Let's Talk

In Canada, we have something created by a phone company called Bell Let's Talk Day. On this day, ten cents from each text or phone call - on a Bell telephone - is donated to local mental health charities. Of course, any money raised for these companies is positive, however, the culture surrounding this day is what I find quite problematic. As people copy and paste messages on Facebook, or text from non-Bell phones promoting the day, I get filled with rage.

Bell Let's Talk Day is supposedly designed to "end the stigma around mental health". The commercials focus on depression and show people forlornly moving around living spaces while sad music plays. In the Facebook copy and paste messages people post help-line number or say that their door is always open. My question is, how does this "end the stigma around mental health"? Telling someone with depression to call people greatly misses the point of severe depression where people struggle with the most basic of tasks and calling someone becomes unimaginably difficult.

Am I an authority on mental health? Well, maybe I am. In 2002 I was sexually assault in a dirty nightclub while attending my first year of university. I lived with my brother and his friends and when I came home wounded, shaking, and crying, they metted out rough street justice. One of my friends kicked the guy so hard he broke his own leg in the process. My brother and friends had to run from the police, so to protect them, I never reached out for help processing what happened. The next year I started to lose the ability to function. Gradually I lost interest in activities, I slept long hours, didn't shower, stopped going to class and eventually began crying almost constantly.

My breaking point actually happened over chocolate milk which is a good demonstration of how invasive mental health issues can become. I went to the fridge expecting to find my chocolate milk, and my roommate had drunk it. I collapsed to the floor sobbing uncontrollably. After I don't know how long, I crawled to the phone and called my brother. I couldn't even form words when he answered, but he said, "I'll be right there." See, I called someone.

When he arrived he tried everything he could to comfort me, but I could not stop crying. He called my mom, who drove two hours from our home town to pick me up. On the drive home she talked to me about how she had been homesick at university too, while I silently heaved and tears rolled down my face.

Not knowing what to do with me, my mom helped me lie down in her bed and she struggled to sleep while I cried and cried. The next morning she took me to the doctor. I sat there silently crying while my mom and the doctor talked. He apologized and said, "I can't help her. This is beyond my abilities, she needs to go to the hospital." So we went to the emergency room.

An earnest nurse tried to talk to me, but I stared through her, completely numb. The crying had stopped, but I couldn't talk and my movements were slow and stilted. The doctor said he was admitting me under the Mental Health Act. My mom was ushered out and I was taken to the mental health ward. I laid down on my bed and didn't get up for nearly a month. Medication is not a miracle and takes time to become effective, and doctors often struggle to find the right combination. After two months in hospital, I "recovered" and was allowed to leave under the condition that I go to therapy which my family could barely afford.

By 2004 I was back in university. The reality of recovery for most people is actually managing their mental health through medication and therapy with occasional relapses (about which I would learn much more in time). My brother, however, was now struggling with his own mental health. While I had been raped and hospitalized, my brother had been living a happy life with a fiancé and new baby. Then one day, seemingly out of the blue, his fiancé left him and took the baby. He was devastated. His son had been his world.

Men's mental health is an even more neglected area. My brother battled substance abuse while he worked long hours to pay child support for a baby he could only see on weekends. We tried to get therapy for him, but we couldn't find anyone who worked as late as he finished work. He did his best to "man up". Reaching a breaking point, he drove himself to the hospital expecting a similar experience to mine. Instead the doctor told him his problems were "situational" and dismissed him. Our family doctor offered medication, but it provided no relief, and my brother moved in with my mom for support.

Meanwhile I had started my second year over at a university satellite program in our city. In April 2004, I was finishing up my exams and was very proud of how far I had come. On the night of my last exam, my brother came home looking high and went straight to his room without talking to my mom or I. My mom asked if she should check on him but I figured he wanted to be left alone and told her not to bother him. She drove me to my exam.

When we returned, my brother's light was still on in his room. Again my mom asked if she should check on him. I said now was probably the right time. She opened his door, then yelled sharply for me. I came running and he was laying on the floor, pale and bleeding from his mouth.

My mom started CPR, and I called 911. He was rushed to hospital, but ultimately died of an intentional overdose. He left a note but the police officer didn't let us read it, something I still wonder about. My mother and I deeply mourned and suffered from PTSD.

How do I move this story back to my original topic, the idea of ending stigma? Well, this story is something I only tell those closest to me. Hardly anyone knows about my sexual assault or hospitalization, and when I tell curious people that my brother died from suicide their faces blanch and the conversation stops. But this is where the conversation needs to start.

Did I merely "recover" from PTSD like I "recovered" from severe depression? No. I developed a severe eating disorder which began as extreme binge eating where I gained sixty pounds in a month. After years of untreated binge eating, I desperately wanted to lose weight. So I stopped eating which, while being a very effective weight loss technique, is not healthy or safe - mentally or physically. I didn't eat for six months and lost two hundred pounds. I also suddenly started losing feeling in my body, I developed double vision, and my skin started turning blue. My mom finally convinced me to go to the hospital when I couldn't stop throwing up despite there being nothing in my stomach.

At the hospital they thought I had had a stroke, but their tests came back negative. I had developed symptoms of paralysis, was throwing up pure bile every fifteen minutes, and was so sensitive to light and sound that the lights had to be kept off. I was put on the palliative floor as I was clearly dying.

