“There is no great genius without some touch of madness.” Aristotle

While this is a space for me to write about the science behind mental illness, I was recently inspired to write about something that I also find very important: breaking down the stigmas that surround mental illness.

Just over a year ago, when I was hoping to pursue a PhD, I was told that I should seek other paths in life because I've struggled with mental illness. Unfortunately, I quite literally have to wear my struggles on my sleeve, while some mental illness can fly under the radar. She thought she was helping me, guiding me away from a path that she thought would lead to inevitable failure. "I've never seen someone with depression get through a PhD program. I've seen them try," she told me, "but eventually they left or just barely made it through by the skin of their teeth." I was discouraged; the very thing that had launched me into mental health research was, apparently, going to be my demise in academia. I let her fuel my mental illness, catapulting me into a deep depression filled with self-deprecation and self-destruction. Just a few months later, I was half-heartedly filling out applications for graduate programs, knowing I would be rejected. With what I thought had to be a stroke of dumb luck, I got into the Master's program in Psychology. I was convinced that they made a mistake, but I decided to dive in, anyway. 

This week, in my Clinical Psychology seminar, a wonderful professor came in to teach us about the models of treating mental illness. We were learning about Marsha Linehan, the psychologist that created the innovative Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). "You're probably wondering how someone comes up with a therapy that could help so many people with difficult to treat disorders," my professor said. "She revealed recently that she had struggled with Borderline Personality Disorder and was suicidal, the issues she now helps to treat." The year-long knot in my stomach began to loosen as hope flooded back into my veins. I spent the next two days researching the many successful people that we had no idea struggled with mental illness and discovered that Marsha Linehan wasn’t alone. Many of the people we learn about in our history and science classes that helped shape the world we live in today had their own battles to fight. This post is as much for me as it is for all of you; we need to begin to put a face to mental illness instead of allowing it to become an entrenched societal stigma. People with mental illness are not incapable, they are not lazy, they are not “crazy.” We are different, but that does not make us worthless.

I'll list just a few of the other many successful people who have struggled with mental illness; this list is anything but exhaustive, as success and mental illness are anything but mutually exclusive.

Elyn Saks graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University, earned her Master’s at Oxford, earned her J.D. from Yale Law School, and holds a Ph.D. in psychoanalytic science from the New Center for Psychoanalysis. In 2009, Saks was selected as a MacArthur Fellow and received a $500,000 genius grant. Saks also lives with schizophrenia, a disorder with a heavy stigma and an often bleak prognosis. Her disorder began when she was a student at Oxford. She now writes about legal issues related to mental health and advocates for proper treatment: "we who struggle with these disorders can lead full, happy, productive lives, if we have the right resources."

(Watch Elyn’s amazing TED talk here: http://www.ted.com/talks/elyn_saks_seeing_mental_illness?language=en)

Isaac Newton, a physicist, philosopher, astronomer, mathematician and mentally ill. It’s thought that Isaac Newton had bipolar disorder, psychotic tendencies and possibly fell on the autism spectrum. This didn’t stop Newton from developing theories in modern physics, laws of planetary motion, and laws of gravity – all incredible discoveries within the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.

Winston Churchill, widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the 20th century, often spoke of the “black dog of depression” that followed him throughout his life. While he spent much of his time as Prime Minister trying to determine what the next step should be in World War II with Hitler, he also spent a great deal of time contemplating ending his own life. Some say that his battle with depression may have allowed him to see hope in the hopeless of World War II, and that his bouts of mania were responsible for the 43 books that he wrote.

Buzz Aldrin became the second man to walk on the moon, piloting the first human lunar landing in history. Famous and beloved, Buzz had his share of struggles that we couldn’t see. After coming back to Earth, the fame and changes got the best of him and he fell into a deep depression and an even deeper battle with alcoholism. Following his struggles, he became a chairman of the National Mental Health Association.

Others include Abraham Lincoln, J.K. Rowling, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Darwin, Calvin Coolidge, John Nash, John Adams, Theodore Roosevelt…the list goes on for miles.

