Episode #63 - A World Between (Temporary & Intermittent Mental Illness)

Mental illness comes in many varieties and one of the most common is the temporary form.  However, temporary doesn't mean its not problematic.  Temporary mental illness actually accounts for many issues both in and out of the church.

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I am your host Damon Socha and today we are going to talk about a more common form of mental illness, one that is temporary.  

Some where between a defined mental illness, needing therapy and long term treatment, and whatever might be considered normal human emotions lies an vague void in the world of mental illness.  Nobody really likes to talk about this mental and emotional landscape well because it is large, very ambiguous and difficult to define.  When does a bad couple of weeks or months turn into something that you have to address with a physician?  When does a bad mood become a temporary mental illness or even something more permanent?  What do you do when it really isn’t a major mental illness, but it is enough to cause family problems, relationship issues, changes in behavior?  How do you deal with what might be termed a more temporary mental illness where long-term medication and treatment might not be needed but issues are rising to the surface and the problems need to be addressed?

Temporary mental illness is far more common than most people think.  In fact, the likelihood that you will experience it at least once in your life is quite high.  The majority of individuals who live to adulthood will experience temporary symptoms of mental illness at least once in their life if not a few times.  Symptoms of mental illness are the bodies way of coping with high levels of stress, trauma, abuse, accidents and so forth.  The symptoms for short-term mental illness often mirror long-term or mental illness.  They may come and go, they may stay for only a time and not show up for years again.  They can be deep and poignant, moderate and longer lasting.  There really is no predictability as to when temporary mental illness will arise.  Sure you can say things like car accidents, abuse, trauma to the body, mind or emotional senses or even simple financial stress, marital stress, work problems can bring forth some form of symptoms.  Even pushing the body to exhaustion can cause a collapse of the emotional and mental system.  What might trigger an event in your thirties may not even have phased you in your twenties.  What affects your neighbor and pushes them to depression may not even cause you to break a sweat.  And yet the same might be true on your side of the fence.  The difficult nature of a more temporary mental illness is that it is truly unpredictable in many senses.  For this reason most individuals never equate their symptoms to a temporary mental illness.  Bad mood, not feeling well, loss of desire and energy, headaches, body aches, restlessness, unable to sleep, and many more common symptoms often are passed off as physical illness or aging but rarely does one equate the current stress level in their lives to a temporary mental illness.

Speaking of long-term illness and its relationship to temporary. The temporary is often how the long term illness begins.  Meaning that temporary turns into long-term but there are no specific reasons as to why or who will be affected.  I am sure that a genetic component exists but science has yet to discover the exact combination. We don’t just feel fine one day and then the next we are diagnosed with major depression disorder or paralyzing anxiety that needs treatment.  Mental illness takes time to develop and many times that development is imperceptible and in short term bursts.  Mental illness may take years to fully develop and the person may not even notice the difference from day to day or week to week or even month to month, although I doubt anyone compares month to month, I can’t remember what I felt like last week.  They might notice a few bad weeks and then things seem to normalize only to return to those bad weeks again.  A few bad weeks are generally easy to rationalize, and if one returns to normal they can be forgotten until they occur again.  However, those bad weeks can turn into something longer lasting and far more difficult, particularly if the person is not listening to the signs the body is giving.  So just because the symptoms appear temporary and environmentally caused doesn’t mean that a larger problems aren’t looming just under the calm seas.  Temporary can become long term, and imperceptible issues can emerge like a sunrise and then blossom into a full blown illness.  It is important to notice reoccurring symptoms especially if they appear progressive.  This is especially true for teenagers and early twenty somethings as this is when long-term mental illness is most likely to occur.  One does not need to rush to the doctor but observation is critical and generally it is advised to have someone else do the observation because we are terrible at self-observation.

