3. When did it start?
(This is the third out of a series of seven posts that I wrote for the Faculty of Engineering’s Women in Engineering [WEN] association, for Mental Health Awareness Week, 2017)
I only took action to seek the university counsellor one week before university started this year in March, after I was encouraged by an engineering staff member. He said that he was glad to hear that I was taking actions to look after myself physically, but he was also concerned for my mental health, hence suggesting that I seek someone to address this as well. I thought it would be worth trying it out, because I thought that it wouldn’t hurt to have a session with a counsellor, and treat it like a casual conversation about myself. Thankfully, with uni not having started yet, there was an available slot for me 10 minutes after I walked in, and so I secured this appointment and had a one hour session with a really lovely counsellor.
Before I delve into talking about how this session went, I would like to point out that this one hour was a crucially key turning point in my life. I managed to learn so much within this hour, and uncovered so many more things about myself.
She asked me what brought me here. I said that I was advised by an engineering staff member to come here after my decision to study part time.
She asked why I wanted to study part time. I said that it was because I was going through a major physical health issue that was impacting my life immensely, therefore I wanted to lessen the academic burden and have more time to focus on myself and my health.
She asked what kind of health issues I had. I said I had hip, back, neck and shoulder pains that are so intense that they limit my functionality to a huge extent, such as sitting up, looking down onto a desk to study or write, standing up, sleeping well, and so on.
She showed great sympathy for me, and then asked how I felt whenever I got those pains. I said that I felt upset and frustrated that I couldn’t do things I should be able to, and said that I felt angry and sad that I couldn’t achieve well in my papers because I couldn’t study for even a short period of time, therefore making me feel disappointed about myself. I said that I felt worthless as I am dragging behind my peers significantly. I said that I felt helpless because pain killers like Panadol don’t work for me, and that the pain itself is too great to be subsided by any other methods. I said that I felt hopeless because I don’t even know why I have such great pains, and my GP wasn’t particularly concerned with finding a solution for me, therefore making me feel like I was in the dark about my health, and my future.
She patiently listened to all this and I found myself tearing up as I explained all of this. Then she stood up, and started drawing a diagram on her whiteboard to help me understand what she was about to say.
She started off by saying “Naa-Eun, I think pain is affecting you like how depression affects people.”
Then she drew the cycle of the effect of depression onto a person, with four main components; mood, physiology, behaviour and cognition.
She said when you’re depressed your mood lowers, which then affects you physiologically by blocking serotonin and you feel acutely lethargic. This affects your behaviour with impaired concentration and motivation, short term memory loss, impacted sleep and withdrawal from society or family. These then affect your cognitions, filling up your mind with thoughts such as “I’m useless” or “I can’t function” or “it’s hopeless”, and this in result lowers your mood, creating a strong, unbreakable loop of depression.
As I listened to this more, the more I felt unbelievably astounded. When she finished, I didn’t know where to start telling her about my own life’s correlation with this diagram. Yes, it was a given that I was always in a low mood (how can I not be, when my pains were affecting my life THAT much?), yes I always felt unjustifiably tired all the time, yes I found myself having to try so hard to channel my concentration to do even a simple task, YES I noticed I was forgetting things so easily and not being able to remember many things. And yes, it was all logical that this flow of cause-and-effect made me have endless thoughts such as ‘I’m so useless’, ‘I hate my life’, ‘how am I supposed to live like this’, ‘how can I live another day with these pains’, ‘how can anyone even understand how I feel’, ‘why can’t I study and achieve well like my friends’ and so many more.
For one week after this counselling session, I had one of my worst “low” periods of depression in my life. The counsellor helped me find out so much more about myself, as if missing puzzle pieces found their places inside me. It felt very reassuring that I found these missing puzzle pieces, but to subsequently know that they were named mainly as Depression was not reassuring at all. In that instance, my life felt so empty and soulless and stagnant, and I felt bleak at being aware of the state that I was in. I felt so angry and frustrated, realising now that I didn’t take care of myself enough, didn’t notice things, didn’t identify things, and allowing myself to degrade so much. I felt so stuck and clueless at trying to figure out where to begin from, and what to do to escape from this deep pit. Being in this emotionally unstable state I developed anxiety as well, and am still coping with it to this day.
Looking back at my life BEFORE the turning point in February, I really don’t quite know how I managed to go through full time study with my Civil Engineering degree. Especially for us, doing 5 papers every semester throughout our second and third years, it felt like we had an endless timeline of tests, assignments and projects for all five of the different papers. As these years were designed to give the students a ‘taste’ of the six different specialisations in Civil (structural, transport, geotechnical, environmental, construction management and water engineering) it was especially hard to switch our brains over when learning about and studying for each paper, primarily because they were completely different to each other. I clearly remember a memory I have of preparing for my final exams in my second semeseter of my second year. After study leave began my first exam was Geomechanics 1, which was exactly a week after university classes ended in week 12. I therefore assumed that I could easily spend the whole week to revise for that exam. But on that Saturday of week 12 I felt a massive muscle spasm deep inside my right shoulder, which brought a huge paralysis along my shoulder, neck and the length of my right arm. And for that next week my body was not functional enough to study. I couldn’t lift my arm past my waist and I was bedridden for the whole week, not being able to move, eat, sleep, and most importantly (in the context of a university student); not being able to study. Yes, I could have watched lecture recordings, yes SURELY I could have studied somehow many may consider, but unfortunately the solution is not that straightforward with many of the papers I took, as a significant amount of learning required me to write out workings and use formulas to be able to understand the engineering concept behind the theory. And with only a day or two of having to cram the whole course, I sat the exam with the most fear, worry and hopelessness I’ve ever had over an exam (prior to now). Especially for this paper, as the questions’ answers carried on from each other, it meant that if you didn’t have the solution for the first sub question, the following 25% would be impossible to do. After the exam I had a huge breakdown to my close Civil friends (who I am so thankful of, they were so kind and supportive and caring; you know who y’all are xx), with all my pressure, pains and worries crashing down onto me, with the biggest fear of the possibility that I failed the exam. Thankfully and miraculously I did end up passing the paper, but this was the very beginning of my academic struggles throughout university that were to follow.
But at this point in my life right now, I’ve come so far from where I was in February. Although from February I felt so shit every day and felt like I had no solutions with life, I realised that there were only two directions I could decide to take. One was to immerse myself in my deep depression and give up on life; give up MY life, stay being stagnant at the same point in my life while everyone one else in the world progresses forward with their own lives. The other was to accept the position I was in, be mindful of it and decide to start putting effort into building up myself- because there is NO ONE else other than myself who can make the effort to build up myself and progress on with life.
Therefore, I can confidently say that I have progressed significantly since February, and although I still have a long way to go, I have learnt so much during my journey and I am definitely at a better position than I was 10 months ago. I want to share my story as far as I can, to whoever I can, to let people know that depression is real. One in five people suffer from a mental illness, but New Zealand holds such a strong stigma for mental illnesses in society, that many people are unaware that they are actually a significant part of our lives. Through talking about myself and my journey, I want to change that.
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