I'm writing this one in response to a challenge run by @naturalmedicine, which I run with @holisticmom and @mountainjewel. If you're interested in writing for this challenge, everyone is welcome. You can find the original post here, and it's running right through to August 15th. Check out the #naturalmedicine tag for some fabulous entries so far.

We both sat at the table with the quite innocuous looking cardboard packet of pills in front of us. I was crying with frustration and rage, angry that I’d been so quickly diagnosed with a disorder that a daily pill could fix, with no questions about my history or information about what the side effects could be, and no mention of ongoing support or follow up. It just felt wrong, but I’d filled the script anyway, and now I had a glass of water and a pill broken out of it’s foil packet and waiting to enter my bloodstream, my brain, my life.

I’d known many woman on anti-depressants. Some were genuinely desperate and without them, I wonder if they would still be here at all. I’m reluctant to say that they don’t have their place in our world, because many lives have been saved by them, but I think we all need to be fully informed when we’re given them, and they certainly aren't the right solution for all of us. It was this lack of information that really, really bothered me. And I was feeling right in my very guts (you wise guts you) that there was something else going on, and they weren't for me.

With the pack in front of us, we poured over all the research and information we could find, all the while me chanting like a mantra: ‘I don’t want to take them, but I need to take them, I don’t want to take them, but I need to take them’.

Three years ago, I’d sunk the lowest that I ever have sunk in my life, and it’s been a roller coaster every since. I had a stress breakdown at work, overloaded with an overfull timetable and a sense of responsibility to the beautiful souls I was teaching. My empathy nerve is incredibly sensitive, my mirror neurons copying the state of those around me, so that as they reached their exams and peak stress and tears, so did I, and all whilst trying to nurture and love them and be the best that I could be. It wasn’t good enough for my harsh inner critic, of course, which constantly felt as I if I was underperforming. Admitting I was sinking wasn’t an option when everyone around me looked so competent and capable and strong. The more anxious I got, the more paranoid I got, and the more isolated I felt from those around me, who I felt rejected my very being. Somehow, all these wires inside me were crossing and fizzing and shorting out. I remember one day being called into the deputy’s office because someone had dobbed me in for swearing in my office. I broke down in tears and said that I just wasn’t coping. She was beautifully sympathetic, and made me feel heard, yet did nothing to ease my workload or to offer solutions.


I don’t know what stress feels for other people, and at the time, I could say I was stressed and identify with that, but I don’t think I could articulate what it truly was or what I was feeling, not adequately. I can describe it in my body, because it still very easily falls into those states of flight or fight, as if there was some damage back then that is taking a long time to respond normally to the world. I can only describe it in the present tense (as is common with trauma, immediate, crippling, evocative, disabling) – my jaw is clenched, the cords of my neck are like piano wires, my chest is tight, my throat constricts, and I just want to go home and curl under a blanket and cry. Each part of me is sensitive to the touch, and every noise appals me. I can’t think and my words won’t line up or behave. I can’t make decisions. And I feel as if every single cell in my body is vibrating with some bad juju. As if, I tell Jamie, it’s going to make me sick. I daren’t mention the c word, because I’m scared I’ll manifest it, but that’s what I imagine is going to happen to my body unless I do something.

So I’m standing there (and again, I write in present tense, because re-living this moment causes me to relive the immediacy of that anxiety), with the pill in my hand, reciting ‘I need this, but I don’t want this, I need this, but I don’t want this’.

Because I don’t want dependency. I don’t want to wake up in twenty years time and still have a pill. I don’t want doctor’s appointments and increased dependency. I don’t want suicidal thoughts or any of the side effects we’re reading, right there, on the internet. There is Dr Google, of course, which we are circumspect about, but there’s also hard data, and anecdotes, which count for something. A lot.
In the blackest of the black, I woke up one morning three years ago and couldn’t get out of bed. I cried, and cried, and cried, and tried to get up, but couldn’t. One mental health day turned into three, at which point I had to call my head of department to say that I couldn’t come in because I was stressed, who then put me in touch with the work counsellor, who described it like this: ‘your mind has broken’. She confirmed that there was no way I could get in front of the classroom, and that I was to go to the doctor’s and get a certificate and she’d hook me up with a psychologist.

It had taken me to actually break, for anything to happen.

This is why I’m hyper alert to the warning signs in others that anxiety might be barking at their door. This is why I’m always asking people how they are, and if there’s anything I can do to help before they break. This is why I’m offering my story as a natural medicine. Because no one saw it coming with me, even though the warning signs were there like big fucking howling beasts in everyone’s face. We need to live in a society that listens and cares and offers solutions, not quick fix pills, to help people cope with the world they live in. It was when everyone stepped in to care that I started to heal.
I'm feeling quite raw as I write this, because writing always does this to me as I articulate the emotion and images on the right side of my brain with the power of the left, as I use my frontal cortex of solutions and rationale on the deep primal rawness of the amygdala.


