Sonia Patel's Blog, page 5

BACK IN THE DAY, IT WAS NONFICTION "CASE VIGNETTES" ABOUT THE SEXUAL VIOLENCE SURVIVORS I TREATED. NOWADAYS, IT'S THEIR INCONVENIENT REALITIES IN YA FICTION.

THE HEALING RIPPLE EFFECT

I can’t stop, won’t stop both guiding young people on their healing journeys in my virtual office and writing realistic young adult fiction to reflect these journeys. The more these young people can learn to love, care, and have empathy for themselves, the more they can love, care, and have empathy for others. A ripple effect.

MR. TRUMP, SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN ANY FORM IS A BIG DEAL.

This is the first paragraph of my essay that was published in LENGUA LARGA, BOCA ABIERTA, edited by Isabel Quintero & Allyson Jeffredo, February 2017.

In my office, I guide survivors of abuse (sexual, physical, and/or emotional) on their healing journeys. The first steps are always to ensure safety and support, and then, hopefully, to escape the narcissitic, privileged abusers.

I’m hopeful our country will also escape on November 3rd.

TALK THERAPY CAN BE "LIFE-CHANGING."

Slow and steady, behind the scenes, big things happen. Please, if you or someone you love is going through mental anguish, seek help! It can be life-changing and life-saving.

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
Call 1-800-273-TALK (8255)

Find a psychiatrist: http://finder.psychiatry.org/

I consider myself fortunate to have the opportunity to treat kids, teens, adults, and families struggling with mental health issues. And this card, it’s fuel. I’m grateful.

World Literature Today, NSK Juror Interview!

https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/interviews/festival-five-nsk-juror-sonia-patel-editors-wlt

CHECK OUT THIS GREAT WEBSITE: SOCIAL & EMOTIONAL LEARNING IN THE LIBRARY!

Joanna Drusin, a high school librarian at Brooklyn Tech HS in Brooklyn, has gifted us with a wonderful resource for SEL in the school library setting. Check out her website here: https://sites.google.com/bths.edu/librarysel/home/skills/self-advocacy

I’m grateful RANI PATEL IN FULL EFFECT is featured prominently on the site under the SEL skill of "Self-Advocacy."

Also, here’s a blurb regarding her site and how it can be useful: 

“Social and Emotional Learning in the Library is intended for use by school librarians, teachers, administrators and parents. (The resources are relevant to classroom teaching outside of the library, as well).
Included are tools that librarians and teachers can use to help support specific SEL skills: mindfulness, empathy and friendship, grit and persistence and self-advocacy. I am hoping that these resources will be helpful to others, especially at this strange moment in history when kids have gone through trauma of one kind or another, and can use support and love.
Each skill page also includes suggested bulletin board displays and high-interest books, for grade 6-12. These books would be appropriate for independent reading, book clubs, or full-class study. I've also compiled a longer list of SEL-related titles for 6-12 on the site. In an effort to address the immediate needs of librarians and teachers, I also included resources for remote/blended learning, as well as resources for parents, and resources to help librarians and teachers navigate discussions around COVID-19, the Black Lives Matter movement, loss and trauma.
I hope that these resources can be useful to you in some way. We all have social and emotional needs and are on an ongoing journey of figuring those things out!”

GOT MY DREAM LITERARY AGENT!

I’m grateful. Inconvenient diversity needs a bigger space.

BLACK LIVES MATTER.

My sign—not enough, but not silence & not a blank black square.

THIS BROKEN CURRY-BROWN GIRL WASN’T TAUGHT TO SPEAK

Writing is my truth whereas speaking has been my lie. As a child, little lies dripped off my tongue in fear. Little lies uttered that added up over the years. I’m fine. No, I’m full of rage. That didn’t hurt me. It crushed me. I won’t tell, it’s ok. I’m so ashamed. I’m worthless. I’m nothing. I want to die. In addition to English and Gujarati, lies were the other primary language spoken at home and I learned it well. My family of origin and I spoke lies in public to cover up the awful secrets that defined us behind closed doors. Forced to bury the harsh realities of home, my ability to speak my whole personal truth was snuffed at a young age. The fake smile on my face, the false words that spilled out of my mouth, masked my family’s dysfunctional system and ironically became how I survived the pain of my youth. This broke my developing brain. It biologically hardwired a duality in my existence that I’d later learn as a practicing child and adolescent psychiatrist is common in abuse survivors. My swallowed reality remained hidden behind the fabricated Broadway show/Bollywood film of my life. 