We should never allow our illnesses to deter us from our dreams, but rather inspire us to run faster toward them. Never allow anyone to tell you otherwise. Yes, these illnesses are obstacles, but as the old saying goes, nothing worth having will ever come easy.

"Understanding is the first step to acceptance and only with acceptance can there be recovery." J.K. Rowling

            The statistics are jarring: 43.7 million (18.6%) of Americans will struggle with some form of mental illness each year (NIMH, 2012). Yet the stigmas still prevail within our everyday conversations: the depressed are “lazy,” the anxious are just “too high strung,” the anorexics should “just eat,” and the schizophrenics are just “crazy.” Often, we judge what we can’t understand; we can read the statistics, but without a personal struggle, it’s difficult to understand that someone who is depressed can’t simply get out of bed, that someone who is anxious can’t just calm down and someone who struggles with anorexia can’t just eat. If only it were that easy – the mental health field would collapse within days. 

It is impossible to explain in words what it is to struggle with mental illness. The scars scattered across my skin like a road map of my past would show you the many years I spent wishing I could stop harming myself, the many months I spent in treatment for my eating disorder unable to fathom being any fatter and the many nights I wondered if people would be better off without me. I struggled for many years and after many therapist visits, stays in treatment and hospitalizations, I began to lose faith that I would ever get better. My self-hate came full circle when I began to punish myself for not being able to recover. I wondered what it was within me that caused me to self-destruct rather than help myself. 

Fearing that no one would be able to help me, I began to search for answers. I very quickly learned that there isn’t one simple solution. This both terrified me and comforted me: though it was terrifying that I was being treated by a system that didn’t have a definitive way to “cure” me, it also meant that these struggles were not my fault. I quickly learned that it was not a matter of will power, but of recalibrating my serotonin, noradrenaline and even hormonal levels. I became inspired to jump into the field of clinical neuroscience, to be a part of the group of people that were searching for answers. As I begin earning my Master’s in Psychology (and hopefully, one day a Ph.D) I hope to spread awareness and hope to all of you who are affected by mental illness: whether you or a loved one is struggling, it is important to have patience through the recovery process. Why? Because it is not a simple matter of deciding to get better, but deciding to recover day after day, rewiring your brain while also allowing medication or other biological treatments to help the process along.

Yes. Biological treatments. These are biological illnesses. Just as you wouldn’t blame a cancer patient for his or her slow progress, it is important to understand the complex changes in biochemistry that must occur in order to finally feel alive again. In some cases, known as “treatment resistant” cases, there may not even currently be a truly efficient way of treating the illness, leaving the patient’s brain chemistry in an abnormal state. It is so important to have both patience and faith in those struggling with mental illness because if there is one thing we do know about mental illness, it is that a solid support system is correlated with better outcomes in everything from depression to Parkinson’s disease. 

I’m hoping that over the course of these posts, you will learn about mental illness: signs, symptoms and the biological components that will help increase understanding for everyone involved – those struggling, those supporting those struggling as well as the insurance companies who are currently quite guilty of denying patients in dire need of help the coverage they need to get better (more on that later!) It will become very clear through the alterations found in neurotransmitter levels as well as differences in activity in specific brain regions, that these disorders are anything but a choice. Hopefully, you’ll find as much hope and passion in all of this as I do, because once I realized that, just like medical problems, mental illness research lacks the knowledge to truly know how to help patients, I wanted to dive in. I wanted to save the future generations from the revolving door of treatment centers, the haphazard medication process and the unsure faces of doctors, psychiatrists and therapists. In the future, I hope to be able to help find more adequate ways of treating mental illness, but for now, all I can do is inform you of the facts and offer you a little hope.

 Having a mental illness is not a choice, but a disorder of altered brain chemistry that takes time, patience and effort to heal.

 

And if you aren’t quite as passionate about it as I am, take comfort in the fact that learning something new increases the gray matter (the cells in your brain which help to increase the speed of connectivity) in your brain!

In my next post, I’ll cover the neurobiology of depression!