My Anxiety is Self-Diagnosed Because the System Failed Me

I don’t know when it was that I realised I suffered from anxiety but I can tell you that it’s been a while. It wasn’t a realisation that suddenly dawned on me one day but rather a gnawing thought that there was something that made my experiences different from other people. Probably the most shocking moment for me was when once I asked my brother about what he thought about before he went bed and he said… get this… he just simply went to bed! Considering it’s still kind of a miracle for me to get a full night of uninterrupted sleep, this was a big realisation for me… the fact that most people could sleep quite well, undisturbed by their anxious thoughts. It still baffles me, if I’m perfectly honest about it.

For a long time, I lived with an underlying anxiety that didn’t have huge effects on my life. But there were little things that I never realised that not everyone experienced. For example, being filled with anxiety at the thought of picking up a phone; having to practise out an entire phone conversation in your head before even thinking about calling someone, even a quick phone call to make a doctor’s appointment. I still have friends and family members who think it’s hilarious that I have to go through such a struggle to make a simple phone call, yet most of them are unaware of the exact extent of struggle that I have to go through before every single phone call.

 

Seeking Counselling

In my third year of university, things took a turn for the worse, where my anxiety often left me debilitated, reducing me to little more than a panic-stricken girl in a bathroom stall. For anyone who has suffered a panic attack, I’ve found that anxiety attacks are quite similar, except that the anxiety doesn’t leave your body for hours and hours. That you can feel the after-effects for long afterwards. During these times, I finally understood that anxiety wasn’t just a mental illness, but that’s it’s physical effects could often be staggeringly painful. For me, it always started with getting the shakes, before the tears, the fast beating of the heart, the inability to breathe. And for hours afterwards, I would still be left with my body shaking like a leaf. This was a typical anxiety attack for me, that could happen in the middle of a busy street, a classroom, a hallway, a social event. Anywhere, anytime. It often came without a warning, and when it led to me fleeing social situations, it often left me feeling incredibly cowardly and weak, like I was incapable of doing the most basic of things in life.

After the anxiety attacks started becoming an almost commonplace thing for me, I decided enough was enough. I was lucky that there were people around me who had experience with anxiety too, and so when I needed someone to turn to, to ask for advice, my friends had some inkling of what I was going through. They encouraged me to seek support. I was also lucky in that my university offered free counselling services which I could avail of. Not everybody is so lucky. After I decided to sign up for counselling services – an anxiety-inducing task on its own – I was put on the waiting list which was quite extensive. After a few weeks, filled with anxiety, I finally got called into my first counselling session.

I remember that counselling session well. I remember the feelings of self-doubt that I circled through before the session came up. I remember waiting for the session to start with shaking hands and legs. I remember that even as I explained my reasons for being there, the flare up of my anxiety, the anxiety attacks, I wondered if I was really anxious, if I should really even be there.

Those counselling sessions were probably the best things that could have happened to me, and I am still happy that I chose to go down that route of seeking help, because I’m fully convinced that without those few weeks of counselling, I wouldn’t be as I am now: a sane, relatively happy member of society, with a manageable amount of anxiety.

 

Managing My Anxiety

My counsellor at the time seemed to know exactly what I needed. And though we often worked on trying to figure out the root cause of my anxiety, what was much more important for me at the time was to find the mechanisms to cope with the anxiety attacks that I was prone to. It was also important for me to figure out my trigger at the time, and work on how to both avoid those triggers, but also figure out how to deal with them at a time when I was more capable of doing that. Though the counselling sessions only lasted for a few short months, it gave me all of the tools that I needed to be able to handle and manage my own anxiety.

Right after I graduated from my BA, a pretty big thing happened in my life. I decided to start my MA in the UK, and not only was it another country but it was also the first time I would be away from home. My counsellor tried to prepare me for it, too, and we spoke extensively about the ways that I could work on managing my anxiety when I was abroad, and that there would be the potential for it to flare up once more as I would be in quite an unfamiliar territory. She also encouraged me to seek more help while I was there.

