Mental Health

When your mental breakdown becomes an inconvenience to others

(I wrote this when I was suffering from depression around 18 months into a severe nervous breakdown)

One thing I’ve learned during the recovery from my nervous breakdown is that it all becomes a bit of an inconvenience to people.

Some people (family) are frustrated and I understand that.

They’re in a position where they can’t do anything to help and they can’t relate to who I am at the moment. They’re just having to wait for me to get better and to hopefully go back to being the person they knew before, fingers crossed. They want me to recover – of course they do – but they don’t feel comfortable asking probing questions for fear of getting into a deep, emotional conversation.

From my perspective, I’m a nuisance to them. I’ve always been the life and soul of the party, the one who makes everyone laugh, the clumsy one who everyone rolls their eyes at, the one who’s carefree and leaves at the drop of a hat to do something more exciting. All they see these days is a straight face, a tired expression and a sad pair of eyes, if I can keep my eyes open long enough to show how I’m feeling.

I feel as if I’m sitting in a room full of people, screaming inside because everyone’s avoiding the elephant in the room.

In the past couple of days, I’ve had to remind the people I thought understood, that I am, in fact, recovering from a serious nervous breakdown and that might well be the reason for my lack of interest in their lives and my general inability to hold much of a conversation. They actually seemed surprised and not a little bit annoyed, as if they were thinking, ‘that was ages ago – surely she’s over it by now!’ 

Which made me feel like a nuisance.

It’s gone on too long now, you see. I’m not as upbeat and bubbly as I used to be. I’m not the good laugh I usually am. I’m not as supportive because I don’t have the capacity to care. I don’t seem as interested, because my brain has enough to cope with without dealing with more input. And this has gone on too long.

They’ve started to lose interest. They don’t want to talk about my recovery. They’ve stopped asking after me because I won’t lie and say, ‘I’m fine’, and at the end of the day it’s a bit awkward to be met with, ‘actually, I’m seriously struggling at the moment’ when you just want a bit of smalltalk. 

Which makes me feel like a nuisance.

I had to remind a friend tonight that I’m still recovering from a nervous breakdown, after she was confused as to why I was ‘working on keeping stress levels low’. It seemed that she’d forgotten that I’d had a breakdown at all. It seemed that she thought I was putting it on, that I sounded perfectly normal to her so I must be okay.

Well, that’s because she only hears from me on days when I’m able to do more than sob and actively avoid sounds that cut through my brain like a chainsaw. I desperately wanted to talk about it but she didn’t hang around long enough.

Which made me feel like a nuisance.

People don’t realise that if I’m in touch with them today it means I’m having a good day after weeks of being barely able to function, even though I’ve explained this to them, over and over. When I tell them I’m seriously depressed they seem surprised that I’m struggling and don’t want to delve deeper.

After all, I’m usually the positive, happy one, aren’t I, so I’m bound to be okay deep down?

Surely I’m back to normal by now.
Surely I’ve had enough time to get over it.
Surely I’m back to planning dreams and adventures.

Well, no. Not yet.

I’m suffocating in a brain fog the likes of which I’ve never imagined. I’m drowning in depression the likes of which I’ve never experienced. I’m not back to normal at all. I haven’t had enough time to get over it and am nowhere near thinking about – let alone planning – my dreams and adventures.

I’ve never felt so misunderstood in my entire life and I’ve had a lifetime of being misunderstood.

It’s my mission after this has passed to bring awareness to what it’s actually like behind the scenes when someone, who is recovering from a nervous breakdown, tells you, ‘I’m fine’.

If they’re depressed, they’re not fine.
If they’re stressed, they’re not fine.
If they’re broken, they’re not fine. 

They’re anything but fine.

Facing people for the first time since your breakdown

You’re facing people for the first time since you suffered a mental breakdown. You’ve had plenty of rest and your energy levels have gone up a bit – that’s why you’re at the point of being able to see people. But at the same time you’re feeling nervous because you don’t know how they’re going to react to you having suffered a bout of mental illness.

