MENTAL ILLNESS: WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON?
26 OCTOBER 2022 (23 MIN READ)
Most of our societal understanding of mental illness does nothing to heal the actual dis-ease. All it seems to do is keep the demons at bay or make matters worse. The main reason this occurs is because our diagnosis of various mental illnesses fails to dig deep enough to understand the actual roots, keeping those who suffer perpetually swimming on the surface of a deep world of pain. This tragedy occurs because when we arrive at the doctor’s door pleading for help, they simply yell out a label, diagnose a deficient neurotransmitter, shell out a couple of pills, and call it a day, without looking into the story behind the person in front of them, which is probably full of unresolved trauma and parental abandonment. I am not denying that certain mental illnesses involve deficient neurotransmitters, such as low dopamine in people with ADHD, or that medication is not lifesaving when utilized correctly. What I will deny is that the majority of psychiatrists, while well-intentioned, completely understand what’s going on with the patients in front of them beyond perceiving them as a robot with a broken part that needs fixing.
This reality deeply troubles me because mental illness is not the same as a broken bone. It cannot be quickly fixed. Healing, not fixing, mental suffering is a long process that involves unpacking everything buried in the unconscious to understand what made you deviate from the joyous being you were supposed to be. Furthermore, immediately handing people pills to fix their minds suggests that they came in incorrect to begin with, but no one is fundamentally broken or deserves to be treated that way. What they are is a product of a painful journey that deserves to be seen, acknowledged, and understood for all the suffering they’ve had to carry on their shoulders for so long.
My interest and dedication to exploring this topic of pulling the curtain behind what mental illness really is stems from being put into boxes that made no sense to me. A couple of years ago, after experiencing a mental health crisis—or as I like to see it, a deep need for compassion, understanding, and love—I was diagnosed as having severe ADHD and Bipolar Type II disorder, which inevitably also come with depression and anxiety. Having the stubborn, questioning brain I possess, I kept asking what that really meant, and all I got kept being told to me was that I either had deficient neurotransmitters or ones that had trouble regulating themselves. And due to this “scientific” viewpoint, I needed medication that regulated my neurotransmitters. This made absolutely no sense to me. I never denied the neurochemical component of mental illness, but the fact that they portrayed my mental situation as simple as that intuitively felt sickening. I knew something was completely incorrect, which sparked a years-long journey of properly understanding what these “disorders” really meant. And what I discovered opened my eyes to a whole world of lies being spoon-fed to us by greedy pharmaceutical companies filling their pockets. This article won’t go down the road of exposing Big Pharma companies, as I would like to not get suicided anytime soon. But what it will do is explain what the four main components of diagnosed mental illnesses really are.
Here is my attempt to unpack the years-long research, both personally and philosophically, that explains what anxiety, depression, ADHD, and bipolarity really constitute.
ANXIETY
Let’s begin by providing the medical consensus of what anxiety constitutes. To do so, consider this definition from a leading study on anxiety disorders: “anxiety disorders arise from a dysfunction in the modulation of brain circuits which regulate emotional responses to potentially threatening stimuli… The brain circuits in the amygdala are thought to comprise inhibitory networks of γ-aminobutyric acid-ergic (GABAergic) interneurons and this neurotransmitter thus plays a key role in the modulation of anxiety responses both in the normal and pathological state.”¹ Put into plain English, anxiety comes from an inability of one’s brain to allow for appropriate emotional responses in the face of a perceived threat. Furthermore, the neurochemistry that supports this point is that a hyperactive amygdala, which is activated under frequent stress, suppresses the production of GABA, which has a calming effect on your nervous system. Thus, if someone has anxiety, they could benefit from a medication that boosts their production of GABA to counteract the suppressant effect of it from their overworking amygdala. Putting it all together, if you have anxiety, the medical establishment simply sees you as someone who cannot properly face perceived threats due to a faulty amygdala that needs chemical support. While this statement is not incorrect, it suggests that each anxious person’s mind is the same and their diagnosis is universal, as if we are all computers who just need a part fixed and we’re good to go. Unfortunately, this medical perspective leaves out everything to do with the history of the person, which inevitably causes the current circumstance they find themselves in. And without properly understanding one’s personal history, not only will they never overcome their anxiety, but they miss a beautiful chance of reclaiming genuine power over their lives.