As J and I read, we confirmed what we’d know already, as we’ve always been fascinated with drug use of all kinds and their effect on the brain and psyche (this is a post for another time, as to why this is, or maybe not - maybe that's oversharing) – that antidepressants have the ability to make the depressive symptoms worse. Now for anyone reading this post who is on antidepressants and it’s working for you, awesome! I’m sure it was the best decision you made for your situation at the time, and had I got any worse that I did, I’m sure I would have made the same decision. And perhaps that’s why the doctor didn’t outline the side effects, thinking that I’d get some relief first before I could come back to the decision to keep taking them (they were careful to say I’d need to be weened off them, at least). But for me, even the thought of increased agitation freaked me out. This increased agitation and restlessness had the potential to lead to suicide, and J just looked at me and said ‘that’s not going to happen, babe’, unable to bear me going through such horror. And then there were the other effects of long term use – lost libodo (no fucking way), gastrointestinal problems, weight gain, immune dysfunction, memory problems and so on. This is just the tip of the iceberg with what I was reading.

In the end, the pill was swept off the table and back into the packet, and the alternatives were put onto the table.

You see, I’ve always been a solutions girl. Even in the midst of my angst and anguish and suffering, that part of my brain was seeking solutions, and I was lucky enough to have the means to support that with a loving husband and a workplace that had, in the end, given me nigh on two months to have the space to get back to health. I’ve also been lucky enough to be raised in a house that used natural medicines all the time, to support our health, from daily nettle teas to Echinacea for colds. Our family doctor was also studying Chinese medicine and acupuncture, as well as Ayurveda, and knowing our family’s open mindedness, always offered us alternatives. I’d always been around alternative folk who eschewed the immorality and prescriptiveness of western medicines we’d been positioned to distrust (I’m not sure I would entirely distrust them, given they have cured my Dad of cancer – they do have their place) and male doctors who compared my body to a car when trying to get me to take the contraceptive pill (no offence to males in general, but I certainly didn't feel understood by them in this context) So though I’d been pushed by a psychologist to consider anti-depressants, and I was feeling bad enough to feel that I needed something to stop what I was feeling, I had another way to approach this that had worked for me in the past.

The pills were put in the cupboard, and we made a vow that if the ‘other way’ didn’t work, they’d be there as a back-up.

So I began considering what would be medicine to me, antidotes to what was making me sick, anxious, paranoid, isolated and depressed. I would finish the year at work, and go back on a reduced timetable, because the money wasn’t as important as my health. I didn’t want to quit, as I needed this job to give me intellectual stimulation and a sense of helping others and I loved teaching kids. That felt like too much of a retreat. I’d continue working with a counsellor (in the end, I hated her pithy wisdoms and willingness to attribute my mental health to long ago hard drug use, swooping on that little tidbit like a seagull, and quit that line, though I’m not dismissive of this kind of therapy at all), I kept up meditation and yoga (which is great, unless EVERYTHING is falling apart at once) and I went and saw my naturopath.

Naturopathy, which I’ve said here before, appeals to my scientific rational side. I like that I can ask her questions, and she will give me the science behind it, assuming I had the intelligence to understand basic biology, chemistry, brain science (rather than analogising about cars). She looked into my eyes (the practice of iridology is quite remarkable too) and just said: ‘Oh honey, your adrenals are so depleted!’.

Adrenal fatigue, it turns out, leads to a lot of the symptoms I'd been experiencing - fatigue, brainfog, anxiety, scattered thinking, depression - you name it. I don't really want to go into the ins and outs of it, because it's getting late in the day and this post is getting overlong, but it was one of the main reasons I was unable to cope. Stress is one of the main causes of adrenal fatigue and I'd basically run my system to the ground. However, with the support of magnesium, inositol and other herbs such as kava, st john's wort and withuania, plus cutting sugar from my diet and being careful with what I ate, I regained a sense of control again over my life, for the first time in a long time. There was hope that I wasn't crazy after all, and that something could be done to in part fix what was making me feel so bad. With the help of my naturopath, I now had a treatment plan to help me through and make me feel rested, revived and nurtured to get back on top of life.

So when I consider all of this, and think about what my natural medicines have been, it's been my beautiful partner, reassuring me and loving me and believing in me. It's been the herbal allies that have worked on calming my system down and restoring it to baseline so I can approach the world more calmly. It's been the gaps in my life away from work so that I can walk in the beautiful world, tend to my garden, surf in my beautiful ocean. It's been my family, asking if I'm okay. It's been you guys, loving me and supporting me here on Steemit. It's been yoga and meditation, strengthening my body awareness and helping me be attentive to early warning systems, and giving me a community to make me feel safe and empowered.

It's all a process, and I'm glad that I have these natural resources to help me, because I sure as hell don't want to open the drawer where that packet sits. Ever.

---

---

Want to find more quality posts? Consider the #tribesteemup trail, and adding them to your autovoting along with #ecotrain.. Please ask if you're unsure what this might mean for you.

You can read about the 8 Pillars of TribeSteemUp here

A community driven curation & mutual support group - request membership here