"Claiming" depression or anxiety

By owning it, accepting it...

I receive pieces from themighty, an online magazine to build mental health advocacy and de-stigmatize mental illness.

Today I read a piece on how recovering from depression created a panic and mourning and discomfort for someone struggling with it.

Emma Dorman writes:

“I’ve since learned my depression is a part of me. On occasion, I still feel it here with me. Sometimes, I can tap into it to understand others. Overall, I think it’s made me a more empathetic and sensitive person. I’m still on my recovery journey, but I believe we all are. Whatever has happened to us, life puts us through our paces.”

I certainly understand her points and I support and validate anyone who has found ways to manage their depression, or anxiety, or other mental illnesses.

At the same time, I get that this will not work for everyone.

I am not sure it works for me.

And that’s okay.

Like grieving and trauma, mental illnesses are intensely personal and subjective and we have to figure out the healthiest way for us to navigate through them and self-identify with them.

I have a friend who is undergoing chemo right now because of breast cancer and we have talked about how it is much the same thing for those with life-threatening conditions like cancer.

Some prefer the words and to internalize and think of it as “a battle” or “fight” or “struggle.” I have read posts on social media that read “fuck cancer.”

I also have heard others instead prefer to consider their cancer as disappearing and quietly, peacefully, exiting their body, as they focus more on the healing than on the fight.

Whichever path, it’s intensely personal and has to make sense and work for the individual cancer patient.

I believe it’s the same with those of us with mental illnesses or mental health crises.

My best friends struggle with mental illnesses, depression and anxiety. One of them says that she needed to accept her condition and that she would always need to be on medication to function.

Others disagree with this and think it sets oneself up for mental (over)dependence on medication and an unwillingness to explore other options.

I can see that, the psychosomatic, self-fulfilling prophecy of that.

But ultimately, we have no right to judge. We will never know what it is like to exist in the body of another.

Also, there are so many varieties and variances of the root causes of depression and anxiety.

Sometimes there are situational components or genetic ones that contribute to depression.

We also have what we have often referred to as “chemical” depression that may stem from a lack of serotonin and melatonin and other important hormones within the system.

There are so many ways in which a person can have depression and how it affects them and the causes of it.

And I think we need to hold space for those varieties.

Even as someone who has experienced severe depression, generalized anxiety disorder and PTSD and C-PTSD, I know that there are others who experience these and feel this conditions in vastly different ways than how I do.

For me, personally, I am thankful that I sought out healing and therapies and treatments, reading about the ways in which I may be able not see or accept my depression and anxiety as a lifelong sentence. But rather, I grew to look at the root causes of why—stemming largely from intergenerational trauma and my own, lived, embodied experiences with trauma, as a double family suicide survivor.

I am grateful that I do not see depression and anxiety—for me—as something that I will always have.

My mental health is improved so drastically from what it used to be because of therapies and healing that seemed so woo-woo and intangibly abstract and bizarre.

I no longer identify as someone who has depression and anxiety.

I identify as a trauma survivor.

This works for me and has helped to understand my own depression and anxiety as side effects of my trauma, rather than the other way around.

But again, that is my body and my experiences.

Navigating mental health and mental health crises and/or illnesses is subjective, individualistic, varied and complex—

Rather than judgment, we need to accept the ways in which people manage and cope and (feel that they may) heal from them, on their own terms.