A Big Blog Post. Personal. 911 words. Hhhmmmm…

Mental Health. What did you just think when you read those two words? Those people… Crazy… Manic Depressive… Almost always somebody else. Until it becomes yourself. I’ve worked with lots of students who have had mental health issues. I’ve had a phone call when I talked to a former student who was considering suicide. I’ve had to make mandatory reports. But until a few years ago I had escaped this label. And it is a label. Now, I own it. I talk about with my students, my friends and my family.

But in terms of everyday activities… What does Mental Health mean? And why do we have such a bias against helping people with mental illness. Longview. Bedlam. Northern State. So instead of dealing with improving mental asylums and hospitals and their issues, we shut them down and put many of the people who need the most help in our society on the streets in cities where they aren’t likely to freeze to death.

My own mental health journey has been long and sporadic. I’d had a number of episodes dealing with depression after particularly hard life experiences: losing a baby, losing a marriage, trying to find a continuing teaching contract for three years. During that time I didn’t recognize I was depressed until I’d passed through it. It took a huge positive to pull me out of these: my daughter’s birth, a new successful long term relationship and getting a continnuing teaching job.

I’ve witnessed the effects of post-partum depression first-hand. And seeing someone I loved find themselves with the help of anti-depression medicine, opened my eyes to the idea that there was no weakness in helping your body refind its balance and center.

The first time I utilized medication to help was after a particularly hard year. I went from being happily married and successful at work (to the tune of $300,000 in grant-writing for Clearview, the alternative high school I worked at), to losing both. I remember feeling increased heart-rate, sweating and tunnel vision. I felt like I was “faking it” in every part of my life. The medication was pretty low level and helped me keep going for myself, my kids at home and my kids at school. After about a year, things had gotten back to an even keel and I would be starting work building a “new” school, Windward High School, with a group of people who came to be part of my chosen family. But as I came off the depression medication, I didn’t realize that my drinking increased. I chose to take a 400 day break from alcohol and was successful, nearing the end of the 400 days, I wrote my first novel and within three years I had finished two more.

Windward High School was an amazing community, not just a school, but a family. We were not an alternative school as most people think of, but we were a fully accredited high school with all of the state requirements. Three years after the school was established we lost two students and two others were badly injured in a car accident that occurred during a school P.E. Class. This proved to strengthen relationships in our school staff, students and families.

Six months later my first grandson was born premature, he saved his mother’s life by helping doctors discover a growth in her adrenal gland, but we only got to have him with us for 20 days. This, along with an inability to finish my fourth novel pointed toward depression, but I had some coping skills.

A year after that we realized that enrollment in Windward was dropping, we could see the writing on the wall. The district would not be able to continue to support or school if it was not maintaining enough enrollment to support the teaching staff. Before Spring Break we learned that if we didn’t stabilize enrollment by the following fall we would be closed down. Luckily, I had already started on some anti-anxiety/anti-depression medication. That fall, enrollment dwindled even further. So this pain and expectation we staff had been dealing with internally, was shared with the students. This brought some relief. I was also diagnosed with ADHD (though students had been suggesting it for years…) and begin trying medication combos to help.

Since that time, I’ve had a full year of chaotic change transferring to the big comprehensive high school, changing my job mid-year, reducing my hours, and being assigned to teach a schedule I had not asked for. Over these last two years, the use of alcohol to self-medicate had gotten worse again. As I start the new year in yet another new position at work, I feel like the third or fourth medical combination, counseling and self-care, I feel like I am coming out of the darkness for the third significant time.

I feel pain and sadness for folks who have to deal with similar life-experiences and do not have the familial, friend and work support, who do not have the insurance coverage I have or the ability to pay the copays on the insurance they have. I am lucky.

If you are facing life-experiences that are overwhelming, feelings of intense anxiety, depression; please reach out to someone for help. We need to help each other. We need to change the way insurance only works well for the dwindling middle-class and the upper class that can afford it anyway.

Visit Eva Pohler and read more World Suicide Prevention Day, Tuesday, September 10. The FaceBook Live Event is here.