Are they going to avoid eye contact and ignore you?
Are they going to ask probing questions?
Are you going to have to convince them you’re not insane?
Is it going to be too overwhelming and set you back a month? }
Are you going to end up drooling in a corner, watching them back away slowly?

Just how awkward is this going to be?

In all likelihood your breakdown is going to be the very last topic of discussion, in fact it’s going to be a topic most avoid. This can be both a good thing and a bad thing: good because it allows you to get on with life without having to use up valuable energy explaining what happened and bad because it feels like your breakdown is something to be hidden or ashamed of.

Yep, people tend to avoid talking about mental breakdowns. It’s all they can do to hold on to their own sanity without having to think about yours.

Dave and I laugh about the irony sometimes. When he had cancer, a sibling who’d cut him off for a decade suddenly wanted contact (until he was given the all-clear, at which point she slammed the door again). Everyone wanted to offer support, to talk about his terrible misfortune, to get all the gory details. To be part of his illness and, potentially, his death. The fact he had experienced no nasty symptoms, felt fine and breezed through his surgery and treatment fell on deaf ears. It was, after all, CANCER. Dun dun dunnnnnnn!

Well, yes, part of his bladder was unwell for a while … had it been his brain that was unwell, however, he suspects that nobody would have given a shit.

Try to go with the flow and be gentle on yourself and on others.

The chances are that nobody will get it right all of the time. If people try to talk to you about your breakdown you’ll want them to shut up because your brain can’t cope with delving deep yet.  If nobody mentions it at all you’re likely to feel neglected and resentful because, naturally, you want to be cared about. You’re likely to be irritated no matter what people do or how they react to what you are going through. They can’t win and neither can you.

It’s not your fault and you’re not a bad person – what you are feeling is all part of the healing process. You’ll feel annoyed at yourself sometimes because you know you’re being unreasonable.  Just go with it and apologise if you’re snappy. Recovery is tough and there’s no getting around it. The healing process is stacked with ups and downs and learning how to cope with other people again is one thing that takes time.

So, take your time and allow yourself to feel whatever you feel. It’s the only way.

Vulnerability is normal, especially when you feel abnormal

If there’s one thing I’m not scared of it’s being honest about life’s struggles, including showing a side of myself that others might regard as fragile.

Human character traits are fascinating to me and I think the more vulnerable parts of our personalities are more interesting in terms of discussion than the more desirable or socially acceptable parts.

A shame it is, then, that people are so quick to cover up their weaknesses and either pretend that they don’t exist or that they are something to be ashamed of. In reality, they’re something that we all share and to sweep them under the carpet seems to do a disservice to our fundamental makeup.

After my nervous breakdown I was referred to as ‘fragile’ by many people, all of whom were trying to help.

They were pointing out the obvious but said it hesitantly, sympathetically and in hushed voices, as if they were revealing something about me that I wouldn’t want to hear.

Some said I should ‘get help’ because I was so fragile. I found this intriguing because to me my fragility was both temporary and necessary; it was simply part of the process of having a nervous breakdown, an obstacle to get past with time. Though frustrating, it wasn’t an unpleasant state to be in and, in fact, was helpful to me; it was a momentary state of mind that was designed specifically to ensure that I had no choice but to rest, recover and rebuild. I therefore saw it as something positive under all the confusion and I appreciated the fact that my brain was taking the reins for a while and insisting that I stop.

I understood it and could bear with it while it did its thing.

Inevitably came a couple of nasty messages alongside the nice ones, ridiculing me for having a mental breakdown, telling me that at my age I should have my life sorted, shouldn’t be so weak, shouldn’t be affected by things that happened twenty years ago blah blah blah. It wasn’t nice to receive such words but it highlighted the reason people cover up their fragility when they’re going through something traumatic: we have a very real fear what other people think of us. 

Being fragile is part of being human, a moment of relative dysfunction in an otherwise normal state.

There’s usually a very good reason behind it. It’s absolutely nothing to be ashamed of, to hide or to fear. The irony is that people are encouraged to open up and be themselves these days when, in reality, much of society is waiting to pounce and criticise us the moment we do and that, of course, makes it difficult to share what’s really going on.

