A Little Basic
When I was in the hospital in 2020 they didn’t talk to me about my diagnosis. Those conversations may have happened between my dad and the social worker, but while I was inpatient they did not burden me with that discussion. It wasn’t until my nurse was taking me through my discharge papers that I saw my diagnosis on the top of a page:
Generalized Anxiety Disorder with Panic, Major Depressive Disorder
“Why does it say that?” I asked the nurse. “I don’t have depression.”
(I was wrong, by the way, I did also have depression. More on that later.)
My nurse told me that they may have put that on my records for insurance purposes. Apparently some insurance companies do not view anxiety with panic attacks as a valid reason to be hospitalized. To that I say the people at those companies have clearly never had repeated, uncontrollable panic attacks, but I digress.
I became annoyed with my primary diagnosis: Generalized Anxiety Disorder. What a boring name! How nondescript! With all the adjectives in the English language the best they could come up with to describe one of the most horrible feelings I’ve ever experienced is “general”. Way to make me feel like a basic bitch, doctors. I mean, sure, my GAD came drizzled in the secret sauce of “with panic” which makes it a little spicier. But still, the name does not do the condition justice.
That being said, I do actually understand why it is “general” and not specialized. It seems like every other person I meet has GAD. My social media feeds are little parades of people creating content around their anxiety. It’s so common that it almost seems trendy to have anxiety these days. It is wonderful that people are so open and talking about it freely, but it has recently been weighing on me that the prevalence of the discussion around anxiety could minimize the actual breadth of what mental illness encompasses.
I worry that folks could see so much about anxiety and depression and forget that there are many other conditions out there. There are people who require far more in depth treatment, sometimes residential on a semi-permanent or permanent basis. There are those who cannot tell truth from fiction in their own minds, those who see things that aren’t there, those who cannot and will not ever live a full life independently.
When I worked at Barnes & Noble, occasionally a group of patients would come in from Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital, a state hospital which was just a few miles up the road from the store. I gathered that the outing to go shopping was a special field trip, a chance for some residents to get out of the hospital. They were always accompanied by staff (or maybe they were volunteers) who helped the patients out while they were in the store and kept an eye on them. The patients always made a beeline for the cafe, which is where I worked. They would line up and each order coffee in turn, the staff member with them whispering to us to please make everything decaf for these guests. Some were independent enough to order and pay on their own, while others couldn’t even speak or needed help figuring out the money.
Those were challenging shifts when Greystone came to the store. Not because it was unpleasant or scary to serve the patients, but it was overwhelmingly sad. I remember thinking that if these were the people who were well enough to leave the hospital, I couldn’t imagine what on earth those who couldn’t leave the hospital dealing with. To have your life so limited by a condition completely outside your control and to have to live in an institution because it is not safe for you to live out in the community; it is a sad reality for many people who are easily forgotten when out of sight. On those days at work my empathy went into overdrive and I sometimes would have to step into the back kitchen to get myself together.
Early this year I found myself on a date with someone who was actively hallucinating. He was hearing me say things that I was not saying. He was seeing shapes on flat, colorless walls. He told me stories about things that he had experienced and when I asked if those things really happened, he couldn’t say for sure. There were moments when he was lucid and I could see him shaking his head as if trying to get rid of the hallucinations and make room for logic and reason. But that night he couldn’t win against the paranoid schizophrenia that he lives with every day, a thing he did not reveal to me until our sixth date.
It is a hard thing to tell someone that you’ve got an illness such as paranoid schizophrenia; it has such a bad reputation for being connected to senseless violence. And even taking medicine every day does not guarantee that a person with schizophrenia will not have an episode. They can be doing everything right and still experience symptoms and have really bad days. This is true for anxiety, depression, for all mental illnesses I’d wager. But once again I found myself feeling incredibly sad for this person who I could see was actively trying to fight off his mental illness and was losing.
Mental illness is not a show with a guaranteed happy ending. I joke around about popping a pill for better living through chemistry and relying on my therapist to fix my brain when it misfires. The fact of the matter is that I can joke around about my mental illness because, in all likelihood, I will get a happy ending mental health wise. People with my conditions can and very often do live full and fulfilling lives. While there are days that I truly struggle, I know it’s going to get better, that it’s going to pass. That simply isn’t the case for everyone. There are some nasty mental illnesses out there. And while there are treatments and options for everyone to try, sometimes for whatever reason it just isn’t going to get better, or at least not that much better. It would be a disservice to mental health awareness month to pretend that these things do not happen. Ethical treatment centers, state hospitals, and psychiatric facilities need to be supported, not ignored. We need continued funding towards research into these illnesses to try to help those who cannot help themselves.
In the end really I am okay with my Generalized Anxiety Disorder (with panic). In fact, in this instance, I’m grateful to be a little bit basic.