When I made the move, I realised right off the bat that doing a postgrad was tough enough on its own, but to do it in a foreign country where you don’t know anybody and suffer from anxiety makes things even worse. Thankfully, the university that I went to seemed to encourage seeking help for those who suffered from mental health problems. And the first postgrad welcome event that I went to had a stall at the front that was hosted by the people in the university who were there to look after your mental wellbeing if you needed it to be looked after.

 

“Wellbeing” Leads to Undoing

A funny thing happened, though. When I approached the desk and asked about their problems, they decided that their first port of call was to tell me that because I was a foreign student, I wouldn’t be able to avail of any of the scholarships and monetary help they have on offer for the British students. I assured them that that wasn’t the type of help I was looking for, but they still looked doubtful as they reminded me again that no, I wouldn’t get any monetary help due to the fact that I wasn’t British. I tried not to be discouraged as I took a leaflet and went on my merry way.

It wasn’t long before I decided to actually seek help and search out the “wellbeing” practitioners of this university. I truly wish I hadn’t, because it would have probably saved me from some really intense anxiety. When I arrived at this wellbeing office, I was told that I had to go to the wellbeing office for international students, because again, I was going to be offered no monetary help because I was an international student. Again, I went on my merry way, anxiety-ridden but not discouraged from my mission to seek the help that I needed.

My first meeting at the international wellbeing office went well, despite getting rather lost, and then arriving exceptionally early. I tried not to be dissuaded by the fact that their offices barely looked like an office, but more like a cupboard that these people had been shoved into, especially in comparison to the office that the British nationals were getting. My meeting actually went very well. The counsellor that I met with was very encouraging and seemed excited to work with me. He told me a little bit about what they did at the wellbeing offices, and how they often worked as a middleman between you and your professors, in case your mental health problems ever made it difficult for you to work at the same pace as the rest of your classmates. However, he told me that before I could seek further help with them I’d have to get officially diagnosed because they were incapable of helping without an official diagnosis.

I told him about my previous counselling sessions at my university but he let me know that unfortunately, they wouldn’t count in this case. Instead, he encouraged me to use the medical centre at the university and to meet with a GP and get diagnosed there.

Getting Diagnosed

I made the (dreaded) phone call to the GP as soon as possible in order to get my diagnosis. I went through all of the same motions that I did before my first counselling appointment. Anxiety, self-doubt, the whole shebang.

A lot of people (who have never been diagnosed or tried to get diagnosed, I assume) think that getting diagnosed is some scientific/medical experiment that is accurate to the T…. it’s not. When I went into the GP, she asked me why I was there. I told her it was because of my anxiety, that I had been to counselling before, that I had experienced it for a while. She asked me what had led to my counselling, I told her about my anxiety attacks. She asked me about the symptoms of those. She gave me a leaflet for a counselling service in the university that I could think about joining. That was it. I asked her if she could contact the good folks at the wellbeing centre, and she said that I should simply ask them to get in contact. Which I did, almost immediately.

I waited for a while for someone to get in contact with me about something. Instead, what I got was a strange message on my student account at the university’s website that didn’t list my anxiety but instead told all of my lecturers that I suffered from a mental illness, giving the examples of schizophrenia or depression. This certainly wasn’t what I was expecting. When I contacted the people at the wellbeing centre, they said that my diagnosis had not reached them. When I called the doctor again, I found out that they had a) either lost all of my information, including my appointment and my subsequent diagnosis or b) they just weren’t arsed to really dig through their records. They were pretty blasé about it but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that it was a) which is still in pretty goddamn bad form.

Anxiety Highs

In any case, my anxiety was in all kinds of high levels now (especially after all those phone calls – yikes!) but I swiftly made another appointment with the medical centre (before becoming an anxiety puddle on my bedroom floor). This time, I was on the calmer side of things. I definitely shouldn’t have been. So I went to this medical centre, and though I asked for my previous doctor, because they had “lost” my medical records, I was put in place with a completely different doctor.

