mental health together. Some days were harder than others, but we kept working on it.

Motherhood changed everything. The love I have for my son is unlike anything I’ve ever known, but postpartum brought mood swings and emotional struggles that I wasn’t fully prepared for. Though I wasn’t officially diagnosed with postpartum depression, I felt its weight. Even on the hardest days, my love for my son kept me going.

Through all of this, I’ve had to learn how to cope rather than just survive. One of the most helpful skills I learned in outpatient therapy was Opposite-to-Emotion Action. When I feel depressed, every instinct tells me to stay in bed. Instead, I take small steps in the opposite direction—sitting up, putting my feet on the floor, standing. Even when it feels impossible, those small steps help me move forward.

I also learned Radical Acceptance, a mindset that has been crucial in my healing. I have bipolar disorder. I have faced trauma. These are facts. But instead of resisting or dwelling on them, I ask myself: It is what it is. Now what? What positive steps can I take to move forward? What can I do today to make my life better?

Looking back, I know my journey hasn’t been easy, but it has made me who I am. I’ve learned resilience, self-compassion, and the importance of reaching out for help. Mental health struggles don’t define a person—what they do with those struggles does.

If you’re reading this and feeling alone, please know that you’re not. There is always hope. There is always a way forward. Even the smallest steps in the right direction can change everything. 

Rachel, in her late 20s, is a mother, wife, daughter, and mental health advocate who lives with anxiety and bipolar disorder.

Books

Books

When I was pregnant with both of my children I experienced terrible insomnia. The sleeplessness wasn't from the discomfort of pregnancy, but rather this constant feeling of manic energy that I had from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. I couldn't take anything for it, so I had to suffer with the echoes of medical professionals and other women saying unhelpfully, "It will pass when the baby is born." These were the same people who said equally unhelpfully, "Sleep now. You'll never sleep well again."

When I was pregnant with my daughter, I would sit on the red el shaped couch in the living room watching shows on TLC. Little did I know that this kind of trashy network would help me solve a big problem in my life.

I lived in a 2 bedroom apartment in Chicago for 6 years until my boyfriend who became my fiance who became my husband moved in. The master bedroom was mine (ours) and the guest bedroom belonged to my books: five bookcases overfilling with books. I needed to get rid of those books before my daughter was born, but I couldn't.

I started collecting the books immediately after I moved into the condo after a failed engagement. I brought books from my parents house. I bought books at used book stores. I'd never pass a Barnes and Noble without buying several books.

When people would enter the second bedroom, they would say, "Wow, that's a lot of books." Whether that statement was uttered with admiration or trepidation didn't matter. I was proud of my collection and the idea of parting with it was painful.

Which brings me to TLC and being six months pregnant and not sleeping.

I would watch a double header of "My 600-pound life" and "Hoarders." My husband suggested that perhaps watching those shows was making it more difficult for me to fall asleep. I knew he was right, but I couldn't stop watching.

The episodes had the same pattern, kind of like Law and Order, but with real human beings. There was the shock of seeing the person or home, followed by the interviews with friends and family, inevitably there would be an enabler, then an intervention, followed by medical or psychological intervention, ending in a resolution of no more hoarding or weight loss. Inevitably, there would be a set back at some point, but hopefully the person was on the road to recovery.

I would listen as each therapist in each part of the country that would be contracted by TLC or the producers would say that the hoarded item or food represented an emotion or more accurately a repressed emotion. Therapy would involve addressing those emotions. Often the people on the show had suffered some horrible trauma. After the shows I would Google the subjects of the episodes to see if there was an update. TLC would have something on their website for certain and sometimes local news outlets would cover the person being featured.

To be clear, I wasn't a hoarder nor was I 600 pounds. However, the shows made me realize that the books represented much more than their title pages.  So what was their purpose.

• They filled a void during the several years between my broken engagement and meeting a new partner. They were there for me as relationships with the opposite sex proved unreliable. 

• They were a sign of my baggage for future partners or friends. You may like me, but just so you know, I come with a lot of books. 

• They covered up insecurities.  "I may not seem that intellectual, but I am because see, I have lots of books."

• They would be there in case of some apocalyptic type scenario. If it was the end of the world, at least I would die with my books. If I needed to be hidden or hide someone, like Anne Frank and Miep Gies, there would be all of these books to read to keep my mind  (or the mind of the person I was hiding) off of the impending doom. 