A neurologist finally managed to diagnose what was happening: beriberi. It is a severe thiamine deficiency seen normally in places of extreme famine. I also had other vitamin deficiencies that could all be cured by huge doses in IV bags. However my biggest hurdle would be something called demyelination. Nerves are surrounded by something called a myelin sheath. The vitamin deficiencies had stripped my myelin sheath leaving me paralyzed from the collarbone down.

It took a year of physical therapy to finally walk unassisted and a further six months before all sensation returned. Physically I was fine, mentally I was not. I still didn't want to eat. I gained weight and tried to jump off a highway overpass. I took off my shoes, climb over the rail, and hung there while a transport truck sped under me, honking. Two men grabbed me and dragged me to safety. I never got their names, too busy fighting them and then the police who put me in the back of their car and drove me straight to the hospital.

This time I fought my hospitalization. I was physically restrained for trying to escape and injected against my will. I still managed to escape three times, but a stick-thin woman running down the street in hospital pajamas tends to get noticed, and the police brought me back each time.

I was placed in a specialized treatment program for severe anorexics and again "recovered". I became bulimic. Something people don't know about bulimia is that you actually gain weight, because you can only throw up about thirty percent of what you eat on average. However, when you reach a "normal" weight and are seen eating, people tend to assume you are fine.

This is the grand lie of mental health stigma, that people who look fine are fine. I was working, I was socializing, I was dating, I was puking. In 2017, I met Peter who asked me to go camping with him. I had never been camping but he convinced me with beautiful photos of the islands of Georgian Bay.

Being an inexperienced camper, I couldn't figured out how to throw up discreetly on a small island, so I didn't. Under a hot July sun, I ate chocolate covered almonds and for the first time in years didn't throw up. This was the beginning of another "recovery". As I spent more and more time with Peter, I threw up less and less. However, I still occasionally binge ate. I gained even more weight, but I was happy.

Peter and I married in 2019 in a small ceremony at the local church. We honeymooned in Amsterdam and Paris. Of course we talked about kids, but Peter was hesitant. Finally he agreed and during the very beginning of the covid pandemic, I became pregnant. Knowing weight gain was inevitable, I put it out of my mind, and focused on the coming baby.

By fall of 2020, I had to stop working because I could barely walk due to severe pelvic pain. I gained even more weight resting at home waiting for the baby. I had to have a c-section because she was breech, and she was born December 9th.

Now I had been highly medicated for years and checked with every specialist about my medications before even getting pregnant, wanting to know if they would harm the baby. The answer was always, "No, they are safe to take."

Three days after being born my baby stopped eating, started crying inconsolable, and shaking. The nurses started treating me very coldly as they said she would need a urine test. They said it, "came back fine", but my baby was suffering withdrawal from my medications and would need to be in the neonatal intensive care unit, otherwise known as the NICU, for an unknown amount of time.

I was scared and horrified. Six different specialists had said my medications were fine, but now my baby was in danger. I can't really describe how awful the next week was, but I, after having major abdominal surgery, had to walk down a long corridor every four hours through three locked doors to take my little baby out of an incubator, being careful of all of the attached wires, and attempting to breastfeed her.

Mothers don't often talk about how stressful the pressure to breastfeed can be. You are manhandled by nurses, lactation consultants insult your nipples as less than ideal, and you may, as I did, also have to pump. So when you are not breastfeeding, you are pumping, and in between you try to sleep while being wracked with guilt. When my baby was finally discharged, fully recovered, I still struggled with breastfeeding.

I developed pneumonia, had a dinner plate sized internal wound, and wasn't sleeping. My husband wasn't exactly sympathetic as he was loosing sleep too and trying to work during the height of the pandemic. One day we fought and I stormed out of the house. I walked about a block before I took stock of the situation and realized I was too physically ill to walk any further. I reached for my cell phone, but the battery was dead. I was feverish from the cold and finally, physically and emotionally bankrupt, I simply sat down on a snowbank.

A neighbor called 911 and police arrived. They took me to the hospital which was overrun with Covid patients. I was denied my regular medications, and at three a.m. was transferred to another hospital. I tried to escape the hospital and was placed in their extra security area. I started screaming and crying, "I just want my baby! I just want to see my baby!" Six people dragged me to a bed where I was strapped down and injected. I would later learn that this injection would stop me from breastfeeding as it could harm the baby.

Because of Covid, I was discharged in a hurry, especially when the doctor realized she had made a medical error by injecting me. My husband didn't trust me with my prescription and took it from me. In the chaos of coming home, he lost the paperwork.

When I contacted my own doctor he prescribed my regular medications, not realizing I had been given a long acting injection. For a month I slept too deeply to wake for the baby, and could barely function during the day. I was dangerously oversedated. I was unsafe to watch the baby alone. I was devastated.

Ultimately the medical errors were corrected and I could look after my baby like a proper mother. I "recovered". And this is really crux of the problem, the idea that you "recover" from mental health struggles. That a quick call to a friend is all you need to snap out of it. The truth is you live with it and fight it every day. You fight it with medication and specialized therapy, and,yes, sometimes you still lose the fight.

As for Bell Let's Talk Day, I refuse to participate. I don't tell people my story. How can I? Just the idea that I have been hospitalized makes people recoil, let alone multiple times. And how dare I talk about restraints. If this is published will I lose my job? Notice I haven't told you what I do. I haven't told you my current diagnosis, or medications. This is the fear that those with mental health issues suffer with, and no text message or Facebook post is going to stop that stigma.

By Andrea Harmathy

From: Canada