Mental Health Day at CFS Squared

It’s theme day over at the Science and Health Channel of b5 media. This month, Mary Emma and Liz are the gracious hostesses. These lovely gals blog over at Alzheimers Notes. Please go check out their blog for all of the great information surrounding this month’s theme topic. Speaking of this month’s theme topic, it’s mental health. May is Mental Health Month, and so we have all gathered together to have one big mental health day.

This theme day has caused me a little bit of grief (like normal…I always have a difficult time coming up with something to write about for theme day), and this one is no exception. Can you believe I have had a mental block, on the day that we have chosen to support mental health. There is something not quite right about that. This time around, I had a hard time choosing a topic, because there is so much to choose from….and I write about mental health a lot on this blog. So rather than repeat myself, I thought I might go in a bit of a different direction (for me) and discuss a topic that we all know very very well. CHRONIC FATIGUE SYNDROME IS NOT A MENTAL ILLNESS!!!!!

OK, I know that mental health and mental illness is not the same thing. But I am thinking that they can be closely linked enough for me to be able to participate in theme day.

We have all heard the following words “…but you look fine, you just think you are tired. It’s just all in your head.” Enough already! Let’s put a stop to this nonsense, once and for all. It is not all in our heads. We are more than just tired. We are past exhaustion. We sleep ALL the time, because it’s almost impossible to get out of bed. We can sleep for a year straight and not be rested, why…because we don’t experience the REM sleep stage (repeated non restful sleeps will in turn, do really bad things to our immune systems). For those who don’t have CFS, try a little experiment for about a week (ok 4 days), set your alarm clock to go off every 25-40 minutes when you go to bed. So you are getting about 30 minutes sleep at a time, then report back to this blog and tell me of your findings. I suspect that you won’t be functioning very well.

There is a really nasty super flu going around right now (at least in my part of the world) where its knocking people on their a** for a week or more….well people, imagine what it would be like to live with this super flu for months or years at a time…oh yeah, and medication doesn’t really do a whole lot for you. This is what it’s like to live with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. You are exhausted all of the time, you are very very sore (and move slowly), feeling weak, experiencing headaches, fevers, sore throats, swollen glands, food intolerances, your brain doesn’t work the way it should, and the list just goes on and on and on.

No one says to patients with the flu, that their symptoms are make believe. So why do they with CFS? I have my own theory….and some of you may not like this. I think its in part how CFS is treated. As helpful as antidepressants can be, they carry around a very big stigma with them. Personally, when I got off of the antidepressants, my condition was taken a whole lot more seriously by the people who surrounded me. The drugs allowed the people closest to me, to dismiss what I was going through as depression. I heard things like “go outside, fresh air is really good for depression”, or “you are just depressed, snap out of it already”. Saying things like this, does not help. It makes us feel worse, like we aren’t trying hard enough.

When I stopped the antidepressants and started antibiotic treatment (which led to alternative treatments) the little “pep talks” also stopped. All of a sudden, I was being treated for something real. Something that wasn’t so invisible, if I could take an antibiotic for it. This is so very sad.

Looking back on that time, I wish I had the courage/energy to say “back off people, you don’t have any idea what you are talking about…Let me recover in peace”. But sadly, that didn’t happen….but I can say it now. And while my voice isn’t terribly strong these days, I do have a soap box and a trusty megaphone. Just let me climb up here….

“Ahem…back off people, you don’t have any idea what you are talking about….let us recover in peace”.