This leads to the vast majority of us trying to live up to certain expectations in public whilst struggling with supposedly unacceptable problems behind closed doors.

If you notice, when a celebrity loses control and cries during an interview, shouts at someone who’s shoving a camera in their face, gets drunk and rants at their audience – things that everybody is capable of doing – the media focuses on that to emphasise flaws and weaknesses or to create an issue where there is none. It is never forgotten despite it being completely unrepresentative of that person 99% of the time and is brought up again and again at expense of an otherwise well-rounded personality.

Showing weakness or fragility is unacceptable in a society that contradicts itself entirely by advising, ‘Be yourself … but not if it doesn’t fit in with what we expect of you!’

People are quick to define a person based solely on that fleeting moment of imperfection, possibly because it makes them feel less flawed in themselves briefly.

We have all kinds of emotions and behaviours that crop up over a lifetime for whatever reason.

We make good choices and we make bad choices and those choices have consequences, good and bad. I would rather reveal the true nature of those highs and lows than to portray a flatline existence for fear of showing insecurities or supposed weaknesses, adhering to other people’s ideas of what being ‘normal’ or ‘in control’ or ‘grown up’ should look like.

I can laugh at myself, embarrass myself, joke about myself and not be scared about showing an uncomfortable side of myself even at the worst of times because to embrace myself, warts and all, makes me human. And it makes me anything but fragile, even if fragility is what I display during those moments.

A nervous breakdown doesn’t always happen overnight

It can take a long time to spiral all the way down to rock bottom. And that’s the good news: there’s plenty of time to spot the warning signs and sort yourself out before you reach breaking point.

Unfortunately many of us somehow manage to ignore – or perhaps get used to – the warning signs and it’s only when it’s too late that we’re able to join the dots and understand how we were able to unravel so disastrously.

All of the signs and symptoms that I include below are from my own experience and all, without exception, grew worse over time because I didn’t acknowledge how serious they were when they began to impact my life.

I hope my experience will be of help to you or to someone you know.

Symptoms I experienced before my mental breakdown:

Irritability

Everything that wouldn’t usually get on my nerves would make my nerves raw, from a cat purring to a web page not loading quickly enough. It wouldn’t take much for me to throw my toys out of the pram over something petty and I’d find myself blaming tiredness or being due on. I even thought I was turning into a grumpy, middle-aged woman at one point and assumed it was just part of life. Even so, it troubled me greatly, as I’ve always been relatively tolerant and I didn’t like what I was turning in to.

Self-consciousness

I’ve been a ridiculously sensitive person my entire life but I was off the scale in terms of how self-conscious I became, especially when it came to what others might think about my weight. I grew paranoid and anxious if I thought someone’s gaze was lingering on my stomach or hip area and I’d try not to turn side-on to a person so they’d be less likely to focus on my size. I hated going to shopping centres or busy places because I felt so self-conscious; even walking past a stranger sitting on a bench would be agonising for me.

Guilt

I felt guilty about being short with people, particularly close family, but I was too stressed to curb my behaviour. More to the point I couldn’t control my behaviour and felt guilty about spoiling the atmosphere at social events, being well aware that I was making other people feel uncomfortable if they said anything that would make me even the slightest bit defensive. If someone pulled me up on my sensitivity it would make me feel guiltier but instead of apologising I’d somehow convince myself that I was in the right and that everyone was against me.

Anger

I felt easily angered by strangers’ comments on the internet, people getting in my way in shops, conversations on the radio, comments by family members etc. and the anger would bubble away inside me as I stewed for hours, knowing I was wasting my time on something unimportant (which made me even more annoyed). I’d feel such overwhelming resentment and rage at people’s stupidity, especially on social media, that I willingly backed away from society even more than usual. I’d catch sight of myself looking angry in the mirror and didn’t recognise myself at times.

