A Panicked Feeling
I can vividly remember the day that my anxiety turned into full-blown panic. While I spoke earlier about my anxiety about the safety of people close to me, I was always extremely nervous in other situations. For example, before baseball games throughout my teenage years, I was usually so nervous that I could hardly interact with people. While I don’t recall being nervous before exams in high school, I was usually extremely nervous before exams in college. I remember my friends joking that the last person who should be nervous about an exam was me. After getting a B+ in freshmen English during my first semester, I never got anything less than a straight-A during the rest of my college career, but I never learned to relax before an exam. In fact, sometimes, I felt like I was the most nervous person in the room when I was giving an exam. I was constantly worried about the exam being too long, too difficult, too easy, sufficient in covering important concepts, etc.
I had spent the summer of 2001 living in Hampton, Virginia, and working at NASA Langley Research Center. Rita was pregnant with Amanda during this time. This was a great experience, and I came back to State College for the academic year with a lot of enthusiasm. I taught two classes that I’d taught before but had decided to revamp one of them completely. Thus, I started making new notes from scratch. In early October 2001, I was sitting in an area of my office away from my computer where I would write and develop notes for class. Early in the semester, I had gotten ahead preparing notes, but my buffer at that point was basically empty, and I was making notes the day before or the day of a lecture. This wasn’t really a serious problem, but I really needed to be focused on other things (i.e., research) as an assistant (untenured) professor. Plus, Rita was pregnant, and I was feeling constantly drained. I would later discover I had severe sleep apnea.
While sitting at this side desk in my office, I just felt this sense of being completely overwhelmed and thinking that I was never going to maintain what I was doing for the rest of the semester, especially with a newborn at home. I started sweating and trembling (which I now call “the jitters”), and I could not focus on anything. My mind was racing in all different directions, and I couldn’t relax. In previous stressful situations, I could always calm myself, for example, once the game or exam started. However, this time I just could not calm down. I was supposed to be teaching a class that afternoon, and I was panicked that I would not be able to. I have since learned how depression and anxiety can lead to more depression and anxiety, and you can wind up in a terrible downward spiral.
I wound up trying to teach my graduate-level class that afternoon, but the students could tell I was struggling with something, and I recall finally telling them I needed to take a few minutes. At that point, a couple of students told me it was fine to cancel the class, and I remember two of them walking back with me to my office as I trembled. I called Rita, and she came to pick me up. I felt terrible about ending class early, but there was no way I was going to be able to continue. My brain just could not focus.
The problem was, this made me even more anxious about the much larger, and surely less understanding, undergraduate-level class the next day. I wondered if the same thing would happen. I got myself calmed down by the evening and was able to sleep, albeit with undiagnosed sleep apnea episodes occurring about once a minute. Stress has always made me sleepy. However, I woke up even more panicked than I was the previous day. There was no way I would be able to go to work, nonetheless give a lecture. I called in sick. This made me feel terrible and even more determined not to miss any more lectures. Unfortunately, this just ramped up the anxiety, and the downward spiral continued.
During this period, my typical day was as follows. I would wake up in an utter panic with my mind racing. I couldn’t focus on anything, which resulted in me not making even simple decisions. I would stand in the walk-in closet, not being able to decide what to wear, even though I knew it really didn’t matter. You don’t realize how many simple decisions you make every day until each one of them becomes a huge one in your mind.
The mornings were definitely the toughest, but I could usually settle down by the late afternoon. But the cycle would repeat every day, and it became clear that I would not be able to teach classes that semester. My department head found someone to cover for me permanently after Amanda was born and rushed to the NICU.
At some point after Amanda’s birth, I realized that I was not going to be able to overcome these panic attacks on my own and started looking for a psychiatrist that could help. I can’t remember who I initially saw, but he prescribed me Zoloft. The problem with anti-depressants is that they take a long time to start working, and in fact, you never really know if they’re doing anything or not. It’s not like you’ll notice anything different if you don’t take them for a day or two. Likewise, if you start to feel depressed, taking one won’t make you immediately feel any better.
Eventually, I was able to pull myself out of the downward spiral of despair and get back to functioning normally. Going through a case of clinical depression and anxiety was very eye-opening for me. While people understood this far more in 2001 than in, say, 1980, there was still a stigma about it, and I think there still is. Before going through it myself, I was one of those people that would think, “You’re depressed? Just do something fun to make yourself feel better.” Unfortunately, it simply does not work that way. First, everything you used to enjoy does not seem enjoyable anymore. My psychiatrist once told me that when you’re depressed, you cannot understand how you could not be, and when you’re not depressed, you cannot understand how you could be. This is very true. You simply cannot make yourself feel better.
