There has been so much stuff written about anti depressants in the ever reliable about medical issues press over the last few years. (like that story that said they weren’t effective in mild cases, which everyone took to read ‘they don’t work at all’ despite the thousands, millions of people with severe cases who had been helped…)

There has also been a growth in the amount of people who assume all medication , especially for things like depression is BAD and you are a BAD PERSON for taking them and you’re just buying into OMG BIG PHARMA CONSPIRACY for taking them.

I am sick of being judged for taking medication. Sick of people who do not live with my illness every day, do not know how it affects me feeling they can pass judgement on me.  Taking anti depressants does not make me ‘weak’ it does mean I am delusional and think ‘pills can cure me’.

Anti depressants are not a cure, yes I have had awful side effects from time to time and have had to change meds to get one that ‘works’.But I still take them becuase the benefits outweigh this.

I am sick of being judged for taking medication that helps me manage a chronic and disabling illness.

It’s about management, at the end of the day my meds help me manage just a tiny bit better. I have therapy, but the reality is therapy is hard to access on the NHS and waiting lists are long; I waited a year.  People get put on anti depressants to help them cope while they wait for other treatment, it’s one small part of treatment for an illness that varies so much from person to person, that has no cure, that can only be managed with varying degrees of effectiveness.

So before you get on your high horse and start judging people who take ‘evil naughty bad bad bad bad’ anti depressants think:

If you had an illness that made you feel unbearably awful for the majority of the time, you’d take something that helped even a tiny bit wouldn’t you?

And by unbearably awful I mean unbearably awful. I’m not talking about a bad mood that can be managed by talking to friends of having a nice walks. I’m talking about not being able to get out of bed, about be tormented by thoughts that you want to kill yourself and you’re terrified that you might; it’s a terror that has kept me awake, has left me physically shaking, it is not just a bad thought, it’s bad thought that takes over your entire being and begins to eat away at you.

That you’re hopeless, that nothing is worthwhile, thoughts that swirl round your head so fast and are so vivid and real you can pretty much feel their effects physically: You shake , you become agitated, your limbs become heavy, you get dizzy, you feel sick to the stomach.

You can’t cope with life any more, you can’t do your work, you don’t see friends, or when you do somehow manage to drag yourself out you don’t feel right and spend a whole evening ‘having fun’ trying to hold back tears.

You sleep so much, becuase you’re tired and becuase sleeping isn’t being awake. You’ll take sleeping pills so you will sleep for days so you don’t have to face the world.But even when you sleep it’s no escape, this thing has invaded your dreams, you can sleep forever and still wake up tired becuase you can’t rest, even in your sleep.

You get strong urges to hurt yourself, to destroy your body, and you do.

and no matter what you do to ‘distract’ yourself it wont work. No amount of comedy films or chocolate or shopping trips or whatever else is supposed to lift the spirits will work.

Then something helped, maybe you only felt so goddamn awful 90% of the time, you had 10% to feel halfway normal. Believe me you’d take that chance. It might have side effects, it might ‘not be a cure’ but it helps you gain some vague semblance of functionality of actually HAVING A LIFE that you don’t care. It’s worth it.

I honestly believe without anti depressants I would have attempted suicide. I certainly wouldn’t be able to go to uni, to see friends, to have a life.

So excuse me if I react with bitter cynicism and bile when some sanctimonious twat tries to tell me what a big mistake I’m making my taking anti depressants and how it’s a ‘bad thing’ and how I should just take some herbal tea and go for a jog or massage my aura or something.It’s my choice to take anti-depressants, I don’t get handed them from a sweet shop, I see both my G.P and Psychiatrist regularly. It’s my CHOICE about an illness that affects ME.

To put it very un-politely FUCK OFF. It’s my life, it’s my illness , it’s my body. Until you live with what I live with every day, STFU and do me a favour. I have enough to deal with without your pious attitude problem.

Invisible Disabilities

I ‘don’t look sick’. I look ‘normal’ but I’m disabled. Both by my own definition and by the government’s:

‘A physical or mental impairment that has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on his or her ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities.’

I am not always open about it. There are people in my life who know me quite well who don’t know. I can ‘pass’ as able bodied as ‘normal’ and ‘not ill’.

I seem to have lucked out and acquired not one but two misunderstood and maligned illnesses, physical and mental.

I suppose the stigma I’ve already faced makes me weary about bringing things up. I suppose I hide it sometimes becuase it’s bad enough having to deal with chronic illness and get on with my life without the added bullshit of peoples misconceptions and ill-informed and often offensive comments. or becuase i spent so long aching to be ‘normal’ that now I can pass for it I do.