Lack of motivation

Even though I enjoy what I do for a living, I was finding it increasingly difficult to motivate myself even to check emails or do the necessary admin to keep the business running smoothly. I couldn’t find the mental energy required to do even the most basic of tasks and the more I let my business slide, the less I could get motivated about saving it. Motivation takes energy and I was simply running out of it. This applied to diet, exercise, hobbies – everything in my life – until I felt like I was just existing rather than living a life I loved.

Stress

I became highly stressed, particularly by anything new being presented to me. I’d suffered chronic and severe stress for decades but it grew far worse in the years leading up to my breakdown. If new information came my way it meant that I had to process it. I’d feel my brain getting foggy, my eyes glazing over and my stress levels rising – this was my brain’s way of stopping anything new being taken in because it couldn’t cope with it. This came across as me not caring, which stressed me even more because I had no control over how I was reacting.

Irresponsibility

If I had to do something, for example go to a meeting or contact a customer, I would become severely stressed and would do everything I could to get out of it and pass responsibility to Dave (my husband and business partner); if there was something I wanted to do I found the capacity and interest to get it done. This went on for years before I hit rock bottom and continued well after I had my breakdown. It’s taken the best part of a year to be able to deal with responsibility to any helpful degree again.

Exhaustion

Over a few years my physical and mental energy dwindled until I was unable to do even the simplest of chores; it would take days for me to get the mental energy needed to open the post, put the washing on or tidy up, for example. It was that extreme. I thought I was suffering from severe fatigue because I was fat and had had a few hard knocks in life, but it was way more than just feeling a bit tired and lazy. Some days I wasn’t able to do much more than get out of bed and head to the sofa and often I didn’t have the energy even to get dressed.

Poor hygiene

I’d put off brushing my teeth until later in the day because I would be so exhausted after taking a shower. Some days I wouldn’t get round to doing it at all. Everyday tasks were getting way too much for me to handle and in the weeks leading up to my breakdown I didn’t have enough energy to shave both legs while taking a shower; I’d have to do one leg one day and the other leg the next day. I couldn’t take a bath because it was too exhausting to wallow in the heat and I’d have to rush a shower because I didn’t have the energy to stand for long.

Lack of emotion

Heading towards a breakdown was like being on a drug that numbed me at times, though not all the time. It got much worse in the fortnight before my breakdown but after my breakdown it was like a release and all my emotions came back. Before that, though, I didn’t have the capacity for emotion, and I found myself withdrawing from people and from showing feelings. If Dave was upset about something or wanted to talk about something business related, I didn’t really care. I worried that I was becoming sociopathic and that I wasn’t in love anymore.

Victim mentality

I felt picked at by everybody and developed a victim mentality, probably because it meant I had an excuse to remove myself from social situations. I expected people to see the worst in me and when I was with family I’d wait for them to say something that could be interpreted as them being disappointed in me so that I had an excuse to purposefully withdraw from them. I was paranoid about what people thought of me, especially family. It got in the way of relationships but I didn’t have the capacity to care about the effect I was having on them.

Confusion

I couldn’t take in what people were saying to me. At times it was like being in a bubble and it grew particularly worse over the last couple of weeks before my breakdown. During that time I wasn’t able to hold much of a conversation at all and certainly couldn’t take in any new information. Some days I’d be fine but if I was tired or stressed my head would grow foggy and there was nothing I could do to clear it. It left me confused at times, affected my speech, my thoughts, my energy levels and was the most shocking symptom I faced.

Withdrawn

I felt like my world was getting smaller and I didn’t mind; I didn’t want anything to do with the outside world at all, especially people. I was losing interest in things that interested me before. I didn’t care to hear about what was going on in other people’s lives because I didn’t have the will to take it in or to help them. I would resent having to reply to messages because I didn’t have the power to think beyond my own predicament. I preferred to remain withdrawn, even though when I did see people I felt better for a while.

Obsessive

I was obsessed with my expedition to Iceland. I thought it was normal for me to be single-minded because it was such a big thing to do but in fact I was trying to escape from normality and withdrawing from responsibility. It was easy for my brain to cope with because it wasn’t something mundane and it was something I was passionate about but I would feel guilty because it would take my attention from things I was supposed to be focusing on and getting done. Life came down to me and my expedition for around a year before my breakdown.