Fast forward to adulthood. In my closest relationships, my murdered personality rejected normalcy and automatically sought the secret chaos and lies that I’d learned growing up. Then I got married and had kids. Old habits die hard and even with them I couldn’t speak up for myself and fell into recreating my family of origin’s dysfunctional dynamic. Only when this almost destroyed my new family was I finally able to realize there was something very wrong with how my brain operated. I descended into the worst depression of my life. My eyes shifted between the gleaming blade of suicide and my children’s pencils. The pen is mightier than the sword. My hand wavered but I chose a pencil, thinking of the family I’d always dreamed of being a part of and nurturing. 

Could I do it, though, when what I’d learned was the opposite? I clutched the pencil tight. My thoughts swirled. My upbringing was in stark contrast to that of my husband and my children. My past has shaped everything about me, including how my brain and personality have formed. Shame has banished me to a dark dungeon, shackled to self-hate and anxiety…

I started writing. My first truths flowed onto the blank page in the bars and hooks of rap and the stanzas of poetry. Rhymes made sense to me. See, I grew up in the golden age of hip hop. Rap, as it turned out, had been the protective soundtrack of my life, only I didn’t know it back then. 

I remember being the first kid in my middle school class to own Run DMC’s Raising Hell and the Beastie Boys Licensed to Ill cassette tapes. When I closed my eyes and listened to L.L. Cool J spit Mama Said Knock You Out or Queen Latifah proclaim U.N.I.T.Y, I didn’t feel the throb of my broken brain. Instead I felt lifted, strong. Salt-n-Pepa’s Push It made me feel, on a physical and emotional level, the clout of confidence I didn’t even know I lacked. Over the years, rap, as well as hip hop dance and fashion became my armour. The dope beats steadied my racing heart. The empowering lyrics were my surrogate voice because trauma had silenced mine. Hip hop dance let me act the way I wanted, free from the chains of automatic shame reactions. And hip hop fashion was my creative, defensive wall. 

I wrote.

Things started to make sense.

I wrote.

My rhymes forced me to confront the secrets and denial that dominated my youth, and the lies that served to perpetuate it all. The written words made me look beyond the tremendous privilege of being the first person in my Gujarati-Indian immigrant family to be born and raised in America. I had the opportunity to make it in the U.S. but the truth was I’d paid a price. 

My jotted rhymes let me investigate my past, sweep away the lies, unearth clues, and then self-reflect. The pencil and pad allowed me to become my own ideal therapist.

What I discovered was shocking and humiliating—the nightly cruel fantasies of being kidnapped and gang raped by older men in order to lull my teenage brain into slumber, the random, violent, and degrading sex that was the norm in college that, ironically, made me feel useful, loved, and protected, the “double identity” of overachiever by day and slut by night, the inappropriate and sexualized attention and expectations from older men during medical school and after that felt “normal” whereas healthy relationships with friends and partners my age left me feeling worthless, and on and on. Barrelling full speed down the path of self-destruction beginning in my teenage years, somehow I didn’t crash until my thirties when I had my own family. The act of creating a new, healthy family went against everything hardwired in my brain. My brain wanted nothing more than the comfortable discomfort of recreating my toxic family of origin system based in chaos and lies. 

I kept writing and analyzing my rhymes. I dug deep into my youth. I admitted to myself that I hadn’t, in fact, been raised in a safe, nurturing environment. I admitted to myself that it had been abusive on many levels. It’d been a chronic, dysfunctional system with secret, systematic grooming, isolation, manipulation, and sexual violation. As a kid and teen, there was no way I could’ve stepped outside of the situation to identify it as problematic. It was the only life I knew. That and no one else thought it was a problem. In fact, everyone commented on how lucky I was. 

The traumatic upbringing left me powerless and robbed of my adolescence and my individual identity development. I didn’t, couldn’t, become my own person with my own thoughts and feelings. I couldn’t let the natural progression of time and small, regular mistakes teach me to make good decisions. I couldn’t speak what was on my mind.