To make the point that understanding our personal history is required for us to figure out our anxiety and transcend it, consider this chart I made, which will be drawn upon to explain the creation of anxiety in the human psyche:
The chart begins with the foundation of repressed trauma, which creates mental stories someone tells themselves that then create a perceived reality, which dictates their behavior based on that perception. And in order to find the source of it all, the repressed trauma, one needs to reverse engineer their way down the ladder. Putting this complex notion into a concrete example, consider this story of an overtly macho man:
As a child, the only thing Tony ever desired was love from his father; however, his father would only show him love if he was acting the way he wanted him to. And this way was to present a macho side of himself to the world, where stoicism and emotional repression ruled over anything else. Whenever Tony cried because he needed help or was processing something stressful from school, his father would beat him black and blue and repeatedly call him a “pussy,” and to “man the fuck up.” After experiencing situations like this over and over again, Tony learned to shame, despise, and tuck away any side of himself that experienced emotions, which manifested as telling himself to be a man and not be a pussy whenever he felt sensitive. Matching these self-perceptions, whenever anyone questioned his masculinity, whether it be a friend or romantic partner, he would immediately get aggressive and violent at times, in order to satiate his belief that he was as strong of a man as possible. As Tony grew up, and the more he repressed all his negative emotions, such as anxiety and sadness, he suddenly found himself not being able to repress all that pain anymore, as it grew too large to handle, so he started drinking alcohol regularly and developed serious alcoholism.
Using the chart, let’s reverse engineer the life of Tony to find the repressed trauma that is causing him so much suffering. To begin with, what are the behaviors that are causing Tony troubles in his life? Fighting people who question his masculinity and drinking too much. Moving down the ladder, what is the perceived reality that is causing him to engage in those behaviors? He fights people because he perceives them to challenge his masculinity and he drinks because he perceives his anxious feelings as too much to handle. Moving down the rungs again, what are the mental stories that feed these perceptions? The answers to this question, for anyone, are the ones that really drive you to finding where all that pain stems from. In the moment when someone challenges Tony’s masculinity, he thinks to himself, “that person thinks I’m a pussy,” or, “that person doesn’t think I’m a strong man.” These thoughts then create a negative charge in his system, full of anxiety and rage, that propel him to attack the person in front of him. Where do those stories come from? Who told him similar things? And why do those thoughts create such strong feelings in the body? His father would tell him the same things before he beat him, so Tony learned to associate himself and those words with awful violence and terror. This core wound is why Tony lashes out at people when they challenge his masculinity: to protect that little boy he could not as a child. Furthermore, the anxiety he needs to numb with alcohol all stems from the fearful thoughts he has of needing to constantly be someone he’s not, or else he will face the brutal blows of his father. However, his father is no longer here, and he has transferred the potential threat of his punches incorrectly to any threat in the real world. Tony’s brain learned to associate any signal of weakness with terrible violence, so of course he lives in constant fear and pain, as he cannot communicate these overflowing sides of himself to the world.
Yes, Tony does match the clinical definition of anxiety. He has inappropriate emotional responses to perceived threats and his brain is having a hard time producing needed amounts of GABA to calm himself down, which is why he reaches for alcohol so often, since it provides a temporary flood of GABA to the brain. However, it’s criminal to limit Tony’s suffering to that definition. The real reason behind his anxiety is a terrified child who was beaten to a pulp whenever he signaled a sign of weakness. In terms of healing someone with this sort of anxiety, let’s consider how the traditional way of fixing anxiety would have worked for him, versus an approach that helped him understand the deep reality behind his pain.