Sometimes I speak out, but sometimes, I’m ashamed to admit,  I hide; I just don’t have the physical or mental strength sometimes to deal with it.

But I’ll say it here. I have M.E , I have Depression.

Most people see me when I’m on a good day, when I’m functioning. That’s the trouble, that’s why I look so ‘normal’. People just don’t see me when I’m having a bad time of it as I rarely go out, I’m too ill to cope with uni, socialising, most things beyond bed and a sofa.I also get good at ‘faking it’ for other peoples comfort. Especially the depression. When people ask ‘how are you?’ I just say ‘O.K’. It’s not easy, or indeed acceptable or recommended to admit to a casual acquaintance you feel terrible and felt like throwing yourself under a car earlier.

It’s easier to say I was off with a cold, than explain my complicated medical history or delve into the depths of my flawed psyche.

‘Coming out’ as disabled is hard. It’s an odd issue; I feel guilty I spend so much of my life ‘passing’. Being able to fake it as the way my health is at the moment, I can pretend to be ‘fine’ for the most part. As much as I feel like a traitor, sometimes it’s just easier to pretened to be fine. It seems like I have enough shit to deal with being ill and trying to get through uni that dealing with other peoples misconceptions and having to explain everything is more than I can face.

I don’t want the painful memories of my adolescence dragged up. The doctors who said I wasn’t ill. The years I spent denying my depression becuase I thought it would mean I really was faking it after all and it was just ‘all in my head’. I can’t even remember half of my teenage years, I seem to have blotted them out. I just don’t like talking about it, in fact I’m getting tearful now.

As much as I wish I could be a flag bearer and waver for disabilty and invisible illnesses as I belive there really is a lot of work to do to create more understanding and tolerance. I can’t. I don’t have the strength.

I find it easier to fight other things, feminist activism etc, it’s less personal, it doesn’t touch such a raw nerve that’s liable to leave me in tears on a regualr basis. I just don’t have the pyshcial or emotional strength to be as open or active about the disability thing as I’d like.

This post has taken me longer to write than any other, and I’m still not happy. I still don’t think it’s relevant, coherent or worthwhile. But I’m posting it anyway becuase I feel my random thoughts on the issue have some merit, however small and disjointed.

Hopefully I’ll be able to pull a more coherent blog that actually says something tomorrow.

A bit of an aside from the usual feminist stuff; but I’m not a one trick pony. This is an issue that’s been bugging me lately.

I know this may piss people off and I don’t care. I’m saying it.

Imagine you’re ill. Imagine  nobody believes you, imagine everybody tells you to ’snap out of it’ and ‘pull yourself together’. That what you have isn’t a ‘real’ illness. That you’re somehow faking it, that you’re not ‘really ill’.  Sound familiar?

It is precisely this scenario above which is what angers me so much about some of the offensive and ill informed opinions that hold sway in the M.E/CFS community about mental illness. I can’t count the amount of times I’ve read comments along the lines of ‘But I don’t have depression, I’m really ill!’ and ‘It’s not depression, I’m not making it up!’ and ‘M.E is a REAL illness, it’s not mental’. I do not for one second suggest M.E is depression, or that M.E is a mental illness. However mental illness is real, depression IS real, my depressive disorder has had a debilitating affect on my life, just like my M.E has.

I’ve had to deal with all the malingerer and ‘faking it’ misconceptions with my M.E and it hurts, to have to deal with them again but from the people who I figured would understand is even worse. To see sections the M.E community buy into the offensive stigma surrounding mental illness hurts me, it makes me angry. Yes M.E is NOT a mental illness but some of the comments I have read in the M.E community have been downright offensive towards those who have a mental illness, and while a miss diagnosis of any medial condition is to be avoided, the bile and fury with which people defends themselves against being seen as mentally ill, as ‘not really being ill’ is offensive. The fight to have M.E recognised as physical illness and not mental is all very well but it is often home to an underlying current of prejudice and misconceptions against mental illness, and it turn the mentally ill. Reinforcing the stereotypes that the mentally ill are something society is ashamed of, something they hide away.

So please think twice before posting things along the lines of ‘I’m relived that people have said I have M.E and I’m not just depressed ‘. or ‘I’m not mental ill I’m genuinely ill!”  As someone with a misunderstood illness, as someone who has all that ‘pull yourself together’ bullshit thrown at you you should understand, don’t do what you hate others doing to you. You’d find it offensive if someone said ‘Thank god I’ve been diagnosed with Lyme Disease (just using an example here) and it’s not just M.E , I’m actually really ill!’

Being mentally is IS being ‘really ill’ and it’s downright offensive to suggest otherwise.