The traumatic upbringing broke my brain, literally. The thing is, no one could see the breaks the way a broken femur can be seen on an X-ray. Under my ever present mask of normalcy, there was molecular, structural, and functional damage being done to my developing brain. It revealed itself in hardwired loops of poorly modulated feelings ranging from rage at small things to shame and fear, a fragmented identity, a profound sense of inner badness, and an inability to connect with people in a healthy way with appropriate boundaries. The pain was different too. It wasn’t physical like when a bone fragment tears through flesh. Rather it remained hidden and felt like when a category five hurricane of negativity ripping through my head or a dense, jagged fog of paranoid anxiety pounding and piercing me from within. 

Trauma, like daily mini-concussions, stunted and wounded my brain, molded and ruined my personality. Trapped in a traumatic environment no one else acknowledged, the “breaks” in my brain weren’t random, they strategically allowed me to survive my youth by trusting the untrustworthy, feeling safe in danger, finding control in the unpredictable, feeling empowered in powerlessness, and believing the underlying lesson of the abuse—that I was wrong, inferior, and unworthy. Simply put, the emotional manifestation of my biologically broken brain was toxic shame. And this toxic shame offset the deficiencies of my family of origin in the way a healthy brain would never have allowed. 

Low level daily shame and intense “shame attacks” dictated everything. What I thought. What I felt. How I acted. I hated myself. I was a bad person. I was unlovable. I felt depressed, anxious, and paranoid. My behaviors were reactions to all of that. 

Understand that the biological nature of these thoughts, feelings, and behaviors wouldn’t allow me to think positive or do the right thing until I had insight into the fact that abuse had hardwired my brain into negativity and self-destruction. And, as with many survivors of abuse, that didn’t happen for me until my third decade of life when I created my own new family.

Up until then, the lies of my double identity were my survival. My living lie allowed me to shut my eyes to my painful reality and dive into making myself the best of everything. I went above and beyond on chores and working at my parents’ store and restaurant. I volunteered everywhere. I was an academic over-overachiever. High school valedictorian. Stanford graduate. Medical school and residency graduate. From the outside, I seemed extremely well adjusted and high functioning. 

But this was a fragile outer shell. When it finally cracked and disintegrated in my thirties, all that remained was the confirmation that I was truly a bad, bad person. The pain slashed and shredded my insides as if it were a rusty blade of suicide. 

The rhymes I wrote let me understand all of this. I wrote rhymes about everything I was thinking and feeling. I wrote rhymes that unlocked more memories. 

If a patient revealed these types of abusive experiences in one of our talk therapy sessions, I’d begin specific trauma-focused treatment. I’d address the patient’s safety. I’d encourage the patient to talk about the trauma, tell the story, and to begin to grieve a lost youth. I’d help the patient learn to regulate emotions, build a new, solid personal identity, and create new interpersonal connections. 

I help trauma patients understand that trauma has broken their brain and caused them to remain stuck in symptoms without the possibility of healing until their truth is told. 

I realized I had to do all of this for myself, even though I didn’t feel worthy. My children were worth it and I vowed to do it for them until maybe, just maybe, I could also do it for myself.

I got deeper into the process of stringing and restringing raw words together. This process transformed into an open dissection of my brain. A way for me to peel away my scalp, crack open my cranium, and poke around at the injured gray and white matter inside. Medical school and residency had thoroughly trained me in the nuances of how adverse childhood experiences (trauma) of all kinds could both prevent and damage normal child and adolescent brain development, but writing allowed me to apply what I knew intellectually to myself. Writing gave me permission to personally accept the proven science that if a scan of my traumatized brain was put side-by-side next to a scan of a healthy brain, the proof of my brain’s injury would be immediately obvious by the differences in the bright colors.

I kept writing rhymes. The words let me grasp that, like many childhood trauma survivors, my negative and secret thoughts, feelings, and behaviors were external manifestations of the internal damage that trauma had inflicted on my brain. It became clear that my underlying self-hate, overthinking, rage, fear, sadness, shame, propensity to make negative decisions based on irrational, anxious thoughts, inability to express my true thoughts and feelings, inability to set appropriate boundaries with people (especially men), and the need for constant sexualized attention from men, were a direct result of how trauma had hardwired my brain from the outset. Like so many of my traumatized patients, I’d been stuck in a survivor mode of recreating the “stability” of my family of origin’s traumatic existence.

