Alcohol and Anxiety

The cheapest, most readily available antidote

I am reading Joan Didion’s book, Blue Nights. In this book she talks about her daughter, Quintana, who passed at a young age, after a series of unfortunate accidents and health crises.

She discusses her daughter’s anxious condition and writes:

“Alcohol has its own well-known defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested—ask any doctor—that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known. This would seem a fairly straight-forward dynamic, yet, once medicalized—once the depths and shallows and quick-silver changes had been assigned names—it appeared not to be.”

This reminds me so much of a recent visit to the doctor’s office. I saw a new PCP, and I told her of my family’s history with depression, anxiety, suicide, and alcoholism.

She remarked, “Well, the reason you probably had alcoholics in your family is because you have anxiety in your family.”

Yes. Oh, yes.

And yet, I have been disclosing my family history of mental illness and other health issues for years when visiting the doctor. This was the first time anyone had ever come right out and stated that. No other therapist, psychologist, or psychiatrist had ever done so to me.

We are always making advances, medically and with research and what we know regarding mental health issues and mental illness, all the time, so it is entirely possible that since the publication of this book—over ten years ago—we know more and Didion’s assertion here is no longer the case.

Still, it is striking to me, how long this went unacknowledged in my life. And yet, how true it obviously is…how much it makes sense.

Alcohol is cheap. It is ubiquitous. It is easy to get your hands on. It is a quick fix when you either:

1—Don’t want to admit you have a problem and can self-medicate and practice escapism.

2—Can’t afford psychiatric help, or don’t want to get it, you don’t have patience to be proscribed a drug and try some new anxiety medication. (Because, like anti-depressants, some take awhile to work, to get into your system.)

For years, I never labeled myself as someone with anxiety. I knew I was a worrier, over-analyzer, over-thinker. But I have some close friends who struggled with anxiety, especially in social situations, and I knew that I did not have the same embodied experiences that they did when having to interact with others.

Even when I first saw a psychiatrist, and she diagnosed me with generalized anxiety disorder, she never really talked to me about what that meant. She prescribed medicine.

I have since come to understand that anxiety can exist in a variety of different ways and look different on different people. For me, as an extrovert and child of an alcoholic—the hero role, but also someone with PTSD and depression, my anxiety often times looks this: an inability to relax, to stop thinking, to calm my mind to sleep, to rest, to meditate. I feel on edge, people-pleasing, hypervigilant to people who are upset.

I firmly believe that both of my parents had mental illnesses. I knew my mother had trauma and depression. But, after my father’s suicide, and with it—another heaping dose of PTSD for my mom, I saw her at the height of her anxiety, when she was unable to sit still. She paced. In circles, walking around her apartment or wherever she was staying. I saw her after the doctor prescribed her xanax and she started to use my dad’s pain pills to help her sleep and calm herself, so she fell asleep during visits and appeared catatonic at many points. My mother clearly also struggled with anxiety even though it went undiagnosed and untreated (properly treated).

My father disclosed less and was a harder read. I do believe he had depression and PTSD (trauma) as well from the car accident/death of his brother, watching the car burn with his body in it. I also think that he had seen his father and grandfathers drink, and he developed it as an adulthood habit.

So, I saw alcohol consumption modeled by my father, and I will fully admit that I have used it frequently over several years also to self-medicate, to stop feeling, to help me sleep, to help me relax. As a result, and the trauma in my own family, I developed an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, as a means of addressing pain and anxiety and sleep issues, and realized I needed to take control of the situation.

It has been a long journey, but I have found other means of addressing my anxiety. Exercise—cardio and yoga, gut health supplements, therapy, journaling, breathing, anxiety medication in addition to my anti-depressants.

I wish that I had known I had anxiety sooner. I wish I knew varieties of what that looks like on different people. I wish I had been taught strategies and that medication for it was available, and didn’t have to just mean anti-depressants as the one-hat-fits-all remedy for all mental illnesses.

Getting information out about these conditions—depression, PTSD, ADHD & ADD, generalized anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, etc, they are all so important for providing help for those of us experiencing these conditions.

I have seen what happens, within my own family, when information and awareness is not available. When people are suffering, and think this is the norm, that there is no help available, that they will never feel any differently, they turn to what they know, what they’ve seen modeled. They look to escape, to self-medicate, to numb themselves. They drink. They use other substances. Or they engage in other behavior that is risky, that produces thrills/rushes of dopamine, that helps them escape—gambling, sex/promiscuous behavior, compulsive buying.

Such is the story of my family.

These issues are further exacerbated in an economically depressed, rural area where education/awareness of mental illnesses and services for those with mental illness is extremely limited.

I believe we first need to acknowledge these are very real problems that affect many of us, but that they often look different on different people. We need to grapple with those differences and to understand distinctions:

—to understand generalized anxiety disorder and how it varies from someone who feels anxious.

—to understand differences between someone who is in depression versus someone who is depressed.

—to understand PTSD/traumatized individuals and someone who had a bad or negative experience.

So much work in moving forward…

But these distinctions are so important to providing hope to those struggling and suicidal, living with the pain and suffering of these conditions day to day.