Chicken or egg - and does it actually matter?

In my experience, poor mental health is all about cycles; more to the point, it often feels like one spends a huge amount of time and energy attempting to break out of cycles. For me cycles are all about anxiety for, as I have already described, anxiety is the worst of the symptoms that come with my clinical depression.

There is an additional problem for me; when I have had a couple of days of slightly less anxiety I become anxious about when the anxiety will return and how severe it will be. Cycles within cycles you might say.

When I was in hospital the therapeutic approach of choice was Group Therapy. Initially I was unconvinced about its efficacy but soon I was as zealous a convert as you could find! The most helpful thing about Group Therapy isn't the occasional amusing interludes when the patients 'gang up' on the therapist (although please forgive me, they can be very funny) but hearing people voice your own anxieties. I found that whilst I was the only one with an obsessive-compulsive concern about financial matters, the fear that anxiety (in general terms) engenders in the sufferer is common. Of course the most dangerous time is when the anxiety (symptom) starts to feed the depression which created it and the cycle becomes self-perpetuating; the anxiety becomes the cause and not just the symptom.

This is a complex and intriguing equation, a kind of psychological 'which came first the chicken or the egg' question and one which I raised with my CPN last week. His advice was as sound as it was unequivocal - clinically (that is in designing a treatment regime of medication and psychological therapies) it doesn't matter. I didn't expect that! But it did help. For my part I can add only this: I will forever be indebted to the medical team that are treating me. They are actually doing so much more than treating me they are caring for me and encouraging me to care for myself - the goal, in my view, of any mental health patient, should be to take the driving seat in their own recovery!

In the meantime I keep trying to wrestle the metaphorical steering wheel away from my anxiety so that I have more control over the vehicle that is my mental health - I dream one day that it will be a finely tuned Aston Martin rather than an MOT failed battered Vauxhall Corsa! My anxities frighten me and sometimes they terrify me - I promised to blog openly and honestly. But I hope and pray that whether symptom or cause (or both), with continued medical support and therapy, the companionship of my family and friends, and not a little determination from myself, the beast that is my anxiety will eventually be tamed! Now where did I leave the keys to the Aston Martin?