Hey, Natural Medicine community! This is actually my first time posting with the #mentalhealthawareness tag, but as they say in the disability community, nothing about us, without us, so here are some words from someone who has had lifelong mental health struggles.
"Mental health" is such a broad category, with all sorts of causes, some understood better than others (and probably some not understood at all). But a commonality between us is that there is such a huge stigma about it, whether you're depressed or delusional. So I appreciate the "awareness" campaigns working to lift the stigma. At the same time, I hate some of the "awareness" campaigns, because they amount to telling people "Get help!" (when there are SO MANY BARRIERS to getting help, financial and otherwise, and "help" doesn't always help) or posting a suicide hotline number. Suicide hotline numbers are all well and good, but that isn't a long term fix, that is a crisis moment fix (and not the only issue facing those with mental health problems).
And then we get into the fact that the same things that help one person do absolutely nothing to help another person, even if they have the same diagnosis. It's a whole other rant that diagnoses often overlap, and if you've been seeking "help" for any amount of time you inevitably get different diagnoses from different doctors who have different ideas about your condition. Mental health diagnosis isn't like doing a blood test which shows something in your blood that gives a definitive result of this or that. It's far more art than science ...and some of those "artists" are just not very good at their jobs. ;)
So while one depressed person might benefit a lot from exercise, another might feel worse by pushing themselves to do it when all they want is sleep. And that can shift for the same person over time; maybe what used to help stops helping, or vice versa.
I am very much a root-cause-seeker kind of person over a symptom-masking person; that is, I would much rather do the work of getting to the root cause of why I'm depressed and work on that, than take something that might (or might not ...different rant) make me feel a little better, as long as I take the thing. To be clear, I am not trying to pill-shame here - whatever gets you through the day, y'all. If pills help you, YAY! I'm so glad that you found something that helps. I'm just saying that I've tried pretty much all the different self-help, exercise, diet, meditation, long term therapy, etc. recommendations in an effort to find a "cause" and a "fix" rather than "management," so I have some experience in generally what might be recommended in the Natural Medicine community. I'm the same way with ALL of my health care issues: I'd rather change my diet to avoid allergens than live on antihistamines (which my allergic family members generally find insane; they'd rather eat what they want and take the pills). I keep antihistamines around and take them sometimes, because allergens can't always be avoided, but most days I don't need them. I'm that mishmash that was cited well in a Tumbler post, I think it was, that went something like: Herbal honey for a cough, vaccine for measles, please. Because peppermint is great for nausea, but doesn't do beans to prevent polio. In other words, try and fix things naturally if you can, but sometimes things are more serious and western medicine has its place. That's my philosophy.
Long ass intro aside,
let's talk about one of the fixes that I found, in my experience, to actually be helpful.
Bright light! Bright light!
This funny photo taken with my laptop camera is of my Happy Light whilst on (yes, it is literally called a Happy Light). It's one of those full spectrum, high lumens lamps to help with Seasonal Affective Disorder and sleep problems.
I have had sleep issues my whole life. I always thought I was just a night owl, but no, I discovered whilst working the night shift, it isn't that I'm a night owl, it's that my sleep cycles around to different times of the day at different times of the year. This became even more obvious once I became so sick that I could no longer work a regular job with a regular schedule. I had always fought my "insomnia" and struggled to maintain a schedule before; not having to do that showed me that in fact, I don't have insomnia at all. I just don't have a circadian rhythm. Or if I do, it likes to chacha.
At one point in my life, I had a half a dozen different alarms going off in different parts of my apartment. A phone alarm and regular alarm clock next to the bed; another alarm clock that FIRED OFF A HELICOPTER when it went off which you then had to find and replace in order to make it stop; two other alarm clocks in the living room; and a Kindle alarm going off wherever I had left the Kindle lying around last. Still, some days I could turn them all off and get back in bed and NOT REMEMBER DOING IT because I had only fallen asleep two hours prior. You can see why I had trouble maintaining a schedule.
But once that forced schedule was gone, I found that I sleep generally around 7-8 hours a night no problems. It's just that sometimes that's 10pm - 6am, and sometimes that's 5am - 1pm (my current norm), and sometimes it's 3am - 11am. Try planning a life around that!
To show you how bright the Happy Light is, here is me with my regular table lamp on. Pretty dark, right?
Here's the Happy Light on. They sit about six inches apart from each other, so this isn't about distance!
I noted that I always flipped - and it is a flip, not a gradual shift - to being awake during the dark hours in the fall, just as there was very little light to begin with. There are some days where I fall asleep at sunrise and I wake up at sunset. I hate that. It makes me feel a lot worse, and I have no idea why my sleep cycle sets me up for something that makes me feel even worse than normal. It's like, depression on steroids. Hello darkness, my old friend.
So years ago, when I was still working that night shift, I bought the Happy Light. I have tried different ways of using it and fallen off the wagon at various times, but my current system, which seems to help the most, is since I am waking up 1pm ish and the sun is setting at 4:30 pm ish, once it's dark enough to turn lamps on, I turn on the Happy Light for several hours, and that is my lamp, rather than the oft-recommended "sit very close to it for ten minutes a day" or some such.
I can feel a definite improvement in my mood the past few days since I moved it into this position above the endtable so it could be my bedside lamp. It's like sitting next to an open window in the sunshine.
So, in this case, it is a "management" tool rather than a "fix," but so would exercise be if that still helped (generally for me it has not, but for a window of several months, it actually did - I don't know why that year, my body said "OK" when for years prior it did not, but I was glad for it). I am grateful to have a tool in my toolbox that really works.
If you're interested, my Happy Light is Verilux brand. They aren't cheap, but ya know, neither is therapy or prescriptions, at least in my country - and you only have to buy it once (and maybe a replacement bulb one day. But I haven't gotten to that day yet)! :)
Be well, friends, and thanks for reading!
Amazing art made for me that I got from a trade on Simbi! Simbi is a bartering website that I love. If you'd like to try it out, please use my referral link: https://simbi.com/wren-paasch/welcome
