Its been just over 10-years that I've been conscious or 'aware' of my mental health, initially around depression and subsequently more of an understanding around anxiety and social anxiety. Throughout this time - and prior to being conscious/aware of - I've struggled in various ways and managed to make ground in various ways as well, and I'd say that in the past 4 years, at least, I've taken my own wellbeing even more seriously, accepting that if I am going to reach or maintain levels of wellness that I want, then I'm going to have to be active about this and not more-so passively riding the waves of mood or the impact-of-the-world that can spin or sink me.
What I don't want to do in this post is go into my own history or the causal factors behind my own experience of mental health. I don't feel the need to dwell on that stuff or inform others about it in detail either. But I'm doing a bit of working-through of what I'm trying at the moment, in terms of mental wellbeing, and as part of this working-through I wanted to write something down and capture this moment.
Years back, when I first became aware of my own poor mental health at the time, I didn't have any real framework or point of reference to help me understand what I was experiencing or find ways to deal with it. This was around 2007/8 - and in my experience this was long before 'mental health' was such a common or everyday term. Back then, this stuff was still something that didn't really have a common social place in language, at least not in the circles that I moved in. So confronting the experience in the first place was disorienting; the internal experience that something was not right. And then knowing what to do about it was a mystery, particularly when I didn't even have the language or framework through which to understand what I was experiencing. I read something about aerobic exercise and serotonin, and sure enough that became my go-to method of balance, and has remained the solid foundation of how I manage my wellbeing to this day. I started running. Running a lot. I went from a social life of computer games, reading text/literature (I had just finished my undergrad degree in an arts/humanities subject), getting high, and being absorbed in a world of movies/art, to starting to run regularly. It was a shock to the system, tough at first and I didn't enjoy it. But soon enough I began to notice the difference that this regular activity of bodily exhaustion had on my wellbeing. For a start, I found that if I ran enough then I simply *couldn't* think anymore, and that was something of a release from my problems. I ran so much I couldn't think, there was no room for thoughts to swim around my mind as my body just worked to move like a mechanism, mental faculties dedicated just to breathing and repeating the motion: one foot in front of another, the icy cold air of winter suburbs against my skin, and just breathing. Breathing and moving and being - away from thought. I couldn't think, and through the exhaustion I think my mood became more stable or improved at times as well.
This aerobic exercise has always been the foundation for better wellbeing for me, but it still hasn't been quite enough to go towards solving (if such a thing is possible) or actively addressing my issues. I started meditating (as with the language of 'mental health', this was somewhat before 'mindfulness' was a term in such common currency - though perhaps around the cusp of its coming to prominence in my world; I remember reading one article in the newspaper about meditation and I started looking into it). I rocked up to a local buddhist centre, not keen at all to learn anything but the technique of meditation (none of the religious/spiritual side of things) and I learned to meditate. I would return week after week, or sometimes months would go by and then I would return, until I felt comfortable enough with the technique to practice almost anywhere and not feel the need for that place/space/ritual in which to meditate. I've been practicing mindfulness now, to varying degrees, for 13+ years. And alongside running this has been a core foundation of managing my mental health, as well as informing my thinking and living in other ways. My approach to mindfulness has matured and changed over the years - and I became aware that what I was practicing for many years as meditation wasn't so much mindfulness as what in sanskrit is termed 'Samadhi' - which is really the concentration or 'one-pointedness' of mind that underpins meditation in mindful living, but by itself isn't mindfulness and doesn't capture the best or healthiest approach to meditation, as I understand it. To reside in this 'one-pointedness' (what could, for example, be an obsession with 'focus on the breath') can itself be an escape from the world/self, rather than an engagement or exploration of these things - an engagement with your own presence, which includes and contains the negative as well as the positive, the melancholy/depressive/anxious as much as the bliss of escape from.
So, mindfulness and aerobic exercise. These have formed the solid baseline of my foundation for good mental health, and living, for over a decade. But they aren't enough - they don't have the measure of me and they aren't the right medication or method to address everything about my struggles with mental health.
A few years back, sometime between 2014-17, I encountered the worst of my own issues and I knew I needed to try other things. A bit more mature and a bit more ready to ask for help rather than try and address my issues just on my own or in isolation, I sought out talking therapies and went through a course of CBT and, subsequently, at the suggestion of my CBT therapist, psycho-dynamic therapy. Both were available to me for free by my local healthcare services, for which I am so grateful. Both helped - the talking therapies allowed me to articulate, with a second person (and not just my own self/mind), some of what I had been experiencing, and help nudge me in new ways to try and address or respond to this. I got a lot out of both of these courses, and I would likely continue some form of therapy if I felt I could really afford it. For anyone out there thinking of trying this stuff, I would recommend at least looking into it. I've heard that not everyone lands a therapist that they can connect with, but I did - I made good trusting connections, and the mere fact of a second person being with you to prompt new perspectives and realistations in yourself can be invaluable. Our own minds, in my experience, tend to repeat our own rhythms and patterns, which is why I also want to mention: psilocybin.
