anxiety – Page 2 – The Sophie Fund

Prince Harry’s Story

April 19, 2017May 19, 2018thesophiefund

“Once you start talking about it, you realize that actually you’re part of quite a big club.” So says Prince Harry, 32, who has opened up in a British newspaper podcast interview about his mental health struggles and how he is dealing with them.

Harry spent 10 years in the British Armed Forces, including two operational tours in Afghanistan where he commanded Apache helicopters, and achieved the rank of captain. None of his military training and experiences, however, prepared him for the severe emotional challenges he faced due to the tragic death of his mother Princess Diana in 1997 when he was just 12 years of age.

In an interview with Britain’s Daily Telegraph, Harry revealed that he sought professional counseling after two years of “total chaos” in his late twenties. He described how he only began to address his grief at age 28 after feeling “on the verge of punching someone” and experiencing anxiety during royal engagements. He says he is now in a “good place.” He credits his elder brother, Prince William, for being a “huge support.”

Excerpts from the interview with Bryony Gordan’s “Mad World” podcast this week:

“I can safely say that losing my mum at the age of 12, and therefore shutting down all of my emotions for the last 20 years, has had a quite serious effect on not only my personal life but my work as well.

“I have probably been very close to a complete breakdown on numerous occasions when all sorts of grief and sort of lies and misconceptions and everything are coming to you from every angle.

“The experience I have had is that once you start talking about it, you realize that actually you’re part of quite a big club.

“My way of dealing with it was sticking my head in the sand, refusing to ever think about my mum, because why would that help?

“[I thought] it’s only going to make you sad, it’s not going to bring her back.

“So from an emotional side, I was like ‘right, don’t ever let your emotions be part of anything.’

“So I was a typical 20, 25, 28-year-old running around going ‘life is great,’ or ‘life is fine’ and that was exactly it.

“And then [I] started to have a few conversations and actually all of a sudden, all of this grief that I have never processed started to come to the  forefront and I was like, there is actually a lot of stuff here that I need to deal with.

“It’s all about timing. And for me personally, my brother, you know, bless him, he was a huge support to me. He kept saying this is not right, this is not normal, you need to talk to [someone] about stuff, it’s OK.

“The timing wasn’t right. You need to feel it in yourself, you need to find the right person to talk to as well.

“I can’t encourage people enough to just have that conversation because you will be surprised firstly, how much support you get and secondly, how many people literally are longing for you to come out.”

British mental health experts praised Harry for speaking up so openly about seeking professional help for his mental health struggles. Sir Simon Wessely, the president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, went so far as to say that the prince had achieved more in communicating mental health issues in the 25-minute podcast than Wessely had in a 25-year career.

Since retiring from the armed forces in 2015, Harry devotes much of his time to charity work. He is involved with Heads Together, which brings together The Royal Foundation of The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry in partnership with charities tackling stigma, raising awareness, and providing help for people with mental health challenges. He also focuses on the welfare of servicemen and women, championing developmental opportunities for hard to reach children, and African conservation. In 2014, Harry created the Invictus Games, an international adaptive sporting event for wounded, injured and sick servicemen and women.

An Instagram A-Z on Mental Health

March 16, 2017March 11, 2017thesophiefund

We love this Instagram series for mental health awareness by Sonaksha Iyengar, a Bangalore writer, illustrator, and graphic designer.

Broadly falling between depression and mania, mood disorders go beyond just “a bad day” or a “fabulous day.” Significant fluctuations in a person’s mood with greater intensity and for longer periods end up causing disruptions in daily activities. Please don’t ask anyone with a mood disorder to “get over it.” It doesn’t work that way.

One of the biggest problems with the way we approach mental health is that we assume the person is lying or faking it. That their pain and struggle is not real because they might not be screaming, or bleeding. Stop. Stop filling our quietness with your erroneous assumptions. Stop thinking that just because we appear calm on the outside, we’re fine on the inside too. Just because we might not have a visible gash, it doesn’t mean that we’re not hurting on the inside. Our heads might be jumbled in a ball of knots, tugging against each other but we may still remain quiet. It doesn’t make our pain any less real.

“I’m doing everything wrong.”

“Everyone’s laughing at me.”

“I think I left the door open.”

Anxiety comes in different shapes and sizes.

If you know of someone who has or has had an eating disorder, please do not make fun of it or of them. It’s not “cool.” There are various ways eating disorders manifest and it’s important to address them and know not to take it lightly. Support them, in anyway they might require.

Bipolar disorder is NOT another way to describe a mood swing or a temper tantrum. So please don’t.

Iyengar’s A-Z project was featured recently on BuzzFeed. Here’s what she had to say:

“I think it’s so important to be sensitive to how another person is feeling and sometimes when it comes to mental illnesses, people can be so harsh.

“‘Get over it’ is not how it works and I think being more aware and acknowledging mental health will help us make a start in the direction towards kindness and empathy.

“It is time to have honest conversations with each other about the importance of mental health. I think the first step is to be more aware, so with the series, I hope to address it.”

Anxieties of the Post-9/11 Generation

January 29, 2017January 30, 2017thesophiefund

TIME magazine has published a must-read article by Susanna Schrobsdorff on the epidemic of depression and anxiety affecting young Americans. Every parent should be aware of the mental health challenges being faced by millions of our kids.

As Schrobsdorff writes, “They are the post-9/11 generation, raised in an era of economic and national insecurity. They’ve never known a time when terrorism and school shootings weren’t the norm. They grew up watching their parents weather a severe recession, and, perhaps most important, they hit puberty at a time when technology and social media were transforming society.”