I wrote and wrote and wrote and soon I had a three ring binder full of rap and poems. I read and re-read the rap and poems. A newfound empathy for myself took root. Maybe I wasn’t a horrible person. Maybe I wasn’t a worthless object. Maybe I wasn’t nothing. Besides, I thought, I’d never judge my patients or think they were horrible or worthless.

The truth I discovered was this—I was a survivor of a secretly toxic abusive childhood and adolescence that was sold to me as a privileged upbringing in America. There was no acid being thrown in my face. I wasn’t a victim of an honor-killing. I wasn’t starving or living in poverty. I wasn’t forced into child labor. I had tremendous educational opportunities. Therefore I should focus on my good fortune. I did by lying my way through life. But my broken brain didn’t let me forget the secret truth of my reality. 

One day when I was flipping through the binder’s loose leaf pages, it hit me that if I put them in a certain order, it told a story. My story, but also a story not unlike that of many of the trauma patients I’d treated over the years. A verbal avalanche of prose transformed into my first young adult novel—Rani Patel In Full Effect. It had to be the young adult genre because as I knew from my epic self-reflection, that’s where my broken brain was stuck. Plus, I’d never read a young adult novel that realistically depicted the effects and manifestations of trauma in a diverse protagonist. Someone had to do it. Who better than me? A child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist and a trauma survivor.

Through my rewrites and revisions of Rani my words became grittier as the empathy and validation for myself spiked and spilled out as Rani’s raw and real voice. My raw and real written voice that made up for my truth-muteness.

Incidentally, I’m still somewhat truth-mute, especially when it comes to speaking the truth about my past. I haven’t verbalized the entirety of my past experiences to anyone. Not to my mother. Not to my husband. Not to my closest friends or cousins. Not even to the therapist I sought out at one point. The times I tried to speak the facts about my past ended with me minimizing, denying, or retracting. And then my broken brain felt the lies of denial as the stabbing pain of shame, self-hate, and self-doubt. Even small truths unrelated to my past occasionally are difficult for me to reveal.

But I’ve written enough truth to understand that the real me isn’t a liar, sick, or crazy. I don’t want attention. I’m not trying to be famous. I’ve been accused of all of these things by certain members of my family of origin. Of course I’d never think any of these condescending things about my patients who’ve suffered trauma.

I kept writing. 

It’s taken me numerous essays and three young adult novels with a fourth in the works to get to this point of finally writing this because I still can’t easily speak my truth. It’s that hard.

Anyway, by the time Rani was published, the process of writing had become inseparable from my identity. I needed the quiet early morning writing sessions before anyone else was awake. I craved the safety of those peaceful hours with just me, my pencil and pad, my computer, my coffee, and some chill music. That precious thinking and writing time was my meditative medicine to nurture and heal my broken brain. The finished product could maybe even, I hoped, help others heal in a different way than talk therapy in my office.

As a child and adolescent psychiatrist, I’ve listened to the life stories of countless children and adolescents who’ve suffered adverse childhood experiences. The boy beaten by his alcoholic father. The girl raped by her uncle. The girl who’s drunk and high mother abandoned her forever. The boy with the schizophrenic mother who made him participate in her delusional behavior. The sex trafficked girl. The savagely bullied trans boy. The neglected boy who fell into a gang and witnessed unspeakable violence. The twins neglected in an orphanage for the first eighteen months of their lives before being adopted. The girl drugged and gang raped at a party by peers. The girl who’s father died when she was in elementary school. The boy who survived a horrific accident. The heartbreaking list goes on and on.

I can’t see inside their broken brains but the damage and pain is apparent when these teens tell me about their chronic sadness, loneliness, shame, anger, fear, and hurt, their negative view of themselves and the world, their self-hate, their constant worries about being in danger, their paranoia that everyone hates them, their suicidal thoughts, and/or the dangerous behavior they repeatedly engage in (including but not limited to: self-harm, promiscuity, substance abuse, isolation, bullying others, getting into frequent fights, truancy, delinquency, acting impulsively, poor decision making, repeating and recreating what they’ve endured at home, and being drawn to high-risk situations and abusive people).

These teens deserve 110% of my efforts as their psychiatrist and that’s what I’ve always strived to give them. It dawned on me, though, that I could give even more now that I fully understood the long-term effects of my own trauma. Also, seeing Rani in libraries, bookstores, and online made it possible to reach more teens than I could in my office alone. 