In terms of the clinical approach, Tony would have walked into a psychiatrist’s office, been quickly diagnosed with either general anxiety disorder or panic disorder, and either handed Xanax or an antidepressant, or some combination of both, without any understanding of what got him at that place of suffering in the first place. If he went with an alternative approach to the medical matrix, such as finding an uncorrupted psychoanalyst or a somatic experiencing practitioner, then they would begin with trying to understand what went wrong in his life story, rather than what’s wrong with his neurochemistry and calling it a day. The advantage with this approach is that you learn to feel safe with the anxiety and gain compassion for a troubled, younger version of self that is begging to be seen with love in the present moment. Contrastingly, when you are prescribed medication such as Xanax or Klonopin to deal with your anxiety, you are teaching yourself to be in resistance to your anxiety, opting for numbness when in reality you need love and awareness as to why it’s coming up. (I am not completely against anxiety medication for a short period of time. It can be very useful to temporarily clear the cobwebs of the traumatic energy stuck in one’s body, so one can open up better about what happened in therapy, instead of sitting down shaking and refusing to open up).
Similar to how a smoke alarm sounds off to warn you of the fire, your anxiety is coming up to invite you to understand what caused it and inspire you to heal. You can either repeatedly turn the alarm off and continue burning, or go tend to the fire.
DEPRESSION
Similar to the last section, let’s begin by stating the medically accepted definitions of depression in the Western world. Mayo Clinic defines it as “a mood disorder that causes a persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest.” And on a neurochemical standpoint, doctors perceive depression to be caused by serotonin deficiency in the brain; therefore, a popular protocol for someone with depression is to give them an SSRI, where higher levels of serotonin are allowed to flood the brain, hopefully leading to a cessation of the depression. However, multiple studies have shown how that theory could be medically inaccurate: “Simple biochemical theories that link low levels of serotonin with depressed mood are no longer tenable.”² And, “Meta-analysis shows difference between antidepressants and placebo is only significant in severe depression.”³ Adding fuel to the fire of the last point, “[Another] study, which examined 232 placebo-controlled trials of 73,388 patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder, suggested that the active ingredients in 10 of the most popularly prescribed antidepressant medications made a meaningful difference in only 15 percent of the patients who took them, almost always in those patients suffering from the most severe depression.”⁴ So, combining the outcomes of these studies, it seems as if the serotonin argument for depression is only accurate for those suffering from severe depression. However, one in eight Americans is on some form of antidepressant, and out of that group of people, only about 15% have major depressive disorder, so what’s up with the other 85%?
For the vast majority of people who get prescribed antidepressants, the medication is no better than a placebo, so how can medical professionals still be arguing that depression is as simple as serotonin deficiency? The answer goes back to the control of Big Pharma and cowardly ignorance in the medical world. Nevertheless, that still leaves us with the age-old question, what really is depression? And how can we go about treating it beyond shitty medication? Let’s start by branching off the medical definition, which again is, “a mood disorder that causes a persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest.” While I won’t argue against this definition, to only see depression as a mood disorder and leave it at that leaves out a lot of what’s really going on behind the scenes. Similar to how anxiety is not as simple as fear, but rather a reflection of unresolved trauma stuck in the body, depression works the same way as well. So, let me add some words to this surface-level definition: depression manifests as “a mood disorder that causes a persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest,” stemming from an inability to feel seen, loved, and accepted for one’s authentic self.
