For those unfamiliar with what panic attacks feel like, here’s a friendly guide. Step one: a mushroom cloud of panic slowly balloons outward from the centre of your chest: step two: fluttering sensations quicken your pulse, step three: sweat begins to pour: step four: palpitations grip you. Finally, you think you’re going to die. Congratulations! You’ve successfully completed a panic attack!
This exhilarating experience no adrenaline junkie should live without happens over a few minutes. No matter how many times you’ve been through it before, in that moment you feel like it’s the end. To use a Star Wars analogy, I feel like I’m trapped in the rubbish chute in A New Hope, the walls closing in with an unidentifiable monster below trying to finish me. At least Luke Skywalker had a blaster rifle – all I have is a stress ball.
This summer I was diagnosed with chronic anxiety. Having had anxiety attack after anxiety attack at the end of my final year at university, I went to the doctor’s and finally came to terms with what I’ve always known but never accepted. Bouts of panic have plagued me throughout my life, but they were irregular and always subsided. When they went, I strutted about thinking I was in control, but when they returned a sense of regression possessed me. Then it’s back to square one, and lo, over-thinking recommences with a vengeance. Arrogantly and regretfully, I thought I was stronger than others who relied on medication to control their problems. I wasn’t, and now I’m on medication, which is thankfully working.
How easy you find discussion of mental health is an entirely subjective matter which depends on factors like your upbringing and your group of friends. Personally I believe it is slowly getting easier as understanding increases, but enduring stigmas make expression difficult. The worry that you’ll be treated condescendingly lingers. While I’m not a spokesperson for everybody with mental health concerns, pity, undue attention and sympathy are responses I very much doubt sufferers seek. People who suffer anxiety and depression do not voluntarily experience them so they can vomit their problems on social media to get attention for attention’s sake. They are not self-absorbed narcissists who cannot laugh, love and joke like everybody else.
What I don’t want to hear is ‘stop being a spoilt brat, there are people around the world who have it so much worse than you’, because that’s clearly supportive. More destructively, anxiety and depression can be perceived as signs of weakness. Without somebody to speak to in a setting like university, it can appear like everyone else is able to balance studies with socialising while you rot. For men in and out of higher education, poor mental health can emasculate us because, ya know, boys don’t cry. It’s been scientifically proven – The Cure wouldn’t have written a song about it if it wasn’t true. Therein lies the problem: do you keep quiet for fear of embarrassment or call a press conference and grant OK! Magazine the rights to your story?
No matter how awkward discussion of mental health issues is today, it was undoubtedly far worse for our parent’s generation, for whom discussion of this sort of thing was met with derision or beatings. Alan Clarke’s harrowing 1979 crime drama Scum is an extreme example in which young boys in a borstal struggle to articulate their crippling fears to corrupt authority figures with devastating consequences. The 2007 Joy Division biopic Control conveyed the real life tragedy of a man who joked and drank as well as battled with self-loathing that drove him to suicide in 1980. As an avid fan, I often wonder what would’ve happened if Ian Curtis spoke about his issues to his bandmates. Bassist Peter Hook and guitarist Bernard Sumner have often said they didn’t notice Curtis’s sepulchral lyrics or talk about their feelings because it wasn’t something men did. Would Curtis have lived longer if he opened up? Would his art have been as powerful? What’s tragic is that is that he had people around him who could’ve helped but felt they couldn’t because they’d be emasculated if emotion raised its ‘feminine’ head. That’s the stigma I want to beat, and it’s one that I believe is incrementally being eroded.
At this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival the fight against in-expression received a tremendous boost from comedians and performers. Using humour to leaven art based on darkly personal themes, they courageously showed that depression or anxiety wouldn’t define them. Brigitte Aphrodite’s My Beautiful Black Dog, half theatre half musical, explores her battle with anxiety and how it impacted on her interactions with loved ones and the wider world. Aphrodite said going public with her issues was ‘a bit like ripping my guts out’, but art helped articulate her struggles and acted as a great weapon against stigmas. Such acts of defiance should inspire everybody in their battle to confront their problems.
Accepting my damaged mental health was a big step towards achieving some peace of mind. The fear that medication would change me as a person and deprive me of creative impulses has not happened, to the detriment of everybody on my Facebook friends list. My admiration for those who publicly talk about their problems, which bit by bit erodes obstacles to frank expression, is boundless. On a political level, there needs to be cross-party efforts to bring parity between mental and physical health and convert Westminster speak into reliable mental health resources. We cannot, however, wait for the corrupt political elite to change for attitudes to shift positively on the ground. It is up to us to support each other.
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