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The TIME article provides insights into real-life adolescent struggles:

The first time Faith-Ann Bishop cut herself, she was in eighth grade. It was 2 in the morning, and as her parents slept, she sat on the edge of the tub at her home outside Bangor, Maine, with a metal clip from a pen in her hand. Then she sliced into the soft skin near her ribs. There was blood–and a sense of deep relief. “It makes the world very quiet for a few seconds,” says Faith-Ann. “For a while I didn’t want to stop, because it was my only coping mechanism. I hadn’t learned any other way.”

The pain of the superficial wound was a momentary escape from the anxiety she was fighting constantly, about grades, about her future, about relationships, about everything. Many days she felt ill before school. Sometimes she’d throw up, other times she’d stay home. “It was like asking me to climb Mount Everest in high heels,” she says.

The statistics provide another kind of illustration:

In 2015, about 3 million teens ages 12 to 17 had had at least one major depressive episode in the past year, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. More than 2 million report experiencing depression that impairs their daily function. About 30% of girls and 20% of boys–totaling 6.3 million teens–have had an anxiety disorder, according to data from the National Institute of Mental Health.

Experts suspect that these statistics are on the low end of what’s really happening, since many people do not seek help for anxiety and depression. A 2015 report from the Child Mind Institute found that only about 20% of young people with a diagnosable anxiety disorder get treatment. It’s also hard to quantify behaviors related to depression and anxiety, like nonsuicidal self-harm, because they are deliberately secretive.

Read the entire article online here or download a pdf here.

Robin Williams’s Story

October 2, 2016October 2, 2016thesophiefund

The widow of Robin Williams has written a detailed account of the brave struggle with an undiagnosed brain disease called Lewy Body Dementia that preceded the comedian’s suicide in 2014.

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Headlined “The terrorist inside my husband’s brain,” Susan Schneider Williams’s essay in Neurology reports that “the massive proliferation of Lewy bodies throughout his brain had done so much damage to neurons and neurotransmitters that in effect, you could say he had chemical warfare in his brain.”

Susan Schneider Williams used the platform of a medical journal to specifically address her words to medical researchers, saying she hoped the “personal story, sadly tragic and heartbreaking,” would further inspire them to persevere in the quest for a cure. Given the initial media frenzy that dwelled on the actor’s past struggles with depression and substance abuse, the essay also helps expose the harm of stigmatizing suicide through simplistic stereotyping.

Listen to a podcast with Susan Schneider Williams here.

Excerpts from her essay:

My husband Robin Williams had the little-known but deadly Lewy body disease (LBD). He died from suicide in 2014 at the end of an intense, confusing, and relatively swift persecution at the hand of this disease’s symptoms and pathology. He was not alone in his traumatic experience with this neurologic disease. As you may know, almost 1.5 million nationwide are suffering similarly right now. …

Although not alone, his case was extreme. Not until the coroner’s report, 3 months after his death, would I learn that it was diffuse LBD that took him. All 4 of the doctors I met with afterwards and who had reviewed his records indicated his was one of the worst pathologies they had seen. He had about 40% loss of dopamine neurons and almost no neurons were free of Lewy bodies throughout the entire brain and brainstem. …

Not until after Robin left us would I discover that a sudden and prolonged spike in fear and anxiety can be an early indication of LBD. …

I will never know the true depth of his suffering, nor just how hard he was fighting. But from where I stood, I saw the bravest man in the world playing the hardest role of his life. …

Robin was losing his mind and he was aware of it. Can you imagine the pain he felt as he experienced himself disintegrating? And not from something he would ever know the name of, or understand? Neither he, nor anyone could stop it—no amount of intelligence or love could hold it back. He kept saying, “I just want to reboot my brain.”…

After months and months, I was finally able to be specific about Robin’s disease. Clinically he had PD [Parkinson’s Disease], but pathologically he had diffuse LBD. The predominant symptoms Robin had were not physical—the pathology more than backed that up. However you look at it—the presence of Lewy bodies took his life. …

Starting the Conversation

September 1, 2016thesophiefund

Talk to each other… it may save a life…

“Starting the Conversation” is an excellent new guide helping students (and parents) to learn about mental health conditions and signs that need serious attention—and how to talk about them. One in five students will experience a mental health condition in college.

The guide explains why it is so important to have conversations and create awareness—including among students and their parents.

“Conversations allow you to plan for the unexpected; to know what to do if you develop emotional distress, a mental health condition or if an existing condition worsens. Talking about mental health is important even if you don’t experience a mental health condition because a friend may need help. Students often prefer to confide in a friend before confiding in anyone else—or you may notice that a peer is struggling and you may be able to assist. By learning more, you’ll be better equipped to know what to do if you or a friend is in distress.”

Click here to download “Starting the Conversation.” It was released yesterday for the start of National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month 2016 by the National Alliance on Mental Health (NAMI) and The Jed Foundation.

Here’s a sample:

STRESSORS THAT MAY AFFECT MENTAL HEALTH

Relationship breakups

Academic pressures

Poor grades

Financial stress

Social status pressures

Feeling alone or homesick

Feeling marginalized, misunderstood or like you don’t fit in

Concern or worry about your family members at home

Loss of day-to-day family or community support

Drug and alcohol use

Inadequate sleep

Feeling overwhelmed

Grief

Gender and sexuality questioning

Friendship challenges

Sports team losses

Unmet expectations

Read TIME magazine’s report this week on the “Starting the Conversation” guide.

Active Minds is a student organization with branches on college campuses throughout the USA and Canada devoted to “changing the conversation about mental health.” Active Minds is promoting awareness activities this month: click here to read their guide for getting involved.

For parents, a good video to watch is Not My Kid: What Every Parent Should Know. The video was produced by the Society for the Prevention of Teen Suicide.