Not feeling seen, loved, and accepted for who you really are is a fancy way of saying you are lonely. And, “loneliness and depressive symptomatology can act in a synergistic effect to diminish well-being in middle-aged and older adults,” according to a clinical study.⁵ So, just to make sure you don’t run off and call me a dumb ass, data shows how loneliness and depression go hand in hand. However, to go deeper down the rabbit hole and really understand what causes loneliness, and consequently, depression, we must investigate what leads to someone feeling lonely. Loneliness cannot be defined as spending too much time alone, or else how would you explain many social butterflies going on about how lonely they feel once they have downed a couple of martinis? Since social people can feel lonely, the answer to loneliness has to be found in not feeling seen and loved for who you really are. As human beings in this fake world, we learned to wear masks that reflect a personality that we perceive to be a version of ourselves that is most worthy of love. Most of the time, this habit stemmed from a parent, or someone we deeply valued, only showing us love and acceptance as a child when we played a specific role that they felt comfortable with. Growing up this way handed us the message that in order to feel seen and valued, two essential feelings for human thriving, we needed to put on a persona that did not really match what was going on inside.
As time continues, and we get tired of wearing the same mask, what we perceive as “depression” rears its ugly head and tells us to take off the mask. If you spend years playing a role to hide what’s really going on internally, so you can feel a false sense of love and security, in what world will you not eventually get depressed? It’s as if you made someone drink twelve shots of tequila and asked them to not get drunk. The whole time you are putting on a mask, you are telling your body and mind that it is unloveable and needs to be hidden. So, inevitably, your body and mind will retaliate and tell you enough is enough. This mental and physical reckoning to see your true self as worthy and lovable is what I believe to be the process of depression. Depression, at its core, is asking you to nurture and rehabilitate the previously discarded essence of yourself until you get to a place where you can wear it with pride. Thus, within this rehabilitation, one needs deep rest from the false persona they have been presenting to the world.
One can use this time of rehabilitation to reflect on who they really are. Put differently, within a bout of depression, one can figure out who the person they have been hiding really is. To do so, one has to mentally go back to the moment where they needed to be someone for somebody that they never really were, and take back that power that somebody took from them. Once one realizes that the essence of themselves never really left them, but rather was just waiting to be acknowledged, and they step into that essence, depression has a magic ability of waving goodbye. And that’s because when one begins to feel seen, loved, and accepted for who they are at their core, their heart has a chance to wake up from its slumber. (Major depressive disorder presents a different case, where this philosophy will not help as much).
As you may have noticed, both anxiety and depression serve as personal alarm systems to push you to investigate where something went wrong, so you can heal it and return to homeostasis. Contrastingly to the wicked beliefs of the medical establishment, they are not merely mental failures that reflect a malfunctioning neurochemical system.
ADHD
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, or better known as the NIMH, “Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is marked by an ongoing pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity that interferes with functioning or development” Translated more coherently, according to the medical consensus, ADHD involves bouts of inattention, as well as, or including, a hyperactive mind and impulsive behavior, which in combination negatively affect the functioning of one’s mind and development in childhood. In terms of the neurology causing these effects, consider the findings of a clinical study on ADHD: “We describe how dopamine cell firing activity is normally associated with reinforcing events, and transfers to earlier time-points in the behavioral sequence as reinforcement becomes more predictable. We discuss how a failure of this transfer may give rise to many symptoms of ADHD, and propose that methylphenidate might act to compensate for the proposed dopamine transfer deficit.”⁶ Taken out of nerd terms, since dopamine allows you to take action when you need to do something, and having ADHD means you find it hard to take action when you need to do something, the study argues that this difficulty is caused by a dopamine deficiency, which can be cured by METHylphenidate, a medication which boosts dopamine levels in the brain. Combining both medically accepted viewpoints on ADHD, the medical matrix views ADHD as a failure of the human brain rooted in a dopamine deficiency that leads to inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsive behavior, requiring a medication to solve the problem that increases levels of readily available dopamine in the brain.