• As a child, I was a voracious reader. I read at meals, college basketball games, in the car, and at the store. I used books to disassociate and they never let me down.  

At 3 a.m. Central Time, with the baby kicking my ribs, I realized that I was ready to give up the books. I was married to a wonderful man who wouldn't let me down and accompany me until the end of days. And even if for some reason things didn't work out with him, or something happened to him, the books wouldn't be able to help me. I would need to help me.

Slowly, I began ridding myself of the books. I gave them to friends and acquaintances. Eventually, though, they needed to be boxed up. A charity picked them up. I sold the book shelves to a medical student. My husband helped him carry them to his car.

Today I live in a different apartment in a different country. I own very few books and mostly read on a Kindle. However, my kids' rooms are filled with them. They are  like the mezuzahs* on the doorposts of their rooms. They can't hurt. And in this crazy world, I want them to have all of the extra protection they can get.

This is an example of a  Mezuzah. It is supposed to be on every door post in your home, except the bathroom. 

This story is dedicated to my good friend Doda Jojo who has been my mezuzah for several years now. 

Sharna Marcus is a writer, veteran teacher, mom, and wife.

Keeping a Journal Can Help Lead to an Accurate Diagnosis

Keeping a Journal Can Help Lead to an Accurate Diagnosis

For far too many years, I made an egregious mistake. I did not keep a journal.

In my October blog entry, "Admitting That You Have a Mental Illness Is Essential to Recovery," I recalled that for years I had a condition, known as anhedonia. This is a state in which individuals with a mental illness do not recognize that they have a disorder and do not, therefore, seek treatment.

The results for those persons with severe mental illness can be catastrophic. Indeed, I self-medicated with alcohol while tenaciously working to achieve success in a number of areas. In retrospect, I was considered to have a high-functioning bi-polar II disorder. I was able to be ambitious and detailed in my work, but in my private life, I often, except for periods of remission, was in a state of anhedonia, which is an inability to experience joy, happiness or pleasure.

In many respects, anhedonia overlaps with depression. My lack of understanding that my general incapability of enjoying my personal life -- and manic disruptions in my work life -- was an unnecessary burden that I carried with me for decades. I thought it was normal to be "uncomfortable in my own skin," except for rare times that the cloud of despair lifted, and I was able to be in the moment.

In looking back, I am sorry that I did not keep a journal. Frankly, I didn't have the discipline to write down the details of my private life because I was so often irritated, angry and ruminating about my fears, particularly when it came to relationships.

If I had kept a journal, I might have discovered my shifting and painful moods. In bipolar II, like many mental disorders, documenting the chronology of your behavior can lead to increased self-knowledge and recognition. Such self-probing can offer a perspective other than being entrapped in anxiety and despair. That, in turn, can lead to seeking treatment.

Another reason keeping a journal can have a significant impact on improving one's mental disorder is that it allows a therapist to understand your history without having to wait for it to be revealed in therapeutic sessions, which might take a rather long time. This is particularly true of the current increased pressure on therapists to see more patients with more limited amounts of time, either as authorized by insurance or due to a large case load. A journal can provide a road map to your shifting mental states and lead, hopefully, to more accurate diagnosis in significantly less time.

A journal, even after diagnosis, can offer more documented self-insights and behavior, which, in return, can often further assist in recovery.

For some individuals with mental health disorders, there may appear to be insurmountable obstacles to begin writing.  Obtrusive thoughts and the vicissitudes of one's disorder may prevent developing the discipline to record one's thoughts and moods. This was certainly the case with me for many years.

However, there is a solution. 

Just start writing, perhaps only a few sentences at first. Develop an ability to dive inward into recognizing your behavior and thoughts and distance yourself from your disorder as much as you are able. This may be difficult, at first, to achieve. After all, it is not easy to write about yourself when you are not in control of your thoughts and behavior. With determination and tools like meditation and yoga, you may, however, succeed in beginning a journal.

The most important step is to begin writing daily without expectations. Let your mind take you wherever it goes. In a while, you will probably be able to start honing in on recording the details of your daily life. This, in turn, can assist in the process of healing.