There exists a real difficulty with short-term mental illness.  Our society really doesn’t recognize it, in fact, the world has a tendency to ignore it and place it into the category of “if its short-term, not much you can do but take a pill.”  If it’s a teenager, it’s just hormones, school pressure, peer pressure, relationship issues. If it’s twenty somethings its just school or life and relationships issues, career decisions, marriage concerns and those starting life stressful moments. Interestingly enough these temporary (and when I mean temporary, they could last more than a couple of years) more moderate to mild forms of depression and anxiety can cause serious relationship issues, parental-child communication breakdowns, acting out, work problems, behavior problems, and a host of spiritual problems.  I hope that you sat up and took notice.  So many of our issues in life, not all of them, but many can be traced back to forms of mild to moderate mental illness caused by external and sometimes internal forces.  These more moderate forms can cause us to lose focus on important life issues, critical spiritual issues, and over time find ourselves lost in the world chasing what I term internal chemistry, rather than developing and maturing towards salvation and exaltation.  What do I mean when I say chasing internal chemistry?  When you begin to feel those stuck in a rut feelings, saying things like I don’t really know what I want, I’m not really happy, I am doing what I should be doing but I don’t feel any passion towards it.  You begin to chase the internal drug, that adrenaline kick, the excitement for life drug.  The excitement to love what you are doing.  Now I am not saying that chasing dreams and loving what you do are a bad thing.  In fact, they can be a defining moment in one’s life.  Unfortunately, if the problem is more related to mental illness chemistry, chasing the internal drug dream may only buy you time rather than solve the issue.  Often those who are suffering will find that it makes things great for a time and then far worse.  You begin to cycle between chasing the chemistry and the chemistry chasing you.  

In today’s world one doesn’t have to look far to see what happens when a number of unhappy people start chasing the internal drug.  I am not suggesting that all the world’s problems have to do with mental illness, what I am saying is that chasing the drug of excitement, worldly goods, affirmation of performance, prestige and power, tik tok stardom and any number of temporary worldly affirming choices will send you down a road from which very few have returned unscathed.  The world does a wonderful job marketing the worldly internal drug as the answer to your stuck in the rut problem but reality of course is that the world’s marketing is fantastic but its product is terrible.  You will feel that excitement for a time but then those same feelings will return and so you have to increase the dose of internal medicine and work harder, possess more of the worlds rewards.  Sure the drug returns but you are now in an addictive cycle that doesn’t end happily or with your original spiritual life intact.

So how do you even know if your issue is a mental illness or some other problem?  The key to the answer is to eliminate any physical issues, meaning that you will need to see a doctor and then to work on the external forces.  As I have said previously many physical chemistry issues can mimic depression and other mental illnesses and those need to be ruled out as sources of the problem.  Even if the issue is not a physical problem such as lack of sleep, low thyroid numbers, virus like mono, it can be stress that has entered your life, a recent life change or some other outward environment issue is pressing upon you.  The most wonderful thing about temporary depression or anxiety is that it can often be fixed with some life adjustments to those pressures causing the problem. This means that identifying the source of the issue is the first part, and perhaps the easiest part to a two-part problem.  The second more difficult part is then making those long-term good habit-forming changes that allow the issue to resolve itself.  

How do you go about finding the source of the problem? There are a variety of ways to examine your life for those root causes and we have a tendency to do it quite naturally, although we also have a tendency to settle on the wrong cause which is often the easy cause.  For the most part we have a blind spot for the difficult issues in our life that we need to change or difficult past events that might be triggering our current emotional state.  The answer to why is easy, they are difficult and often require long-term effort.  So we look for quick easier changes.  Although generally these quick easy changes lead to far more frustration than relief.  If we have habits that do need changing and are easy to do then of course you can start there but easy answers rarely cause mental illness symptoms.  

