by Megan Ortiz
I was alone on a Saturday after midnight when I had my first panic attack.
It didn’t help that I was high, and, looking back on it, it didn’t help that I was trying to work out some kind of cohesive feeling about the hellfire I was going through at the time with a man I love very much.
My heart started racing and my palms began to sweat. I rocked myself back and forth like a mother would for her child, and I started to take audible and deep breaths; but it didn’t help. My mind was already spiraling into the depths of anxiety and panic.
It feels like a heart attack, or that your lungs are collapsing as you slowly sink down into a large body of water. You may think, “I need to go to the hospital, I am, in fact, having a heart attack.” But instead of running with that idea, I picked up the phone and called a close friend of mine in hopes she could talk me into a calmer state of mind.
Truly, state of mind is everything when it comes to dealing with any kind of mental imbalance.
In today’s era of modern medicine, this is often forgotten. I have known a decent number of people throughout my life who are of the school of thought that if they just take something — anything — they will be OK; better, so to speak.
“Stop complaining if your head hurts that bad,” my mom would say to me when I was younger. “Take a (insert variously named painkiller here). You’ll feel better.”
I never gave in (with the exception of a tooth infection from a root canal) because I firmly believe that the human body and mind were designed to work together in order to heal themselves and that taking any kind of medication to alleviate your pain, anxiety or depression takes away from their natural ability to do so.
Columnist Megan Ortiz advocates for alternative ways of coping with mental issues, such as depression and anxiety, as opposed to using various medications to treat them. Photo illustration by Kaitlin Oki /Nevada Sagebrush
It is understandable that when experiencing fear, anxiety, panic and depression, humans would take advantage of the quick fixes like Xanax or anti-depressants. These emotions are regulated by an area of the brain called the hypothalamus, which assists in many things including circadian rhythms, hunger and thirst, sexual reaction, body temperature and the mediation of emotions.
This works with the ego, one of three parts that serve to make up Freud’s structural model of the psyche, which exists to control us through reality and materialistic value. According to Freudian concepts, the ego drives humans to exist in the “real world,” ignoring their need for instant emotional gratification and rather focusing on the material things one needs to live in reality.
And, let’s face it — reality has a lot of shitty parts to it. You will lose loved ones to death; you will lose jobs and lovers. You will fail. You will be rejected. You will worry about paying your bills and how to follow your heart at the same time. All of these things lead to the release of adrenaline and cortisol in the brain, and they give you the impulse to fix your decisions immediately.
Drugs are a sure, immediate fix. It is not inaccurate to say that Xanax will calm your nerves, because it has been proven to do so. However, it does so by disrupting the natural synapses in the brain and the way you are supposed to function.
Not to mention, have you looked up the side effects of such a drug? It can cause depression, memory problems, insomnia, hypertension, tremors and loss of interest in sex — to name a few.
Other drugs, such as antidepressants like Prozac and Zoloft, have been known to cause seizures, intestinal bleeding, chest pain, hives, mania and thoughts of suicide.
There is absolutely no way, in my opinion, that any justification of these drugs can be endorsed when the severe side effects include manic episodes, depression and suicide. Not a single way.
I feel like many people take advantage of psychiatric drugs for not only reasons of simplicity and ease (it is scary easy to obtain these drugs, even on this campus), but also because they don’t know about alternative methods of healing one’s self.
These emotions, all created out of our own energy and mind, can also be tamed by these same forces. Not only can they be, but they were meant to be. The human body is home to more energy than many people realize, and it can actually be manipulated. The only problem with these methods is that people become very skeptical, very quickly — and that’s your ego talking right there, wanting to keep you grounded in what society has bred us to believe and disbelieve.
However, there is a lot of research on methods like energy healing. David Feinstein, a clinical psychologist who has served on the faculty at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, has done extensive research on how to manipulate your own energy. The concept employs methods on how to shift brain patterns that induce unwanted thoughts, feelings and actions such as depression and anxiety.
There are also other methods, such as yoga and meditation, which have been proven to calm the mind in conjunction with the body. I can tell you from experience that the more you think about fear and how anxious you are, the more anxious you become.
It’s all in your head — all the power you could ever want to maintain a happy and fulfilling life. The problem with humans is that we want instant gratification. We have become obsessed with the idea of not feeling sadness, that we have forgotten that happiness would not be definable without it.
That’s why I picked up the phone that night: to talk it out with someone. It does us no good to keep our emotions bottled inside, hoping that we can just take something to fix it, or worse — ignore it all together.
It’s not quick, trying to achieve mental and emotional stability, and it’s not meant to be. But I’d rather feel too deeply — the bad and good — than feel nothing at all.
Megan Ortiz studies journalism and English. She can be reached at mortiz@http://archive.archive.nevadasagebrush.com.
