Latest / Voices for Voices® / Episode 94: Resisting Denial: An Unfiltered Account of Confronting Mental Health Issues
Transcript
- 0:00Justin Alan Hayes: Chapter 9.
- 0:02Justin Alan Hayes: Crashing.
- 0:03Justin Alan Hayes: Of all the content shared in this book so far, this chapter is the toughest.
- 0:10Justin Alan Hayes: This period for me was very dark and very full of fear, of which consisted of things I had been able to overcome with time.
- 0:19Justin Alan Hayes: As you are reading this chapter, know that I am not sugarcoating anything here.
- 0:24Justin Alan Hayes: It is important to give as much detail as possible because you may not relate to each area at the summary level, but you may relate to some of the details.
- 0:36Justin Alan Hayes: Growing up, I was introduced to doctors by way of annual physicals, usually for sports and occasionally a cold or flu.
- 0:45Justin Alan Hayes: Throughout my youth and through college, I thought there was only one type of doctor.
- 0:50Justin Alan Hayes: So every time I felt under the weather or needed an annual physical, I ended up going to see the same doctor, our family physician, and every time I saw the doctor I started feeling better a short time later after my appointments.
- 1:06Justin Alan Hayes: Even when I started having symptoms like a racing heart, with heart palpitations, racing mind and lack of focus, hypersensitivity to light and almost every food imaginable, the self diagnosis and use of a multitude of vitamins, fear of being alone, extreme stress and anxiety in all group settings, low sleep quality, among others, I did what I've always done.
- 1:34Justin Alan Hayes: I made an appointment to see that same family physician.
- 1:38Justin Alan Hayes: Just to be clear, I am not advocating to not see a family physician.
- 1:43Justin Alan Hayes: What I am saying, however, is that they may not be the best resource when it comes to mental health treatment.
- 1:50Justin Alan Hayes: A family physician can be a great resource to start, but should not be accepted as the only professional to help guide your mental health journey.
- 2:00Justin Alan Hayes: Instead, seek a specialist, such as a psychiatrist and a therapist, whom each have specific psychology education and experience with mental health patients.
- 2:12Justin Alan Hayes: A good analogy is if you are having car trouble, you would not take your car to a lawyer to diagnose and fix the issue.
- 2:21Justin Alan Hayes: You would go to an auto mechanic who has experience fixing cars.
- 2:25Justin Alan Hayes: If you see a generalist, you will get generalist results, while if you see a specialist, you will get specialist results.
- 2:33Justin Alan Hayes: This was something I learned a hard way.
- 2:37Justin Alan Hayes: I spent numerous visits with my family physician, expecting to receive a psychiatrist diagnosis and treatment.
- 2:44Justin Alan Hayes: From my almost 10 visits to my family physician in a short period of time, I participated in just about every test they had.
- 2:53Justin Alan Hayes: I had several blood tests and two halter monitor tests, all of which came back within range, while there were periods of time where my heart rate climbed.
- 3:05Justin Alan Hayes: During the halter monitor tests, my heart rate always returned to be within the acceptable limit as determined by the family physician, and therefore not a pressing issue.
- 3:16Justin Alan Hayes: Still, slowing down, my breathing was difficult and taking deep breaths was impossible.
- 3:22Justin Alan Hayes: I was exhaling more than I was inhaling and this continued to be alarming even after all the tests performed.
- 3:29Justin Alan Hayes: There was nothing conclusive that point to any heart trouble.
- 3:33Justin Alan Hayes: If anything, the test results showed that my heart function was normal.
- 3:38Justin Alan Hayes: I also went to see another family physician that focused on the gastrointestinal tract.
- 3:44Justin Alan Hayes: All tests there, too, came back normal and clean.
- 3:49Justin Alan Hayes: During this same time frame, not only did I spend a lot of time in and out of the doctor's office, I had several trips to the emergency room where ER doctors ordered blood tests around major organ function and key electrolyte levels, in addition to electrocardiograms, ekg and even a positron emission tomography, pet, where doctors reviewed ingested tracers inside of my body to determine any potential internal diseases.