My answer is that you are going to need help to find the root source of the problem and then formulate a plan to address the body and mind’s needs.  What you may find is that not one issue but a compounding of issues is actually causing the symptoms.  If your symptoms have lasted for a period of time, at least a couple of months, then you should begin with a medical doctor.  If you can state that you have felt the way you do for a couple of months, I can tell you that it has likely been going on much longer under the surface.  Our minds and bodies do not like the negative emotional states and so we have a tendency to deny and push aside these feelings for as long as we can without recognizing them.

The doctor will run tests to make sure that your body chemistry is functioning normally.  Understand that modern medicine can only test for some of the many chemical reactions that occur in your body.  And much of the brain’s chemistry is not on the agenda.  Your doctor is going to test for those that directly relate to your mental and emotional state based on the chemistry problems they know to be causes as well as other routine testing.  If something falls outside of the normal, it is important to correct the physical problem first.  Although, do not become frustrated if this doesn’t resolve the temporary mental illness altogether. While you are working things through with the doctor there are other options you can begin to review in your life. 

Are you eating a reasonably healthy diet?  I am not asking if you are eating tofu and rice cakes.  What I am asking is are you eating daily and regularly from the basic food groups.  The doctor is also likely to ask this.  If you are living on energy drinks and sugary snacks, probably need to change a few things. Are you exercising?  I am not talking here about running marathons. This means walking, running if you are willing, playing sports of some kind, generally daily aerobic exercise.  Are you getting some sunlight?  Now I know that this has been kind of an emphasis in the medical world as far as vitamin D and energy.  The reason that I am asking is that a mental illness disorder exists that is directly related to the amount of sunlight.  The disorder is called appropriately SAD or seasonal affective disorder.  People with this disorder have a tendency to be depressed during the winter seasons.  Beyond these things are you generally living a healthy lifestyle?  If so then you can probably rule out those things.

You should also consider spiritual concerns in your efforts.  While it is not always the cause, sometimes depression can be caused by sin, or simply taking the wrong spiritual path.  I always hesitate to mention this one because I always had a tendency to key on it when I was in my depressed states.  Meaning I took to heart the idea that wickedness was never happiness.  It is important to understand that the corollary is not true.  Meaning that wickedness does lead to unhappiness but not all unhappiness is caused by wickedness.  Understand that the Lord is merciful. He knows that you are still learning and while you may not have reached perfection if you are honestly trying then your answer should be I am good in my spiritual efforts.  Don’t let this one cause you to get into the “I need to do more service and be more, exhaustion cycle.”  Remember what the Lord reminded Peter when washing his feet during the last supper.  Washing Peter’s feet was sufficient for the Lord, Peter didn’t need his whole body washed.  We have a tendency to think that what we do is never enough for the Lord.  That is not true.  We can do sufficient without driving ourselves to exhaustion on a regular basis.  If you are doing this, then this might be part of your mental illness problems. Understand when it is enough for the Lord.

If you are good in the spiritual area, which I am guessing that you probably are, then there is one more major area of concern to discuss.  It is rather large and expansive but often it is where most temporary mental illness drivers lie.  It comes in various categories.  Abuse, traumatic events, social peer pressures, work pressures, stress of all kinds, even church peer pressures and so many more.  We live in a confusing, unkind, selfish world where people often are not concerned with how they are affecting another’s life.  If you look at just one category I discussed you will find a host of subcategories that cause temporary mental illness on a regular basis.  When I say abuse, you might think of the big three, emotional, physical and sexual and they are important but we often don’t really define what they mean.  For instance a school or work bully can actually fall under emotional and physical abuse.  Bullies are often easier to see when they are large, present and demanding but bullies can be a subtle as a social group unwilling to allow others to participate, social media consistently showing what body type is acceptable when you don’t have that body type, other who have more money showing that they have it and you don’t in subtle ways.