When I entered this doctor’s office, she first and foremost told me that getting diagnosed with anxiety wouldn’t get me any monetary help. Uh… yikes, okay. Alarm bells. Anxiety bells. Anyway, what followed was basically the same motions I went through with my previous doctors, except this time it was much angrier and I felt super uncomfortable and incredibly anxious for the entire appointment. She did reassure me that she would herself e-mail the good folks at the wellbeing office. So even though I felt like a complete and utter mess of anxiousness as I left the doctor’s office that bright morning, I felt somewhat content that at least this mess was behind me.

It wasn’t. What followed were months and months of trying to get in touch with doctors, the wellbeing people, so on and so forth, trying to get my diagnosis to go through. The thing was that if I hadn’t been diagnosed, I could have dealt with that. But it was the fact that I clearly suffered from anxiety, everybody involved in this mess was well aware of that, yet everybody was so ridiculously incompetent at doing their job and helping me that it was almost laughable. Unfortunately, I was too busy being a total anxious mess in a foreign country where I barely knew anyone and had completely wrong potentially diagnoses listed on my official student records, to laugh at it.

Long story short, nothing ever came of it, and I realised in the end that the entire ordeal was causing me so much anxiety that it was just easier to simply forget about it. It didn’t matter that the weeks before my dissertation, I had multiple anxiety attacks that once more left me debilitated and left me incapable of sleeping. I got through it, with whatever coping mechanisms I had learned previously, instead of the help of those who had previously said they would be able to help me out.

Racialising Mental Health

It’s not just the fact that the people who were supposed to help me were utterly ridiculous at their job, but it was also that there was a pretty clear race element to everything that happened to me back in the UK. A friend of mine who had a similar background to me, as in she was an international student, had quite a different experience from me. Though she faced similar struggles with the wellbeing folks, she didn’t get redirected to the international office… because she was white. Even when they realised that she wasn’t, in fact, British, they didn’t redirect her. She didn’t get told constantly that she wouldn’t get any monetary help for her mental health problems, despite the fact that we were both international students. On the other hand, every single person that was there to help me thought that I was there looking for monetary benefits when I was merely looking for the kind of help that these institutions are literally set up for. Both the health services and the university services failed me, and their negligence was rooted in the fact that I’m a brown, Muslim woman.

 

The Medical Stamp of Approval? Not for me!

My experience made me realise why so many people struggle to seek diagnosis and are comfortable with self-diagnosing and living their lives as they are. The act of seeking help in that instance led me to some of the most anxious months of my entire life and that is not something that should ever happen. That’s without mentioning the fact that building up the courage to admit to yourself that you have a problem that needs professional help is an incredibly difficult thing to do at the best of times. It was difficult for me, coming from an educated background, with friends who had similar mental illnesses, with whom the topic wasn’t taboo. I can’t even imagine how difficult it is for people who aren’t as lucky as me.

Yet there are hordes of people out there who think that the medical stamp of approval is the be all end all of mental illnesses, when many medical practitioners I know are completely incapable of helping those with mental illnesses, and probably know less about it than those who actually suffer from those illnesses. It speaks volumes for both the British and the Irish health system.

My point is certainly not that we should all stop getting diagnosed for mental illnesses, but that it’s important to understand where those who aren’t diagnosed, or (like me) don’t wish to get diagnosed, are coming from. I know many people who are diagnosed with mental illness, who are seeking active help from it; whether this is from therapy, counselling, medicine or a combination. Some of them are happy with what’s being done to help them, some are still struggling along. For now, I am happy as I am, undiagnosed with my mental illness. After I came home from the UK, I did consider the possibility of diagnosis once more, especially as I entered into a workforce that I found difficult to navigate and understand, but decided against it, largely because of how my previous experiences had left me worse off than before.

Maybe in the future, I will seek help once again. Maybe the next time the people who are supposed to be capable of helping me won’t fail at their jobs. Who knows?