Mark Karlin is retired, after a long career in advocating against gun violence, as a hospital executive, an online journalist, a consultant, and founder of a progressive website. He graduated from Yale University, cum laude, with an honors degree in English and received his MA from the University of Illinois.

Admitting That You Have a Mental Illness Is Essential to Recovery

Admitting That You Have a Mental Illness Is Essential to Recovery

You can have a mental illness for years and not be fully cognizant of it.

I know that, because that was the case with me. The condition is called anosognosia (meaning lack of awareness of one's mental illness).

A website, TAC.org, states, 

Anosognosia, also called lack of insight, is a biological condition that prevents some people with severe mental illness (SMI) from knowing that they are experiencing symptoms of a brain disorder. Anosognosia is thought to be the most common reason for not seeking or maintaining treatment for people with severe mental illness.

Beginning with my freshman year at college, I was depressed and in anguish at times, but never associated my condition with needing mental healthcare. In retrospect, the first signs of depression and hypomania occurred, unrecognized by me, in my senior year of high school. Then I felt, at times, a high degree of alienation from my fellow classmates, with the exception of a handful of friendships, coupled with hypomanic high achievement.

Indeed, I felt mal dans ma peau, French for uncomfortable in my own skin. However, I thought this was the way I was and the way that I would always be. Although I briefly saw a psychiatrist when I was a student as an undergraduate at Yale, I didn't see how therapy could help me because I didn't recognize the severity of my mental and emotional disorders. Marijuana and alcohol were self-medicating, but appeared to be acceptable as daily habits in my life that eased my pain.

In retrospect, I believe that I was hampered in developing friendships by social anxiety disorder, avoidant personality disorder and dependent personality disorder. The symptoms of these disorders often overlap. They were later found to be due to my depression, and after that a final diagnosis of bipolar disorder ll.

To this day, I find it hard to understand how I could be unaware of how my personality was so off key, so ridden with anxiety, despondency and social discomfort without realizing that I was in need of therapeutic and medication help. Indeed, anosognosia is considered a neurological disorder unto itself. 

I believe that many people struggle with such symptoms while assuming that they are so much a part of their personalities that they don't think of therapeutic or medical treatment. A further problem is that many psychiatric disorders are nuanced and fluid.  As an article in Psychology Today notes "psychiatric diagnoses may be imprecise, they may change over time, and there may be mitigating factors." Bipolar disorder, for example, often exists on a spectrum that changes from time to time.

One estimate is that 50% of people with schizophrenia and 40% of people with bipolar disorder have anosognosia before being diagnosed or are never diagnosed at all. This, as in my case, can take years upon years. The lack of vitally-needed treatment may contribute to suicidal ideations and actual suicides.

I was fortunate. I never thought of committing suicide due to my despair and helplessness, even though it literally took decades before I was properly diagnosed. Only then did therapy and medications help lift me out of my despair and hypomania, which manifested itself as dysphoria at times (mixed mood states including both depression and hypomania simultaneously). Dysphoric symptoms include discontent, irritability, stress, aggression, and feelings of anger, guilt, or failure.

For me, in any case, there were only limited anti-depressant and bipolar medications in the early '70s when I was in college and in the immediate years after I graduated in 1973. Many people today are taking effective medications to help manage severe mental illness. However, before the '80s they might have received electroconvulsive therapy or have been institutionalized in the absence of all but a few medication options. Or they might have lived their lives in ceaseless helplessness. There were also more limited therapeutic options.

Fluoxitene (Prozac), the oldest SSRI, was not available on the market until 1988. Until then, only a limited number of antidepressants, most notably monoamine oxidase inhibitors and tricyclics -- which could have serious side-effects -- were available. Lithium was prescribed in research and off-label, but is was only approved by the FDA in 1970 to manage bipolar disorder. Since Prozac was approved by the FDA, there has been steady progress in the development of many medications to treat depression, bipolar l and II and other mental health disorders. 

When you self-medicate, becoming addicted to a substance, which I did, you travel even further away from seeking a means of alleviating the dread of your mental health disorder, while actually exacerbating the underlying mental illness. The self-medications further kept me from an awareness of the need for seeking help.

