My personal health journey has seen me labelled with conditions such as “anxiety” and “depression” by incredibly well-meaning and knowledgeable health professionals. At the times when I was offered these diagnoses, in my early 20s when my path of healing really began, I had the where-with-all… shall we say inner wisdom? To desire to reject these diagnoses. Not to say that these symptoms I was experiencing were not real and often quite debilitating, which they very much were! And as far as these professionals were concerned, I absolutely fit the criteria that they could access through their large volumes filled with psychiatric conditions.
Somehow, though, I couldn’t quite connect with their belief that because I was having these symptoms meant that I was “broken” and needed “fixing”, be it via proffered medications or the promise of cognitive behavioural therapy to “fix” (get rid of, banish) these troublesome thoughts that would cause my being to go into fight or flight or freeze. The result of which, in my case, would be anxiety and panic or if that got to be too much, freeze: depression. For me it was never quite the “satiation depression” that we often hear about, where both serotonin and dopamine are lacking and one can’t get themselves out of bed, can’t eat, loses interest in life, etc. For me it was more of an “arousal depression” that resulted in low serotonin but reasonable dopamine so that no matter what I could push myself through and robot around through life, feeling flat… but still getting stuff done: therefore on the surface looking totally put together and ‘normal’ (incidentally, what even is normal??).
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Somehow, though, I couldn’t quite connect with their belief that because I was having these symptoms meant that I was “broken” and needed “fixing”, be it via proffered medications or the promise of cognitive behavioural therapy to “fix” (get rid of, banish) these troublesome thoughts that would cause my being to go into fight or flight or freeze. The result of which, in my case, would be anxiety and panic or if that got to be too much, freeze: depression. For me it was never quite the “satiation depression” that we often hear about, where both serotonin and dopamine are lacking and one can’t get themselves out of bed, can’t eat, loses interest in life, etc. For me it was more of an “arousal depression” that resulted in low serotonin but reasonable dopamine so that no matter what I could push myself through and robot around through life, feeling flat… but still getting stuff done: therefore on the surface looking totally put together and ‘normal’ (incidentally, what even is normal??).
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