Hickey: Getting Help Part 1: Understanding

It’s a nearly universal consensus that if you are struggling with mental illness, you ought to “get help.” It’s a nearly universal consensus that if you are struggling with mental illness, you ought to “get help.” What’s not so well understood is the staggering amount of effort it can take to get from Point A — reading the Counseling Center’s phone number on a “Talk About It” flier — to Point B: making an appointment.

Mental health concerns, particularly depression, have recently gotten a lot of press at Pitt. Depression made the front page of The Pitt News just last week, and there’s been a widespread push to increase awareness of the resources Pitt offers for suffering students. But the students who need this encouragement the most are often the hardest to reach. If you’re having mental health troubles, you might think you don’t have the time to address them, or that you should be strong enough to power through. You might think that therapy is hogwash or worry that you’ll be pressured into taking medication.

Full disclosure: I was diagnosed with clinical depression the summer after my freshman year, although it was estimated I’d been depressed since early high school. My pretreatment years were peppered with unsuccessful, hesitant and plainly half-assed attempts to reach out for help.  I had — both alternately and simultaneously — convinced myself that A) Nothing was wrong with me, B) Taking advantage of the Counseling Center would be diverting resources from people who really needed them, and C) I wouldn’t feel depressed if I could just stop being such a worthless human being.

Unsurprisingly, none of these convictions brought me much solace — but they did prevent me from getting help until it was well-past urgent. And if these thoughts sounded a little too familiar to you, then you might want to read this closely.

If you think you could be suffering from mental illness, you’ll probably do the same thing you did when you thought you had Mono — that is, find the Wikipedia page for the illness in question and read all the symptoms, checking off which ones apply to you.

This is a perfectly valid first step, and it can be helpful in compiling a list of concerns to bring to your first appointment.

What you should not do is use the Internet to diagnose or disqualify yourself without talking to a professional.

If you’ve ever gone from having a headache to thinking you have a brain tumor after five minutes on WebMD, avoiding self-diagnoses based on Internet research will be pretty self-explanatory to you. However, most people suffering from mental illness have the opposite problem. It’s easy to read the symptoms on the National Institute for Mental Health’s website and think, “I had fun at my friend’s birthday party last Friday, so I can’t be depressed,” or, “My manic episodes aren’t that crazy, so I guess I’m not bipolar.”

Before I got treatment, I believed that my panic attacks weren’t panic attacks because I’d never had heart palpitations or fainted. This is ludicrous, but common. Don’t let it happen to you.

The best advice I can give you? Trust your gut. If you have symptoms — no matter how frequently or consistently — be sure to be in tune with yourself and your “normal moods.” If you’re suffering, nothing else matters — that suffering is valid and you deserve help.

Even if you think your depression, anxiety or other problem might be situational — exam stress, homesickness or the transition problems cited as the reason that the Counseling Center is so busy at the beginning of each academic year — it cannot hurt to make the appointment. The Counseling Center will never make you sign a contract committing to a year’s worth of therapy. If you go in for help during a stressful period in your life and after a few weeks or months it doesn’t feel necessary anymore, congratulations: You’re free to go! Wasn’t that easy?

If you’re still waffling, look at it this way: I’ve never heard a person who had a brief stint with a therapist and then decided they didn’t need it say, “Man, I wish I hadn’t made that appointment and had those three counseling sessions.” But people who talk themselves out of getting the help they need always say, once in treatment, that they regret not reaching out sooner. I certainly do. You can lessen this regret for yourself by trusting your gut, taking the leap of faith and making the appointment now — before you change your mind.

If you have no idea what to expect once you get to the Counseling Center — you don’t know what you’re looking to get out of therapy or what you’d even say to your counselor, or you’ve had bad experiences with counseling in the past — I’m way ahead of you. “Getting Help: Part 2” will focus on counseling — what you owe your therapist and what your therapist owes you.

Email Tracey at tbh15@pitt.edu.