I'd had some psychedelic experiences in more of a party or festival setting in my twenties; magic mushrooms at a music festival, and other experiences whilst traveling/backpacking around Central and South America a few years back. These experiences had always been largely positive but also challenging at times. A powerful psychedelic drug can, in my experience, take all your inner space (good, bad, ugly, complex) and unfold it into the world around and within you, leaving you to encounter and explore it. But the handful of times I'd done this stuff when I was a bit younger was, in many ways, not always in a very mature or considered context. More of a 'hey, I got this acid, let's drop it on the beach and stay up through the night and into the sunrise' - a social experience rather than something more intentionally medicinal.
A couple of years back, though, around 2018, I started experimenting with psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) a couple of times a year with a good friend of mine. We'd go camping in the woods and spend a day or a night exploring the psychedelic experience. In our own way - untamed but informed by our own understanding or grounding - we'd approach this as a medicinal experience; we'd fast from alcohol, sugar, caffeine and other stimulants for a fortnight in the run-up to going away, and we'd spend time meditating and getting grounded in our surroundings in nature, then drop the medicine and have the experience. Its well known now that a lot of studies have been underway into the potential therapeutic or medicinal benefits in drugs such as psilocybin for conditions such as depression - and though I've been interested in these studies, in many ways I don't see eye to eye with how they are being explored; in a modern 'health services' context rather than a more free or creative environment. For me, the psychedelic experience makes more sense if its about an unfolding of self and others and the world around us, not within a clinical setting, or as though taken like any other over-the-counter medicine ('here, drop this and feel better'). With psychedelics, I prefer the approach of encountering the experience in a social, trusting and creative context - exploring nature and self and new perspectives, rather than as though a patient beneath an asymmetric relation of another person.
These psychedelic experiences have been massively influential and good for me. The point I make about about our minds repeating rhythms and patterns above - if I want to get into the science of the thing, that's really what psilocybin disrupts; new and fleeting connections are formed in the brain and in the experience, our sensation and world overlaps and undermines ourselves, our pre-conceptions, our fixed way of interpreting or meeting the world becomes fluid and playful. We feel refreshed and we learn and grow together. I'm grateful to myself and my friend for the time we have spent exploring psychedelics in this way - alongside meditation and aerobic exercise, I'd say these experiences have helped inform a better direction in my mental health dramatically. Its not that the medicine, for example, 'cures' in an instant, so much as the experience allows us to break rhythms/patterns and explore new creativities and potentials - step into new selves.
We carry the fruits of these experiences forwards. The hardest part is maintaining what we learn or experience into the everyday (the integration back to the world). But I know that these experiences have helped my mental health in allowing me to inform my self, and my world, differently - and to try and bring what I can back from this.
Now, fast-forward to today. Two days ago I picked up a prescription of SSRIs. I've never previously taken this type of medication and I've always wanted to avoid it. I have some friends who have been on this stuff for years, and even though there are cases such as these that I know of where a regular chemical change (such as SSRI) has helped people to manage mental health, its a route I've always wanted to avoid. Recently, I have been experiencing some challenges, and I realised that much in the same spirit as which I've explored all this other stuff (aerobic exercise, meditation, talking therapies, psychedelics), I should consider this other thing as well.
I haven't taken it yet, and I'm contemplating whether I should. I caught up with a friend the other day who has been on this now for 2-years, and while it has helped them, they're concerned as to whether they can come off it - whether the issues they experienced before will simply return. So its got me thinking: the only way I would want to experiment with this, if I do decide to, is with a fixed end-date in mind. To see whether this change in chemical composition, for a period of time, could allow me to help establish more regular better behaviours through my challenging experiences in mental health. That is: is it possible to take this stuff for a time, to help nudge/establish more repeat rhythms-of-response (say, to triggers in the world) and then come off this stuff, to hopefully bring forward new habits and new health afterwards?
This is my hope, and this is what I'm contemplating. But I'm honestly not sure. Also, while I don't feel as though anything will be lost from me experiencing SSRIs for a time, I still find myself reluctant to start. I'm not sure why. I think its perhaps me having tried so hard to resist them for so long, or maybe even some tendency I have to consider this stuff as though its not actually *helping* so much as *escaping* (perhaps similar to the point I make about Samadhi above). I don't know.
I thought it useful to share this, partly for my own sake of getting something down, articulated and out in the world, but also for anyone else who may have had similar experiences or if there's something for others to learn from in my experiences.
~ flow
Tags: #depression #anxiety #therapy #mindfulness #wellbeing #headspace #psychedelics #psilocybin #ssri