Not only that but it became clear that I had something new to offer the existing diversity in the YA world, something the predominantly feel-good diverse YA was lacking—novels that showed how traumatized teens actually think, feel, and behave. Maybe my writing could validate other traumatized, struggling teens and their experiences. Maybe my writing could change the hearts and minds of people who’d come to expect and champion only the diverse YA in which characters conquered adversity in tolerable ways. 

While feel-good diverse YA often makes readers come away less guilty, it can make some diverse youth feel more alone. I know because some of the diverse youth I treat have told me as much. They don’t see themselves reflected in most existing YA. This perpetuates their negative view of themselves. Worse, it makes them feel as if they don’t exist.

These teen patients often say they turn to YA fantasy for solace, but their perspective of being left out of realistic YA reminded me that I’d felt the same way growing up. Back then, there were no Indian-American YA books, characters, or authors. There are some these days but I still can’t relate because most of them are based on the premise of celebrating Indian culture, having a mostly functioning, intact family, and having the luxury to work through normal adolescent issues without the added challenge of a broken brain. I pondered the subject in memories and within the context of white privilege and social norms… 

All shades of America loves an

Indian-American sassy girl

Hero girl

Bollywood-loving girl

Share-her-yoga-and-spice girl

Speak-her-mind girl

But an Indian-American

Broken girl

Silenced-behind-closed-door girl

Abused girl

Not-sure-of-herself-queer girl

Fucks-up-all-the-time girl,

She doesn’t fit the convenient mold

So you scoff and look away, 

Screaming, her struggles are low on our oppressor guilt list 

But broken curry brown girls weren’t taught to scream.

So while you tout the privileged notion of strength in the loudest voice

We’re standing on the unpopular sidelines

Whispering, we don’t need your acceptance and praise to survive, thrive. We’ve done much more with much less.

This type of contemplation stimulated a sense of urgency in me—I had to give diverse teens like this a voice in YA fiction. I had to write about their lives. They deserved to be represented even though their stories may be unpalatable and messy. Even though their struggles may not be hot-button social issues that make the headlines. These traumatized teens typically suffer in silence and I, for one, wasn’t about to add insult to injury by ignoring them in my writing and in the way I write.

I choose to write their stories real, raw, unsafe, and unpretty. My purposeful writing isn’t meant to please anyone. It’s meant to challenge the notion of beautiful literature, in which struggling teens often have unrealistic self-awareness, as the only worthy literature. It’s meant to resist popularity and social norms. It’s meant to be akin to transcribed sessions of my work with traumatized youth. I refuse to water down their stories with fancy writing for the sake of acceptability. Watering down and sugar coating their stories, from my point of view in the mental health trenches with vulnerable teens, would be shortsighted, minimizing, and insulting to them. After all, they’re in the midst of slogging through unimaginable circumstances and are the ones in the most desperate need for empathy from sources outside of the family. 

Struggling teens aren’t categorically “bad” or “attention seeking.” If trauma has hijacked and derailed their brain development, then they may not be able to “speak up,” “rise above,” “get over it,” “move on,” or “just make better choices.” In their real lives, their thoughts and conversations aren’t always overly witty or insightful (though they’re intelligent, they’re chained by hardwired, repetitive, negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors), and they aren’t able to let loose and go on zany, safe adventures. They might simply be trying to get through another day or not kill themselves. 

Perhaps, I thought, my writing could also increase mental health awareness regarding the challenges of living with a brain damaged by adverse life experiences. Perhaps my writing could foster greater empathy for these overlooked, often forgotten teens. One novel at a time, I’m on a mission to ensure the realistic experiences of traumatized teens exist in YA fiction.

My YA characters so far—Rani, Jaya, Rasa, Kyung-seok, and Ha-na—all have brains injured by trauma. They’re walking, talking negativity. It isn’t their healing alone that’s in the spotlight of their stories, it’s their arduous journeys that can’t take place on the same privileged road as teens who don’t live through trauma. My characters might seem or act unfeminist, dumb, whiny, slutty, cruel, “emo,” etc., but those labels don’t accurately describe their true selves. Those labels are what others experience when they witness the external manifestations of trauma-related damaged brains. And the same way those labels belittle the struggles of these traumatized teens, to dilute their stories in YA for the sake of delight and agreeableness is also belittling.