- 4:22Justin Alan Hayes: Still with doctor and ER visits, the results were always normal, average, clean and not shown anything of concern.
- 4:31Justin Alan Hayes: On many occasions, I was simply instructed to go home and schedule a follow up with my normal family physician.
- 4:38Justin Alan Hayes: All these visits were increasingly exhausting and frustrating, not to mention costly.
- 4:45Justin Alan Hayes: No matter what I was getting tested for or trying to do on my own, my symptoms persisted, and yet I remained hopeful that the symptoms were going to vanish at some point on their own.
- 4:57Justin Alan Hayes: It was also tough in the sense that I didn't actually know anyone with similar symptoms, probably because they were also bottling everything up due to the stigma around mental health issues and the fact that some of the most common symptoms are virtually invisible.
- 5:14Justin Alan Hayes: No one should have to go through life day to day without knowing when or if the symptoms would subside, like the way I was living for so long.
- 5:25Justin Alan Hayes: Moreover, the timing was just around the same time as my wedding in honeymoon.
- 5:30Justin Alan Hayes: At that point, all the combined red flags I had been living with were kicked into overdrive.
- 5:37Justin Alan Hayes: As the wedding approached, I was now convinced that there was something seriously wrong with me, due to the longevity and multitude of symptoms that were negatively impacting my daily life that all overlap into a generalized definition of depression and anxiety.
- 5:57Justin Alan Hayes: Experiencing anxiety is one of the most death-defying feelings I have ever had.
- 6:01Justin Alan Hayes: Anxiety for me lasted entire days and nights, overtaking my life.
- 6:06Justin Alan Hayes: It felt like my heart was racing so fast it was going to jump outside of my body, almost always accompanying by bouts of dizziness.
- 6:16Justin Alan Hayes: Any time I stood up to complete a task, such as driving to the store to pick up groceries, I could fill my mind and body, kick up into overdrive, causing the task to rapidly become overwhelming.
- 6:30Justin Alan Hayes: It became so overwhelming that I stopped going, and when I tried going to the grocery store with someone else driving, I was okay on the way there, but the normalcy stopped as soon as we would roll into the parking lot.
- 6:44Justin Alan Hayes: Once I walked into the store, a grand sense of panic started, with dizziness and shortness of breath.
- 6:52Justin Alan Hayes: On the days where I could make it through the initial panic attack of entering the store, the same feelings soon returned while waiting in the checkout line.
- 7:01Justin Alan Hayes: Eventually, I realized that these episodes were panic attacks induced by prolonged feelings of anxiety.
- 7:09Justin Alan Hayes: The panic attacks happened at church, at the grocery store, out at restaurants, driving on planes, trying to travel somewhere, at the front of a class trying to teach, and countless other scenarios.
- 7:23Justin Alan Hayes: Panic attacks hit the fight or flight mechanism of one's brain and are tough to get out of.
- 7:28Justin Alan Hayes: Slowing down your heart rate as a start, but in the thick of a panic attack, breathing is challenging.
- 7:35Justin Alan Hayes: The problem for me was that it felt like I could not take a deep breath, meaning that I could not begin a breathing exercise to bring my heart rate down.
- 7:45Justin Alan Hayes: Not being able to take deep breaths was a problem I had.
- 7:49Justin Alan Hayes: That caused my anxiety and panic attacks to linger longer than they should have.
- 7:54Justin Alan Hayes: Everyone experiences these things differently, and I found that I needed to accept the way my body chemistry is made up, such that anxiety was something that I was going to have to deal with in a logical and safe manner At my lowest.
- 8:10Justin Alan Hayes: This was very difficult to wrap my head around because, since my anxiety and panic attacks amped up my heart rate and how quickly thoughts were flowing through my mind, it created a tremendous lack of focus for me.
- 8:25Justin Alan Hayes: Another major symptom I was having was depression Revolving around tiredness, loss of interest, indecisiveness, withdrawn and quiet around others, and loss of appetite At my worst.
- 8:39Justin Alan Hayes: Depression was extremely difficult to manage and I do not think I was even doing a good job at attempting to manage it.