I truly believe that until you’ve gone through it yourself, you do not completely understand, just like men cannot completely understand what it’s like to be a woman and vice versa. People can be sympathetic and possibly even empathetic because they’ve likely had events in their life that were depressing. I’ve obviously been through this kind of depression, but clinical depression is very different; there really isn’t anything that causes it. It would be great if you could pinpoint one thing in your life that you could change to make it go away, but you can’t. In fact, I have realized that my issues usually happen after a stressful event has passed. For example, if there is a deadline, I can focus on meeting that deadline. After the deadline passed, I would feel overwhelmed with all “the other” things I needed to do. Without something on which to focus, my brain would start to race, and every small thing I needed to do felt like something huge.
The best way to make people who have never experienced this understand is to ask them if they could make themselves fall asleep whenever they wanted. They would obviously know they could not. I would then tell them it was like telling someone that was clinically depressed just to feel better. You can’t do it. There’s some chemical imbalance in your brain that simply does not allow it. This is just like how some chemical builds in your brain while awake, allowing you to fall asleep. As an engineer, I would joke that you were simply not able to control the controller in your head. It’s just like trying to unsee something. You just cannot do it, and the more you try, the harder it is. I joke with people now that I should have just told people I had debilitating migraines. While not everyone has had a migraine, almost everyone has had a headache. Thus, they can understand how migraines could make doing anything complicated and empathize with a person dealing with them.
The Zoloft did not really cause any side effects for me besides occasional night sweats which have not happened in years at this point. However, once I started feeling better, I started wondering what it was actually doing for me. As someone hesitant to take medications in general, I decided to stop taking Zoloft. This was, unfortunately, a huge mistake. While I was fine for a while, when autumn came around, I started having problems again. As with many people, I have learned the fall is generally not a good time for me. I wound up in a downward spiral again and had to take a leave from work. Not long after this, three of my nephews died in a house fire. I will discuss this later.
I had stopped seeing the psychiatrist, and I wasn’t sure how to get my prescription restarted. For some reason, I thought that my regular doctor would not be willing to prescribe anti-depressants; now that’s who writes the prescriptions. Rita tried to get an appointment with a psychiatrist as there was no way I was able to deal with it. Unfortunately, no one had any openings. She finally found someone and took me to see him. His office was basically an empty room with a desk. He suggested I take Remeron. I’m not sure why besides him having some samples in his desk. He gave them to Rita, who noticed they were actually expired. He then rummaged around and found some that were not. It was not a good experience, and I think this was the only time I saw him.
He also gave me a prescription for Remeron, and I tried taking it for a couple of weeks. The problem was that it just made me sleep all the time. And when I was awake, I was very groggy and out of it. Maybe if I’d given it longer the side effects would have subsided, but I decided I really needed to see another psychiatrist.
Rita learned that the best way to get seen immediately was to go to the hospital and check in to the psychiatric ward. Rita’s father was bipolar and had been having many problems after he retired and had spent some time in one. Thus, we decided to go to Mount Nittany Medical Center and see if they had beds available. Fortunately, they did, and I was admitted. This was the first time I had ever been admitted to a hospital. It was not a pleasant experience, although a lot of that had to do with the depression. However, I was able to see a psychiatrist who simply said, “Well, it seems as Zoloft worked before; let’s get you back on that.”
I’m not sure how long I stayed in the hospital, but I suspect it was about a week. I learned a lot about mental illnesses and how I could better deal with mine. One thing I realized is that it is different for each person. There were obviously many other mentally ill patients in the hospital, and I realized that I had it very well compared to most of their lives. After I was released, I was able to start developing some coping strategies that worked for me. Unfortunately, the death of my nephews made it all seem pointless.
I have not really had a big problem with depression or anxiety in a long time. There were some episodes at the beginning of the divorce and my initial dealings with the legal system, and I will discuss those later. I have learned that there will be some bad days, but I just have to accept them and not get worried that it’s the start of something bigger. I justify these bad days by simply telling myself I’m sick. I rarely ever get physically sick so being mentally sick for a couple of days isn’t a big deal. This strategy has worked well.