Even though this statement cannot be ruled out as incorrect, it only scratches the surface of the deep well of trauma the development of ADHD comes with. (A number of issues beyond trauma contribute to ADHD, such as a toxic environment and a broken education system. You can check out a whole article I dedicated to these other factors right here, which also includes my personal journey in overcoming ADHD). While a lot of the realizations I state here came from unpacking my own psyche, I owe the validation of these ideas to Dr. Gabor Maté, whose work made me feel seen in a world where everyone was telling me I was not only wrong, but crazy. When we were children, and we were subjected to the terror of unmet needs, such as physical and emotional neglect, we had no way of dealing with that intense stress. Usually, fully developed humans fight or flee when exposed to an intense stressor, such as encountering a wild animal and deciding to square your hands up or run. Put into a more relatable experience, when presented with a beautiful romantic interest and the stress arises about whether you are enough for them, you either ask them out in spite of the stress, thus fighting it, or you walk away and pretend as if they never existed, fleeing all remnants of the scene. When we are babies or infants, we don’t have the conscious or physical ability to fight an intense stress or flee from it, so what we end up doing is escaping to the mind, so we don’t have to feel the terror in the body that is so unbearable. This builds one’s mind in a way in which it becomes designed to escape to the mind when faced with bodily discomfort. So, what once started as a childhood reaction to avoid the pain that came with either parental abandonment, some form of abuse, or a serious health issue like asthma, developed into an adolescent habit of escaping to the mind when presented with stressful situations. But how does escaping to the mind affect one’s ability to pay attention?
In life, it’s quite difficult to find yourself away from all forms of discomfort in the body. Whether you need to crank out some spreadsheets or answer urgent emails, you will bring your hungry, thirsty, cranky mind with you every time. This truth suggests that paying attention consistently entails transcending momentary discomfort for the sake of the goal that needs to get done. However, for those who learned to escape to the mind when confronting discomfort, having to do work that doesn’t interest them cannot pull them out of the loop of overthinking about random scenarios to compensate for the discomfort they face in that moment, leaving them unable to pay the proper attention it takes to get the task done in an appropriate time frame. To someone with ADHD, when they are told they HAVE to do something, or else they face consequences, it brings up too much discomfort that they inevitably resort to the distractions of the psyche to soothe themselves. When we give people with ADHD medication that closely resembles literal meth to make them look past their discomfort and focus, we throw away and ignore all the trauma that gets further repressed into the body, either making them dependent on the drug for their whole life, or leaving them in even more pain when they decide to come off the medication. To combat this unfortunate reality, people with ADHD have to take the diagnosis as an invitation to understand the painful infantile period they went through and learn how to get in touch with their body, so they can heal their wounding, rather than putting on a toxic plaster every morning and leaving it at that.
In order to become comfortable in the body, people with ADHD must learn how to safely be with their discomfort, without needing to resort to the psyche for avoidance, moving from a state of constant psychological resistance to the occurrences of the body into a state of existence and unison with the body. This is where mindfulness is the silver bullet for ADHD, where one can learn how to exist in the background of their mind, observing their cascading emotions peacefully, rather than constantly fighting them through psychological resistance. Personally, I love to expose myself to intentionally stressful situations, such as freezing ice baths or deep tissue massages, and force myself to focus on my breath and stay present, in spite of the serious discomfort. This habit has trained my brain to not escape and stay with my body regardless of how uncomfortable I may feel.
Similar to the alarm system of anxiety and depression, ADHD serves as a painful invitation to take a look under the hood to see what needs to be healed, which in this instance, is a terrorized young child who cannot bear to be with his body. Compared to being seen as someone with a failed brain who needs a drug, how much more compassionate and enriching is this perspective?
BIPOLARITY
Returning to our good old friend, the National Institute of Mental Health, let us consider their definition of bipolarity:
“Bipolar disorder (formerly called manic-depressive illness or manic depression) is a mental illness that causes unusual shifts in mood, energy, activity levels, concentration, and the ability to carry out day-to-day tasks.”
In terms of the neurology creating these symptoms, after years of scavenging for evidence of a consensus and asking various psychiatrists, I eventually realized that no agreed-upon consensus exists for what neural occurrences cause bipolarity. However, even though this confusion is true, doctors still medicate patients based on the generic belief that bipolarity creates an unhealthy wiring of the brain, where one’s neurons go haywire, and an overabundance of dopamine floods the brain. Using this questionable belief, they prescribe mood stabilizers, which decrease abnormal activity in the brain, hopefully creating more appropriate neural wiring and regulating the release of dopamine in the mind.