Demeaning spouses who don’t directly say mean things but are consistently negative about what you do with the occasional sorry and flowers.  I could go on.  What you are looking for are those individual or groups who are negatively impacting your life.  This could include groups with which you have no affiliation but who influence you in many ways.  What you are looking for is that which is causing the negative pressure, often that which causes you anxiety is a contributing factor.  If you get sick thinking about going to school, a church activity, seeing a particular person, a social group, ex-relationships, moments in time when something very negative has occurred and so forth, then you have probably hit upon one of the things that is causing your mental illness.  Even then you are likely to have to drill down even further to a specific person, moment or reoccurring moments in time, to get at the cause.

I have discussed these root causes as if you are doing a self-examination, understand that you are going to need help.  Help from friends, family and counselors.  Don’t look at this process as something you can do by yourself.

Now I have really only discussed the physical problems and trying to find a solution.  Temporary mental illness brings with it a host of spiritual concerns.  All of the spiritual concerns I have discussed throughout these podcasts will occur in a temporary mental illness.  Things that will occur are the lack of clear spiritual direction or difficulty hearing the spirit, feeling depressed in places you shouldn’t, like church meetings temples and so forth.  No desire for spiritual learning or nourishment, the feeling as though you have lost your testimony, which you really haven’t, it’s just covered by the illness.  Loss of connection spiritually, emotionally and tangibly.  Relationships including spouse, children, parents and family may change and you may not feel much like being around those people.  Your spiritual life is going to suffer when mental illness strikes its blows.  Now remember that it is unlikely to come upon you that one day you just don’t ever want to go to church again.  Even temporary mental illness will develop slowly enough that it is not often perceptible until it is a significant problem.  Understand that when you begin to feel the feelings I just discussed and your mental state is mimicking mental illness symptoms that your spiritual concerns are not about your behavior or your standing, they are far more likely to be about the illness.  Even if you can look back a few months and see your activity and desire for spiritual things diminishing, it may not be that your spiritual life is problematic but that the illness has taken hold slowly.  You will have to make this decision on your own and Lucifer is going to tell you that it’s your standing that is the problem.  If you have symptoms of depression and haven’t committed major sin then mental illness is likely the answer.

It is important to remember that your mind doesn’t understand what is happening.  All of the things that used to bring you joy and happiness bring a different set or emotions or lack thereof.  The disconnect between what your mind thinks it should be feeling and what it is, is what creates that ugly feeling of depression and anxiety.  It can and is bewildering, disconcerting and because we cannot step back and see ourselves from a distance, you will likely not even understand what is happening.  This drives what I discussed previously the internal worldly drug addiction.  You begin to use adrenaline and other drugs in your body to compensate for the happiness you lack.  Those drugs are most often driven by worldly pleasures and rewards, the ones I discussed early in this podcast.  So it is very easy to step away from the church and go on seeking happiness by worldly addiction.  Again the problem is that worldly pleasures are always temporary and just like any other drug you need more of them to keep happy.  

I understand how difficult it is to stick with the consistent patterns of spiritual development when you no longer find any happiness, or minimal spiritual nourishment.  When you desire to have the same affection for your spouse but can’t seem to find it anywhere.  When you reach out to heaven and it appears as brass.  Spiritually you can’t see clearly, you can’t hear plainly, you can’t feel peacefully, and you wonder why.   Why did I do all this spiritual work to end up here?  Is any of it true anymore?  Why does it matter if I feel this way? It is easy to just quit and yet that is the worst thing you can do.  When you quit and give up the spiritual fight then spiritual matters that were dim become dark, testimony that was once solid feels sandy, heavenly guidance that might have been limited is now nonexistent.  You have walked out from under the protection of the Lord and by so doing have subjected yourself to even worse difficulties and problems.  The only thing one can do in the midst of turbulent spiritual waters is to hold onto what you have, continue the consistent patterns of spirituality even if you don’t feel they are working and then begin the process of understanding the root cause of the illness.  If you do this, you place yourself in the best possible position to work through the temporary and back to the normal. May the Lord bless you in your efforts and as always keep up the fight so that the Lord can do his part.