I've come to realise that although I'm writing a blog about mental health, the effects of mental health and coping mechanisms for it, I've only really divulged two of my actual mental health disorders. The first being anxiety and the second being SAD. So I thought that today, I would go over what I suffer with and just a general overview of what it is. I feel quite hypocritical writing about all the things I do without being completely open and honest about my own mental health disorders.
Social Anxiety
Social anxiety is something that I think most people can relate to, or have had some experience with so it's probably the easiest one to talk about. It's where you have a fear of social situations and is one of the most common of the anxiety disorders. The best way to see this sort of anxiety is like a phobia, you dread doing normal everyday things, these things could be talking on the phone, asking for help in a shop, actually shopping, talking in groups, scared of being wrong/criticised, meeting new people to name just a few.
My social anxiety can be really hard to work around considering the field I want to go in. As an actor to have this is so hard, this year has been particularly difficult for me. We've had so many new lecturers this year which has been hard for me. We only have four weeks with them and it takes up to the two weeks for me to get use to them and to not have anxiety around them, but it's longer if they're male due to my severe anxiety around men.
Generalised Anxiety Disorder
This anxiety issue is different from my social anxiety. My social anxiety can cause this to get worse though, it can make such a negative impact on my already anxious self but it is separate from my social anxiety.
GAD affects about 5% of the population and slightly more women are affected by it than men. The reason why it's generalise anxiety disorder and not my social anxiety is that I get anxious for lots of different reasons, not just in social situations, for no particular reason. I have so many anxiety triggers that fall under the GAD, one thing that really gets to me is loud rhythms, with these it's almost as though I can feel the beat in my heart and in my blood, then it changes how my heart beats... it either makes it go slower or much faster which causes me to panic. Eating new food can cause me to panic or eating in a place I haven't before comes under my GAD. I may make a blog post later on going into detail about GAD, but for now those are a few examples of how it affects me.
GAD affects about 5% of the population and slightly more women are affected by it than men. The reason why it's generalise anxiety disorder and not my social anxiety is that I get anxious for lots of different reasons, not just in social situations, for no particular reason. I have so many anxiety triggers that fall under the GAD, one thing that really gets to me is loud rhythms, with these it's almost as though I can feel the beat in my heart and in my blood, then it changes how my heart beats... it either makes it go slower or much faster which causes me to panic. Eating new food can cause me to panic or eating in a place I haven't before comes under my GAD. I may make a blog post later on going into detail about GAD, but for now those are a few examples of how it affects me.
Seasonal Affective Disorder
I've discussed this in length in another blog post which I'll link to at the end, but very basically SAD is Winter depression. It comes and goes with the seasons, so during the times when there's loads of sunlight it completely disappears, whereas during the Winter months when the days are at their shortest is when it affects me the most. It has the same sort of symptoms as depression, but it's just that the symptoms become so much worse during those times where there is less light.
Bipolar Disorder
This is probably the disorder that has the biggest misconceptions around. Very, very simply bipolar is a disorder that affects the mood and causes mood swings between depression and mania. Depression is very self explanatory but the mania is something that a lot of people don't quite understand. Mania is where you feel so happy and easily excitable, you make big plans and have so much energy. I find it makes me so easily distracted and during these periods it feels like I've almost taken drugs. The crash between the mania and depression is probably the hardest to deal with. You go from these elated feelings to feeling so down. I sometimes forget during my mania episodes that I will eventually come down, I hope that the mood will stay forever, but inevitably it doesn't.
I was initially diagnosed with clinical depression for a few years, but then experienced extreme mania and depression and went back to the doctors, who told me that I was suffering with bipolar. My down moods get amplified a lot more when my SAD is playing up which can make it even more difficult to deal with.
I've put some links at the end if any of you want to look into each of the disorders that I have in further detail. I know I made quite a long post just on my SAD and how it affects me but if you want to look at how the NHS describe each of the disorders the links are below. I just thought that seeing as I have been writing this blog for a good few months now, I should open up about all of my own mental health issues so that you guys know where I'm coming from when I talk about certain things. I hope everything makes sense and it's give you an insight into me and my mental health issues.
Stay awesome.
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