Even though mood stabilizers, such as lithium, are proven more effective than other psychiatric medications at treating a specific mental disorder, the medical establishment is still not digging deep enough to investigate what life experiences cause bipolar disorder. As always, they go straight to the science of the brain and ignore the traumatic history of the person in front of them. This habit transcends to the population, where people with bipolar disorder are merely passed off as having a deeply malfunctioning brain that needs immediate medical intervention, without any sort of compassionate curiosity as to what happened in their life to cause the disorder. If you want to see examples of this in society, then look no further than the treatment of Kanye West throughout his life. Even though he says wild, controversial, and often hateful things, he immediately gets written off as a crazy man with a broken brain. As you can see, we always go straight to labeling Kanye as crazy when he seems to be speaking abnormally, but why don’t we get curious and ask, “what happened to Kanye?” Extending this thought exercise to the general population, why don’t we ask the same thing to every bipolar person we quickly label as crazy? The answer lies in the fact that we don’t understand the personal history that causes bipolar disorder, all we know is the medical establishment’s questionable perspective. So, here is my attempt at pulling the curtain and revealing the truth.
Similar to how depression results from the body eventually retaliating against your need to wear a mask that does not reflect your essence, bipolarity also stems from a split between the person you learned to present to receive love and the one who remains exhausted from that presentation. However, the split with bipolarity becomes continuously interchangeable, whereas depression is a period of time where you spend in the unipolar state of exhaustion from the persona. The unconscious need to split stems from a repeated childhood experience where one had to split for a primary caretaker, usually between a hyperreactive state and one of passive ease or exhaustion. For instance, on my mother’s side of the family, my grandma possessed severe Munchausen syndrome, where she would present symptoms of illness, even if she was feeling fine, in order to receive the love and affection she needed. Witnessing my grandmother like this growing up and having to caretake her, she learned that in order to really love someone, she had to take care of them, especially if they were sick. Growing up, my mother struggled with depression and severe anxiety, resulting in me feeling rejected and not feeling seen properly. In other words, I wasn’t receiving the presentation of love I needed at that time. However, whenever I had an asthma attack or my eczema got bad, my mother would show me extreme forms of love and attention I would never normally receive. This sudden, intense display of love led me to develop Munchausen syndrome, where I would start scratching myself so badly to a point where I was bleeding a lot, or hold my breath and pant until I got asthmatic, so my mother would come and show me the level of love I needed in that moment.
In terms of how this led to a split inside me, I either presented this hyperreactive, neurotic, emotional persona to receive love, or I sat quietly in the background, both exhausted from the repeatedly intense experiences and giving my mother a needed break from me. Having this experience for the first twelve years of my life—before I started going through puberty and rejecting the love of my mother—led to a developed split in my personality between someone who was highly reactive, emotional, and expressive, and somebody who was exhausted from that energetically costly display, as well as quietly hiding in the background not causing any issues. Although this type of split is not common to many, it nevertheless explains my bipolar disorder to a T. And since this split was explicitly caused by generational trauma, it defeats the argument that bipolar disorder solely stems from passed-down genetics. In my eyes, it gets passed down from repeated environmental exposures that stem from unhealed generational trauma. The split also doesn’t have to stem from one parent, I have seen many cases where the split is caused by each parent needing the child to be somebody completely different to receive their love. Whatever the cause of the personal division may be, the split child, in my eyes, is the cause of bipolar disorder. And although medication may be effective in treating people with bipolarity, I still believe each bipolar patient has a right to know and understand the personal history that landed them in that spot. Without that awareness, I don’t see a way out of bipolar disorder, and by that I mean learning to tolerate it with deep love and compassion, as well as noticing when you may be becoming that split child again and taking a step back to self-soothe, saving yourself from the drastic highs and lows that come with the split.