- 8:46Justin Alan Hayes: Denial was a big cause of this, simply because I did not want to admit I was depressed.
- 8:52Justin Alan Hayes: Everyone has days when they are tired, cannot focus or are not interested in doing things or following through with plans, so therefore there was not something so wrong with me that I needed help.
- 9:05Justin Alan Hayes: Nobody likes feeling down or like they should not do something because it will cause even more deterioration in a symptom or illness.
- 9:15Justin Alan Hayes: Depression is a tough topic to tackle, and it is still something that I am managing to this day.
- 9:22Justin Alan Hayes: Looking back at where I was just a short time ago, though, I am definitely in much better control of my depression and know how to manage it way better than I could have ever imagined before I received the help I so desperately needed.
- 9:38Justin Alan Hayes: At times I would try to mitigate how I was feeling by eating a variety of salty and sweet foods and drinking a mix of tap water, mineral water, alkaline water and Gatorade.
- 9:50Justin Alan Hayes: When I would teach, I took the whole variety with me to class, most of which I would consume at one time during a quick break in the 3 hour class.
- 10:00Justin Alan Hayes: I remember thinking and imagining what my students were thinking about, seeing all this silently comparing me to their other normal professors, causing me great anxiety.
- 10:11Justin Alan Hayes: All over again, the judgment of what I did and how I did it, and the perception to others at every turn was just another rabbit hole my mind would wander down.
- 10:22Justin Alan Hayes: That became another huge red flag for me, but I thought I could just power through.
- 10:27Justin Alan Hayes: What I did not know at the time was that I could not or at least I could not on my own.
- 10:34Justin Alan Hayes: It was after months of the same symptoms with no end in sight that I started to think why me?
- 10:40Justin Alan Hayes: Why was I suffering, having to go through this?
- 10:43Justin Alan Hayes: Why can't I just feel better?
- 10:45Justin Alan Hayes: Something else around me is living a full life, or so I thought, not feeling anything remotely close to what I was.
- 10:54Justin Alan Hayes: While I was at a standstill as days and nights melted into one another, stringing along for weeks and months at a time.
- 11:04Justin Alan Hayes: One day, shortly after, these feelings overcame me, I was frantically googling my symptoms and many different health conditions populated the search results.
- 11:13Justin Alan Hayes: I read and read, re-reading many articles that detailed my symptoms and health conditions in a state of denial, not wanting to believe many of them For whatever reason.
- 11:25Justin Alan Hayes: I had the mindset that I knew better than anyone and discounted what I was reading.
- 11:30Justin Alan Hayes: As you can imagine, the range of health conditions I was coming across was vast, including heart and brain related health conditions and a variety of mental health issues.
- 11:41Justin Alan Hayes: The entire time reading about mental health issues, I discounted everything because of the stigma I had in my own mind.
- 11:49Justin Alan Hayes: I was not one of those people, plain and simple.
- 11:52Justin Alan Hayes: I just could not be a person who needed specialized help.
- 11:56Justin Alan Hayes: I was strong mentally, or so I thought.
- 11:59Justin Alan Hayes: In addition, I did not want my family and friends to know I needed professional help because I thought they would look down on me as a weak person.
- 12:08Justin Alan Hayes: Even mentally ill would mean I was not a normal person.
- 12:12Justin Alan Hayes: But what is normal Is normal.
- 12:15Justin Alan Hayes: Going through life with over the top anxiety at just about every moment of the day, my thinking was absolutely warped and that was one of the effects of knowing that something was wrong and that I was crashing fast.
- 12:29Justin Alan Hayes: What I would soon find out was that those people are strong and quite possibly some of the strongest people I've ever met.
- 12:37Justin Alan Hayes: During this period of crashing, I was closed minded on many things going on.
- 12:42Justin Alan Hayes: My prescription for living is rooted in knowing and believing that I would recover and get better eventually.
- 12:49Justin Alan Hayes: I was stubborn at first, but it was not until I swallowed my pride that I started to see the smallest of positive movements forward.
- 12:57Justin Alan Hayes: Remember if you do not believe you will get better, how can you expect others to believe you are strong and you will get through this and come out even better on the other side.