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IT’S LIKE AN unwanted guest popping up anytime, anywhere. It overwhelms me totally, both body and mind. It builds. Negative thoughts accelerate as does my heart rate. I physically shake, the tone of my voice changes. It just keeps building. I become completely on edge. I can’t sit still.
When this happens, I feel that if I don’t physically move it will become progressively worse. My feet tingle, my mind is racing. Exhausted my focus wanes, and – bang – the day is gone. Welcome to anxiety.
Depression and anxiety
Over 21 years I suffered at the hands of both depression and anxiety. I know am not alone in this – but many of us are suffering silently – either due to lack of awareness and education around the topic or due to stigma.
Interestingly according to a recent poll commissioned by See Change, as part of their Green Ribbon campaign, men are significantly less likely to link mental health difficulties with anxiety compared to women. 55% of men link anxiety with mental health difficulties compared to 73% of women.
That’s a difference of 18%. On average, the male/female divide on other mental health difficulties was just 8%.
This is very interesting because let me tell you this, anxiety is just as crippling as depression. With anxiety, however, hiding under the darkness of your duvet doesn’t help. Exhausted you just try to ride it out, however long it may be.
Anxiety is a mental health difficulty
Many of my days have been lost to anxiety. It is however, very understandable as I too, initially, never linked my mental health difficulties to anxiety. So what does prevent men identifying anxiety as a mental health difficulty?
Looking back on it, I never considered myself having anxiety, again as I explore why, a few ideas spring to mind.
What’s the difference?
On the last point, you may be asking, as I did, what’s the difference? How is anxiety different to just feeling stressed or worried?
Well in a nutshell anxious feelings are a normal reaction to a high-pressure situation – for example, meeting work deadlines, sitting exams or speaking in public. However, for some people (as has been the case with me) these anxious feelings happen for no apparent reason or continue long after the stressful event has passed.
These anxious feelings can seem uncontrollable and can make it hard to cope with daily life.
So it is no surprise to me that, according to the See Change’s recent poll on mental health literacy, so few men interpret anxiety as a mental health disorder or believe they have this condition.
A new me
Since I unmasked my true mental health and revealed about my depression and anxiety I have grown as a person. It has opened me up to a new life, a new me, something I never thought possible. It is far more important for me to look after myself than to be worrying about what people or society may think.
You may be thinking this is easy for me to say, but I can tell you nothing could be further from the truth, I struggled alone for over 20 years, I wanted to end it all.
Now, being open and able to talk about my issues has served me well and inspires me to go on and look forward to my future, now that I have one. It’s time to accept and talk.
Neil Kelders is a personal trainer and See Change ambassador.
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Quite often anxiety and depression start as circumstantial or situational but can escalate to a point where it is hard to break. Unfortunately the stigma attached often makes people bottle it up until they are completely consumed by it and you can no longer hide it. People need to talk and it’s usually easier talk to a stranger or a professional.
@Cheryl Mellett: agreed. The amount of suicides every year in this country is alarming.. Most of them being young adults
@Cheryl Mellett: I know of three suicides last weekend alone ..coincidentally two were on the same profession..all males ..its very sad .
Meditation is good for anxiety.
The mere idea of leaving the house sometimes throughs me into a spin of panic. Big respect to anyone who suffers with their mind. It’s incredibly difficult to explain to people who haven’t lived it.
Anxiety likely a symptom of another illness but like depression medics attitude is here’s your expensive pills now feck off.
Article after article about living with mental health problems but no articles asking what is causing the mental health problems in the first place.
Fixing the problem doesn’t seem to have the same priority as maintaining the problem?
@Chemical Brothers: I totally agree. the only way to deal with anxiety , or any other emotional issue , is to investigate and discover the cause . no treatment can be decided until the cause is identified first.there are no twp ways about it , find the cause , then deal with the effects.
@RJ.Fallon: problem is in Ireland mental health issues are treated as the medical problem not as a symptom.
If you suggest to an endocrinologist, immunologist or rheumatologist that you suspect your mental health issues are caused by a problem in their area of medicine the look to “park” the mental health symptoms and refer you back to a psychiatrist who knows nothing about endocrinology, immunology or rheumatology.
If we want to be more effective at treatment of mental health in Ireland it needs a multi disciplinary approach not just a prescription approach.
@Chemical Brothers: D
@Chemical Brothers: thats strange , I posted twice in reply to your post , agreeing with you and both posts have vanished.??
@RJ.Fallon: Medics are well aware that a multidisciplinary approach is the most effective means of treating mental health issues. It’s not their fault that government does not allocate sufficient funds to provide more inpatient beds, let alone therapies like CBT.
Heading into my third year of suffering with anxiety now and all I have learned…. that this countries health system is useless with this condition. Pushed from pilar to post and constantly having different medication thrown at you, which often just makes you feel sick, seems to be all they can manage. The options are suffer the useless uneducated help of the HSE or pay for extravagantly priced private counselling services. It’s a lonely battle which few understand, so I have unlimited respect for those also suffering and those taking steps towards understanding/helping. This country needs to get its act together on mental health, being from Limerick, I can tell you few pass our bridges without knowing a soul that left the would there at this stage, something has to change!!
@S.Leahy: eh, not just Ireland. They can’t handle mental (ill) health in U.K U.S. Eastern Europe…The problem is global.
@Paul Jennings: 100% but I can only speak for here and it’s not getting any better
The worst thing about anxiety is that its so difficult to explain it to people, even harder than explaining depression in my own opinion. It controls absolutely everything, your decisions ,your actions, your life. Its absolutely horrible. Its a daily grind, and as Neil says you lose days, and possibly even years.
A pill for every ill. Doctors are too quick to medicate mental health issues, anxiety included. CBT is the preferable way, but sadly, our waiting lists are so long that you could be waiting an age for an appointment so it’s no wonder so many go for anti-depressants. Plus, if you’re anxious about going places, then for some, getting to CBT causes anxiety.
@Maria Hickey-Fagan: Again CBT only treats symptoms and not the cause.
@Chemical Brothers: You’re completely wrong. The whole point of CBT is that it enables the sufferer to identify the cause of their anxieties, and hopefully develop the necessary skills to manage them.
@Philip Kavanagh: Except we have enough chemically exposed personnel now to strongly suspect the triggers are not emotional or situational but daily chemical exposures e.g. pollutants such as diesel exhaust, emissions from car plastics, oils, hydrocarbons, detergents and food additives such as sulphur dioxide, sulphites & E621.
CBT doesn’t deal with them.
“Mental health specialists” struggle to help us make sense of our conditions. It would also help if the language was rewritten to exclude terms like “disorder.” For most of us it’s a natural reaction to adversarial and/or oppressive circumstances. So we continue to try this and that – like it’s a lucky dip. Medication, the talking cure, jump leads to the temples or at worst, an ice pick that will make your brain hurt. And no-one can see the damage. Even if they could, most people either can’t or don’t care – and why should they? They’ve got their own s**t to cope with. Or not, in which case they say, spuriously and glibly, “sure aren’t you grand? – what bother’s on you?” We’re talking and people are listening. The stigma is disappearing. So we’re getting better, right? Are we f….
the cure for mental health issues is apparently writing an op-ed about it
tisnt anxiety hormonal mood swings
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