It’s my hope that the inconvenient characters and stories I write will give readers a chance to sit in the office next to me and listen, really listen, to traumatized teens. It’s my hope that my characters and stories will give readers a chance to crawl into the muddy trenches of trauma. 

Rani. Jaya. Rasa. Kyung-seok. Ha-na. They exist. See them. Love them despite their glaring imperfections. Love them despite their disturbing behavior. Love them because they’re strong enough to exist even though their brains have been deeply wounded. They’re doing the best they can with what they've got. They’re clutching onto the hope that growing up will bring liberation from their pain, not knowing that their broken brains won’t let them easily adapt to adulthood because they’re neurologically stagnant in a forever adolescence. They can’t trust or be self-assured the way teens who have the relative ease of a stable upbringing, and therefore a chance at growing their brains more normally, can. They’re doomed to be captives of their traumatic childhood and repeat and recreate their trauma until they can shed the heavy load of their past. This often requires years of tremendous insight, self-reflection, and cognitive work. That’s how long it sometimes takes to build up healthy brain parts that can overshadow the broken parts.

To be clear, the broken parts of a traumatized brain never fully go away. I know this from my training and work as a psychiatrist and also from personal experience. And now that I have an awareness of how trauma damaged my brain, I’m doing the difficult work of recovery. Each day for me requires concerted effort to keep the broken parts of my brain from acting up. I’m constantly my own therapist. I have to challenge, change, or ignore my broken brain’s automatic negative thoughts, feelings, and impulses. I’m learning how to trust myself and others. I’ve learned how to set boundaries with others who don’t have my best interest at heart. Slowly, I’m learning how to speak up about my true thoughts and feelings and protect myself with my words and choices. I’m working on silencing as much as possible my inner bully that hurls insults of shame and worthlessness at me almost everyday. I’m building a new, solid identity. 

No longer am I the “good girl” I was forced to be in my youth. I reject that me because it was the result of an unsafe upbringing that harmed my brain development. These days, I embrace the me-in-progress. 

The me-in-progress indulges in positive fantasies of redoing and reexperiencing my adult life mistake-free. Sometimes these visions of perfection punch me in the throat, particularly when I watch movies or read books about trauma-free friendships and romances that don’t involve the protagonist doing something “wrong.” I’ll go from crying tears of joy and hope to sobbing with anger when I recall my past and my poor decisions. Shaking with rage, it takes me a while to pull myself out of the automatic obsessive nosedive into my horribleness and inability to consistently feel stable in my normal friendships and marriage. At those times I have to take a deep breath and console myself with the fact that I’m actively doing the best I can in the moment to be the best me-I’m-striving-to-be—an intelligent, empathetic, caring, independent, strong, queer person with an honest and unflinching voice and manifested good intentions that are revealed in my roles as a faithful wife, loving mother, dedicated psychiatrist, and keep-it-real author. I’m determined to stay on this path even if sometimes I have to fake it until I make it. I tell myself it’s worth it because I’m worth it. And in the YA novels I write, I’m telling the world that so are Rani, Jaya, Rasa, Kyung-seok, Ha-na, and all the trauma survivors they represent.

MAYBE THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC CAN HELP US END MENTAL HEALTH STIGMA, BECAUSE AREN’T WE ALL A LITTLE CRAZY?

Crazy. Insane. Irrational. Paranoid. Senseless. Let’s admit it—the Covid-19 pandemic has made us all at least a little unhinged. Whether it’s not being able to sleep, or stress-eating. Bursting into tears when normally that never happens, or hyperventilating with panic as soon as the car key is in the ignition. Many people are experiencing mental health fluctuations—subtle to more extreme—as they learn to adaptively cope with the new norms of social distancing and sheltering in place. 

On the bright side, mental health issues born of the Covid-19 pandemic are being taken seriously. Discussions and solutions are readily available online via news articles, podcasts, or social media. And to my knowledge, there doesn’t seem to be any public stigma surrounding pandemic-related mental health struggles. Hopefully, this is an indication that people are less likely to self-stigmatize and therefore more likely to talk about their difficulties and seek professional help if necessary. But dare I dream that this open-mindedness will carry over to all mental illness long after the pandemic is over?