It is vital to get outside of "your own skin" and look at your moods and fears as if you were a third party evaluating your condition. If your symptoms match a mental disorder, you should seek a professional evaluation. If you do not do so, and you have a mental illness, you may condemn yourself to a lifetime of torment and desolation, or even suicide.

This is a life-changing lesson I learned the hard way. 

Mark Karlin is retired, after a long career in advocating against gun violence, as a hospital executive, an online journalist, a consultant, and founder of a progressive website. He graduated from Yale University, cum laude, with an honors degree in English and received his MA from the University of Illinois.

The Dreadful Toll of Alcoholism and Mental Illness

The Dreadful Toll of Alcoholism and Mental Illness

The comorbidity of alcohol use disorder and depression is well documented. For those with both, they are co-dependent with the other. It is estimated that 1/3 of people with severe depression are also addicted to alcohol at one time or another.

I was one of them. 

Although I was initially diagnosed with depression (and later bipolar ll), it was usually during the depressive periods that I depended on liquor to self-medicate, even after I started taking anti-depressant pills. In turn, the alcoholism exacerbated my depression, social discomfort, and anxiety when I wasn't drinking. I never thought about the warnings on most anti-depression medications to not drink alcohol.

However, I never drank during the day at my various jobs or at home until my family went to sleep. In fact, I was energized by my work in my remission phases. I became obsessively absorbed in the details of my day-to-day tasks, leading me to excel and become extraordinarily successful in many different areas.

There were times during my periods of hypomania and racing thoughts that the pressure of working at a Herculean breakneck pace also led me to drink excessively at night. This was a pattern that lasted off-and-on for decades, except for the short or long periods of remission.

On vacations overseas, my addiction to alcohol was incessant and unquenchable. During the days on such trips, I stayed sober, but at nights and when flying, all bets were off.

It was at Narita Airport in Tokyo in 2019 that I reached my abject nadir, as my wife and I were waiting at the gate for a plane to transfer to Hanoi to begin a three-week vacation in Southeast Asia.

My wife is an avid reader and when she is absorbed in a book, there is very little that can distract her. I told my wife that I was restless -- which given my racing thoughts was not entirely untrue --  and needed to walk around. In a duty free shop I bought some miniature Absolut bottles and guzzled down six of them in a washroom stall. My wife was still absorbed in her novel when I returned, and she didn't notice that I was inebriated.

Alcoholic debauchery was not infrequent when flying to stave off my depression, my anxiety, and my desire to avoid interacting with people, such as strangers sitting next to me in an airport waiting area or on the plane.

When we arrived back to the O'Hare international terminal, after our trip to Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand, I had already made the decision to go cold turkey, and I did.

I have not had a drink since that day, I have never attended an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, gone through withdrawal, or received therapy for my former alcoholism. Like many conundrums associated with mental illness, it remains a mystery that I had the willpower to stop so abruptly. 

I didn't become what is known as a dry drunk, which is someone who still craves alcohol; I became stone cold sober, losing any desire to become drunk. I no longer walked through aisles of liquor shelves at supermarkets with a compulsive craving for the gleaming bottles and the temporary relief that came with intoxication.

It was then, when I was no longer waking up after blackouts, that I was ultimately diagnosed as being bipolar II.

There is no doubt in my mind that my closet alcoholism was precipitated by my vacillating moods (most notably depression) as a bipolar.

 It has been five years since my last drink. I think with more clarity, I am more open to relationships, emotions, and social engagement. I avidly volunteer for a variety of causes in my retirement, with my mental health under control due to an effective "cocktail" of medications and therapy.

I occasionally remember when we socialized with a colleague of my wife's and her boyfriend when I was in my mid-20’s. I got blindingly drunk. I was beyond remembering what transpired, a total blackout, and only afterward, my wife thanked me for driving the couple to their hotel. 

As I look back, I feel grateful beyond words that I did not get into a catastrophic accident and kill anyone, including myself. Fortunately, I had the good sense after that not to drive after drinking.

But that horrifying, irresponsible behavior is behind me. I finally feel that I have arrived home, and the possibilities of such disasters and dissolution are no longer on the horizon.

Mark Karlin is retired, after a long career in advocating against gun violence, as a hospital executive, an online journalist, a consultant, and founder of a progressive website. He graduated from Yale University, cum laude, with an honors degree in English and received his MA from the University of Illinois.