Unconfident

I didn’t want to answer the phone or door because I didn’t feel confident enough to deal with people. I had developed a fear of being told off, after a couple of nasty customers had laid in to me on the phone years before. I knew it was completely irrational but at the same time it felt very real to me at the time. I didn’t feel confident enough at times to enter into a quick conversation with the postman or a cashier in a shop and resented going through mundane conversation, deeming it a pointless waste of energy. I had no confidence in myself, which was really the point.

Over-reactive

I’m a very peaceful and tolerant person but in the years leading up to my breakdown I could be surprisingly aggressive, irritable and rude. I would take things far too personally, think everyone was getting at me, be offended easily and stew on things that usually would not matter, for example a passing comment from a stranger. I became quite opinionated and I think now that it was a way of me removing myself from any association with other people, because I found fault with everyone and everything to a ridiculous degree. That’s not like me at all.

Flitting

I had no ability to concentrate on one task at a time and was constantly flitting from one thing to another, never really getting anything done. This was particularly evident when I watched videos – I would rarely finish watching a whole video even if it was only two minutes long; I’d click on another video and never finish that one either. My mind couldn’t stop for long enough to take in information and it was easier for me to gloss over everything by quickly moving on to the next thing.

Lonely

I was feeling very alone and unable to convey what I was feeling because I didn’t understand what was happening to me and couldn’t pinpoint anything in particular that was the problem. I didn’t even care that I had a problem at times. I didn’t want to talk about what I was going through because I felt like a burden to others and didn’t have the energy to bother going into detail. Yet I felt abandoned by my friends and misunderstood by my family, even though they were, in reality, acting no different towards me than usual. I wanted to be alone yet felt agonisingly lonely, which was an odd predicament to be in.

Other symptoms I experienced before my breakdown:

Constipation
Forgetfulness
Impatience
Anxiety
Low sex drive
Tense muscles
Clenched jaw, especially after eating
Fight or flight feeling
Unable to deal with loud or complicated noises
Lightheadedness, especially in public
Panic attacks
Shaky hands (most likely dehydration)
Restlessness
Cravings
Dry skin
Bad dreams
Insomnia

Recognising the warning signs of an impending mental breakdown might prevent you from plummeting over the edge. Once you go over that edge – and you’ll know when you do – it’s a very long journey back to any semblance of normality.

Seriously, it’s been good to me in a way

As I struggle to recover from a severe nervous breakdown I realise that, rather than being a cruel enemy that’s holding me down, my breakdown’s nothing more than a protective best friend. It watches out for me, slowing me down whenever I try to rush my recovery, stopping me from getting ahead of myself and preventing me from having to deal with any stress that might push my brain to breaking point again. 

My world fell apart a few years ago but at the time I remember thinking that, rather than seeing it as an obstacle, I’d see it as an opportunity.

I’ve forgotten that a few times along the way, whenever despair has ruled over rational thought but one thing has remained clear throughout: my life had to fall apart before I was to have any chance of starting over on solid ground. I had too many unresolved issues that were keeping my head in the past.

The last few weeks have been among the worst I’ve experienced in terms of feeling that I’ll never be ‘me’ again, that I’ll never have the energy to function normally, that I’ll be forever treading water instead of powering into my future like I’m so eager to do. It feels as if I’ve been pushed right back to the start, over and over, and this episode has been particularly severe. 

In reality it isn’t a bad thing and it’s confirmed to me that my breakdown does in fact have my best interests at heart, despite me thinking it’s my worst enemy at times.

What it’s teaching me is plain to see but often overlooked.

You can’t build something solid on shaky foundations. I’ve had absolutely no choice but to take my time and to move in deliberately small steps, because my breakdown simply won’t allow me to build myself up too fast; every time I try, it snaps me back into line and reminds me to be thorough, patient and consistent, to do the groundwork required but to make sure it’s done properly before I move on.