I do.

Because now that we’ve all had a lick, sip, or bite of mental instability, I wonder if we can expand our collective empathy and tolerance towards those with hardwired mental illness (the kind that’s genetic, caused by childhood adverse life experiences, or both).

People with mental illness have the simultaneous challenges of struggling through daily activities plagued by symptoms and disabilities, as well as coping with the stigma from societal misunderstanding. Mental illness shrouds people in stereotypes and prejudices of being dangerous, incapable, or having weak characters. Mental illness increases the risk of being bullied, placed in the criminal justice system instead of the mental health care system, and not having decent employment, safe housing, or health care in general. And those mentally ill people fortunate enough to have access and opportunities may still struggle. Perhaps it’s difficulty with maintaining social connections, or battling low self-worth and shame. They may shy away from obtaining treatment. Their “best lives” may remain out of reach.

Certainly our “best lives” may seem out of reach at the moment. And our mental health is being tested daily in quarantine, with anxiety being what most people describe during our telemedicine appointments. 

Anxiety is a complex brain symptom that’s rooted in overthinking. The overthinking blends and blurs past and potential future bad outcomes into the present, automatically spitting out an array of worst case scenarios that shove you into a bottomless abyss of pain. Soon, negative feelings (panic, fear, sadness, hopelessness, anger, etc.) riddle like bullets. The only way to cease the freefall and machine gun fire is to impulsively act (self-harm, use excessive drug/alcohol use, not eat, engage in promiscuity, etc.)...  

Now, imagine that there was The seeds of the overthinking mights sproat as:

All the pasta and cans of beans will run out!

Everyone else is buying up the toilet paper and hand sanitizer so shouldn’t I do the same?

That person sneezed a foot away from me and now I’m infected for sure! 

That Asian person might infect me!

Why did that person get the virus test while I was turned away?

I have to stay on top of all the news so I don’t miss a single thing!   

Most of us, at some point, determine that these thoughts are irrational, and then we change them to more realistic ones. Self-reflection or talking about it with others generally helps with that. And although some of us have already stockpiled on toilet paper, hand sanitizer, bottled water, and canned goods, we’ve managed to calm ourselves down. We’re on FaceTime with our friends and family, trying to joke and hope. That helps us feel a little better. Slowly, we’re getting used to not being on our way to Costco all the time or constantly adding to our Amazon carts. 

For many people, however, overthinking will blossom into overwhelming fear as issues of Covid-19 infection and illness, death of loved ones, job loss, inability to pay bills, etc. becomes a reality. How do people talk themselves down from all of that? I’m not sure if they can. Tangible solutions will be required to help ease those concerns and worry. I wish I had some answers to those big picture issues. 

I do, however, have a suggestion for the mental health issues that will undoubtedly arise from these very real issues. Let’s give it an official diagnosis. Maybe, let’s say, Covid-19 Pandemic Anxiety Disorder (CPAD). People who’re struggling with CPAD deserve mental health support and having a recognized diagnosis can help them receive such assistance. Because, like people with other already classified anxiety disorders, simple self-reflection or venting isn’t effective. Especially if they haven’t yet identified their anxiety as a brain symptom that needs to be managed, just like the wheezing of asthma or the increased thirst of diabetes needs to be identified and managed. 

As with most mental illnesses, the majority of anxiety types can’t be cured. CPAD may be different, only time will tell. However, treatment is going to be similar. Talk therapy, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, can lessen the severity and improve functioning, although it can take months to years of practice to be effective. Medication treatment may be required. And sometimes, intensive, ongoing social and community services are also necessary. 

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought us face-to-face with real danger but also with anxiety. That and, at times, it’s brought out the worst in us—panic-buying, hoarding, doomsday scenarios, sneeze/cough-shaming, conspiracy theories, and even virus-fueled hate crimes. 

Yet, we will get through this. And when we do, I challenge us as individuals and members of the global community to embrace mental health issues with more profound empathy and tolerance. Let’s move towards positive societal change in terms of how we view and advocate for those with mental illness. Let’s use what we’re learning about our own mental health through this crisis—that we want to be treated with dignity, compassion, and equality—and apply it to those with longstanding mental illness. Maybe, just maybe, we can eliminate mental health stigma once and for all.