My Experience Living with Anxiety

Earlier this year I found myself very depressed. I had always worried about health, but my worrying was becoming excessive. I had stopped taking my anti-psychotic medications and I was barely functioning. One day I hit rock bottom and tried to commit suicide. I woke up in the hospital. I was alive and I was grateful. I knew that I had mistake and I also knew that I needed professional help to get my life back on track.

It was at this point that I was referred by my psychiatrist to an inpatient psychiatric hospital and off I went to Houston. I had never been in a mental hospital before and I had no idea what to expect. Part of me was a little nervous as there were going to be all sorts of new people and it was going to be a new environment, etc. But after about 10-15 minutes, I realized that this was going to be a place that I felt right at home. So, I ended up having a very rewarding experience at that hospital so I wanted to blog about some of the advantages of going into treatment.

So, without further ado, here are my top five advantages of inpatient treatment

1. You can see a psychiatrist every day if you need to.

I know in my real world life that trying different medications can be very exhausting. The simple thing is that you are only going to be able to see your psychiatrist once a week or less. So, if you are trying different medications out it can take months and months to get the mix right. At the mental hospital this was not the case. I could see my shrink every day if I needed to talk about side effects or my feelings or whatever was going on that day. The thing about my psychiatrist was even though she was young, she knew a lot about psychiatry.

2. There are lots of groups

I think group therapy is one of the best forums for getting over anxiety. I know that in my case, having a chance to process with a group really made things easier on me. The only thing that is somewhat bad about the group therapy at a mental hospital is that you have to see the people afterward and live with them, so you can’t just be totally honest like you can in other forms of treatment because if you say something that makes someone upset you have to see them at lunch and then the next group and then dinner. Still, the fact that they have group therapy at mental hospitals makes them so useful.

3. Exercise

The mental hospital will force you to exercise. We learned that many people with mental illness die, on average, 15 years earlier than people without mental illness. The reason for this is not suicide as you might think actually. The reason is diseases caused by obesity. People who have mental illness typically do not exercise as much as people who do not. Learning to incorporate exercise into our daily routines was one of the best lessons learned in treatment.

4. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy

A lot of the groups that we had at the hospital were based on DBT. DBT, which stands for dialectical behavioral therapy, helps people learn how to understand and process their emotions so that they do not control you. I was a little skeptical about DBT at first but I learned so many great techniques such as mindfulness and DearMan.

5. Addiction Classes

So many of the people who were at the hospital had addiction problems in addition to their mental illness. We learned that lots of people with addictions self medicate by using drugs and alcohol. What the hospital did was take us to AA meetings that were held both on site and off. At the meetings we had a chance to talk to regular folks with drug and alcohol problems and also to get out of the hospital for a bit. I learned a lot about how mental illness and addiction were related. I learned things that I never knew before, but that I will never forget.

So, those are five of my advantages of getting inpatient treatment at a psychiatric hospital. I have found that 30 days in treatment is like one year of just going to your therapist and psychiatrist. I think it benefited me quite a bit and I am feeling great since I got out. So, if you are thinking of suicide, realize that there is a better way, and whatever you are suffering through right now, it can and will get better if you take this as an opportunity to treat yourself.