“This is a one-time deal,” it tells me. “You don’t want to waste time coming back here.”

In the short term the experience has been indescribably frustrating but it’s now rather a comfort to me. At first I tried to rush my recovery but as time went on I realised that doing so was counterproductive; each time my breakdown dragged me down again I’d have to repeat the steps I’d already taken and it felt as though I was in a never-ending loop. I had no choice but to give in and vow take it slow in the long run because my breakdown would slap me harder each time I tried to skip through the healing phase.

My breakdown’s become like a friend, something that watches out for me and stops me from getting carried away to the point of damaging my brain again.

Far from being a hindrance, this has been a valuable lesson, one that I’ll be remembering every step of my 1000-miles walk: slow but steady really does win the race; rushing ahead sets you back in the long run.

I used to overlook how serious my trauma, stress, PTSD and depression were.

Perhaps that was because they became my norm and were a blanket of insecurity that allowed me to hold myself back in life and to never see my potential through to anywhere useful or satisfying. Rather than dealing with my problems head-on I pushed them to the side, burying them deeper and deeper until my brain just couldn’t cope with the consequences anymore. Now I’m burying them in a different way, mixing them in thoroughly with the concrete of my foundations to form a solid base upon which I can build a future that won’t return me to the extremes of a breakdown.

Rather than being a weakness, I’ve turned them into a strength.

For now, I’ll trust that by slapping my wrists and pushing me backwards from time to time, my breakdown is being a tough-talking best friend; it’s not trying to hurt me in the short term, it’s trying to save me in the long term.

You’re probably imagining it – just snap out of it – things can’t be that bad

“Did you really have a nervous breakdown? You seem fine to me.”

Yep, someone actually said that to me.

Did I really have a breakdown? No, I just decided to stop functioning for a couple of years for the hell of it.

Seriously?

One of the most challenging things you’ll face when you’re recovering from a nervous breakdown is how you feel about how others are judging you and your experience. It all feels pretty unjust because a) you only see people on really good days and they’ve no idea what you go through on a bad day, b) people tend not to want to mention it, which makes you feel like you’re overreacting in their opinion and c) some people will question the validity of your experience when you’re too weak to describe what you’re going through.

Sometimes it’s the old ‘elephant in the room’ situation. Like cancer.

Dave and I were quietly amused that on hearing he had cancer people crawled out of the woodwork immediately – people he’d not heard from in 20 years. All saying how ‘sorry’ they were to hear that he’d drawn the short straw in life. He was suffering no symptoms other than spotting blood in his urine once and in his own words ‘breezed through it’.

I had a breakdown where for months I was unable to write an email, walk up the stairs, make decisions, hold a conversation, take a proper shower and the majority of people I know have never mentioned it, even to this day. After all, it’s a mental issue, so … shh.

Such is the stigma of mental illness.

The best thing Dave did for me was to listen. He was gentle, kind, understanding. He joked with me, laughed with me, held my head as I sobbed in despair. He put things into perspective with me, guided me, did everything I couldn’t do for myself, allowed me time to heal and insisted I heal thoroughly, no matter if it took years (which it has and in all honesty I don’t know if I’ll ever return fully to who I was before).

He did every single thing right. He went with his instinct, knew exactly what to say and I could not have been more grateful.

Other people, however, dismissed my experience entirely.

But that’s the thing: you can’t expect everybody to know what to say, or to be gentle with you. 99% of people won’t know have a clue what to say and whatever they say is bound to grate on your nerves anyway because they’re shot to pieces. It’s not their fault. We’re taught to sweep things under the carpet, say nothing and hope that it’ll go away. It’s how we live, moving things along at a fast pace and brushing over the inconvenient stuff.

As I say, such is the stigma of mental illness.

And such is the nature of people, sadly.

Don’t take it personally. You know the truth of what’s happened and you owe nobody around you an explanation. All you need to do is focus on yourself and your recovery. You can decide how to deal with the people who misjudged you when you’re feeling a bit stronger.