Mental Health Awareness Week

(Post re: Death Anxiety, Panic Disorder and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder)

Hi! It’s the end of Mental Health Awareness Week, and I’ve dithered all week about whether to post or not. It can sometimes feel like it’s all getting a bit commercialised, and I’m never too sure how much is ‘oversharing’, but generally when I do post about my own mental health, I get lots of people messaging and commenting to connect, and I think that being open and sharing this stuff is a great thing. My own mental health hasn’t been too great lately, but I’ve been taking positive steps.

I’ve posted before in an early blog, ‘Conversations with Mrs Death’, about my death anxiety and panic disorder. With amazing support from family, friends and professionals I was able to seek help and, over the course of a couple of years, went from multiple panic attacks a day thinking I was dying each time to being a generally functioning human. At this time, I also was told that I likely have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (to which Ian replied casually when I told him ‘oh yeah, did you not know?!’ thinking that I’d realised before because it was so obvious! I suppose some things just become so normal that you don’t notice them until they’re pointed out to you.)

Last year, I found myself getting into a bit of an anxiety tangle again – I wasn’t having the full blown panic attacks, but my death anxiety was definitely worsening and affecting my life. I struggled to sleep unless I knew Ian was awake keeping an eye on me, anxious in case I didn’t wake up again for some reason. I would wake myself up in the night to check he was still breathing too (we are both fit and healthy with no underlying illnesses), and started getting really distressed every time he went to work in case he was in a terrible car accident or something and didn’t come home. I worried about loved ones and myself dying all the time, and couldn’t stop picturing awful scenarios, to the point that I’d freeze and not be able to concentrate on anything else. I couldn’t go on a car journey without being ‘alert’ the whole time, vividly picturing gruesome crashes, and couldn’t enjoy day to day life and feel too happy without obsessing over it all coming to an end one day. My social anxiety also worsened – I couldn’t send or open work emails or messages to friends without checking them many times, or asking someone else to check them for me, and was constantly anxious in case I’d somehow offended or upset someone, even over the most mundane interactions. (I will reread this post many times and get anxious about receiving comments.) I had to practice conversations in my head before meeting people. It didn’t help that I’d also found several new breast lumps (happily, all turned out to be nothing to worry about) that really made me worry for a while, convinced that it would be the worst outcome.

Desperate to avoid spiralling into daily panic attacks again, I decided to reach out to Talking Helps Newcastle. The waiting list was originally very long, but I agreed to see a trainee and have sessions recorded, and managed to access 4 months of online 1:1 Cognitive Behavioural Therapy quite quickly. My therapist was lovely, and really understanding (my last experience of therapy was in a group, and I came away feeling that it didn’t really tackle my issues). Together, we worked out that a lot of my anxiety issues stem from getting trapped in OCD cycles, where I get intrusive thoughts about death and dying that I struggle to get rid of, and the more I try to avoid them the worse they become. (For example, try NOT to think about a polar bear for one minute, and suddenly it’s all you can think about… like that, but less fluffy, and you’re fighting the thought all day every day…)

From these intrusive thoughts, I also feel like I have to carry out irrational compulsions including mental bargaining in order to keep people safe, and have underlying beliefs that make me feel the need to be more responsible for others than I can actually be. (Eg. if I *don’t* worry about someone’s safety, they are somehow more likely to be in an accident, but if I think about it *too* much then I will somehow cause it to happen, or if I write something down or say it, for example ‘this person will be in a car crash’, that I will make it more likely to happen. I guess like some people have superstitions about watching football wearing a certain top will affect the outcome of the game, but for me the stakes feel incredibly real and much higher.)

Another interesting point is that OCD is apparently a lot more common in people who were brought up religiously – I am no longer, but was brought up Catholic, and did used to believe that God would see my thoughts and that I had to get things ‘right’ in my head or and be ‘good’ or ‘he’ would know and I would be sinning, and this was reinforced by authority figures around me, including in school.

Going through this therapy process with OCD in mind has helped me to understand the cycles a lot more, and my anxiety has reduced massively in this time, although it is still a big work in progress that I will likely have to work on for the rest of my days. It wasn’t until I started learning about it that I realised how much it affects all aspects of my life, from cleaning and tidying, to checking things, to having to count steps/counteract turning around in one direction, to truly believing that my thoughts might endanger or be able to keep someone safe. Genuinely, my biggest fear about getting married in July is that, because it’s something ‘selfish’ that will make me happy, I will be endangering Ian and myself somehow, making it more likely that one of us will have a fatal accident or illness, and it will be my fault. It doesn’t make much sense, but the internal alarm bells tell me otherwise, and it is taking a lot of mental strength to fight it.

It’s a bit strange coming to terms with being neurodivergent - it’s not something I recognised in myself before. I guess this post is a little shout out to anyone else who experiences similar. I felt really embarrassed at first, and that people would judge me for it and want to avoid me if they knew that my brain worked this way (I know myself that it sounds ridiculous to say I really feel that what I do or don’t think could affect someone else), but I’ve had only lovely responses when discussing it, and have come to understand that it’s just the way my brain tries to help me cope with uncertainty, preparing me for the worst outcomes.

Death anxiety and panic disorder are terrible and distressing things, and OCD can be debilitating - I feel like they are unwanted houseguests who have moved in whether I like it or not, but it’s a relief to know that there is help out there and effective options I can use to ‘turn down the volume’. One of the things that my therapist kept reinforcing that I am taking forward with me, is that it takes so much strength to deal with this stuff, and it is a sign of a caring nature. You are already doing better than you think, and you are stronger than you realise.

Big love,

Jenny xx