'Life was just too hard, and I hated living'

 

It was not easy for Aretha Greatrix to run for the St. Albert NDP nomination, considering her lifelong struggles with anxiety and depression.

 

But she did just that, overcoming her fears and thrusting herself into the spotlight. Greatrix credits her ability to put her name forward for the federal election to a set of tools she developed to help her manage her illness and live a relatively normal life.

 

"One of the ways is keeping my stress levels down, because if my stress is high my anxiety hovers at a seven or eight, but if I'm calm and collected, I'm pretty OK," she says.

 

Greatrix manages her anxiety with simple practices such as breathing exercises, yoga, meditation, and walking in the woods. But it wasn't easy to get to where she is today.

 

When she was around 11 years old, Greatrix began to experience symptoms of depression, which included suicidal thoughts, and at that point she began her long journey with mental-illness treatments.

 

"Life was just too hard, and I hated living," she says.

 

Greatrix sought help from medical professionals, but wasn't happy that the first solution offered to her was from a pill bottle. Her family doctor referred her to a psychiatrist, but in the meantime offered her a prescription for an antidepressant – and it wouldn't be the last one.

 

"When I was around that age I went through just about every single one," she recalls. "Some of them were OK, but some of them just made me worse, where I couldn't leave my house and I was crying all the time."

 

She spoke with several different therapists over the course of about a year, but stopped taking the medications at age 13. It was then that she turned to drugs and alcohol as a coping mechanism.

 

"I never liked alcohol, but the whole point was to get drunk so I couldn't feel anything," Greatrix says.

 

Her mother eventually moved her out of the Edmonton area to Toronto to get Greatrix away from the friends who were a bad influence with respect to substance abuse, but the problems persisted. When Greatrix began cutting herself and exhibiting passive suicidal behaviour, like crossing the street into traffic, her mother put her back into therapy.

 

They moved back to Edmonton before long, where she got the news her parents were splitting up.

 

"I never thought they wouldn't be together, so it affected me quite a bit. I then started spiraling into another depression, and I was trying not to self-medicate the way I was before," Greatrix says.

 

When her new therapist's response was to put her on another medication and tell her a lifetime of pills was something she should expect, Greatrix decided to find another way.

 

She found another doctor who substituted pills with strategies to recognize and manage her feelings. She learned breathing exercises and to recognize the signs of an anxiety attack coming on so she could manage it, rather than medicating the feelings away.

 

"I only really started to get better when I really admitted to myself I had a problem," Greatrix says. "I'm sick, and I have a problem I need help with occasionally. Once I acknowledged that, it started to be much more manageable."

 

She eventually stopped seeing the therapist, feeling she had the tools necessary to manage her illness, and spent high school doing very well.

 

That all changed when she was in university. Shortly after a friend's vehicular suicide, an anti-drunk-driving group at her school put a graphic display of wrecked vehicles in the university's quad. The image and associated feelings put her over the edge.

 

That was the straw that broke the camel's back, and she ended up flunking out of university and spent the next two years heavily medicated as an outpatient at the Royal Alexandra Hospital.

 

"That whole year, it's almost like my mind wasn't there. I don't remember a lot about it at all," she says.

 

Greatrix eventually weaned herself off the medication. Since then, she completed a communications degree from MacEwan University, spent four months doing an internship in Washington, D.C., and overcame her anxiety enough to seek public office.

 

The bottom line, she says, is things can get better.

No ‘one size fits all'

While Greatrix spent her time searching for an alternative to pills, other patients see the value in medication and have been able to live more normal lives with its help.

 

St. Albert resident Kirsty Murdoch says every form of treatment serves its purpose depending on the person and the nature of the mental illness.

 

The 33-year-old has been dealing with depression, anxiety, panic attacks, and post-traumatic stress disorder, all stemming from traumatic experiences that occurred during her childhood. She has been receiving various forms of treatment ever since she was 10. At that time, she says, depression in children was largely unknown so she was considered an experimental subject with various medications.

 

Some of them made her tired and "super-numb," unable to feel love or care for her family and friends. Between the pills and her psychological conditions, she wasn't able to fit in. She simply went to school and came home. Somehow, she continued on through university and at one time was a successful business owner. Things were manageable.

 

Then she had kids of her own, and the anxiety flared up. "It's been a struggle ever since," she says. It's so unbearable at times that she doesn't even leave her house.

 

Now, her treatments have a variety of components, including talk therapy, trauma therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy, psychoanalysis, art therapy, counselling through St. Albert's Mental Health Community Clinic, anti-depressants and tranquilizers, along with "good healthy living," such as avoiding caffeine and sugar because they contribute to her anxiety.

 

She also gets regular exercise, eats well, goes to yoga and meditates. That's not even mentioning the wonderful support that she has received from family, especially her husband and her parents.

 

Every one of these treatments is integral to her well-being. Nothing can be left out. Skipping a workout is as bad an idea as skipping her medicine.

 

"Without the pills handling my depression, I would have just such little motivation, such little 'get up and go,' that I wouldn't want to do anything. There were times when I would sit in my closet and just cry and cry and cry for hours. I wouldn't eat. I wouldn't talk to anybody. It's your own private hell. Without the pills managing that, I wouldn't be able to go out and seek treatment. I was that bad," she says.

 

She explains that everything should be considered part of the solution because mental illness is as complex and varied as people are.

 

"We're human. We've all gone through – for lack of a better word – shit in our lives. I am doing a lot more therapies than I think a lot of people would have to do. Some people might be able to handle just the pills or just the cognitive behavioural therapy. It has taken me the larger part of my life to figure out what actually helps me. I have to have a team of people working with me because of how bad I am."

 

"There is no 'one size fits all' approach," she says.

Need for support

Former NHL goaltender Kelly Hrudey has seen first-hand how difficult it can be for someone suffering from mental illness to stick with a treatment plan and make it work.

 

When his daughter Kaitlin was diagnosed with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, her parents' support and encouragement played a major role in helping with her recovery instead of enabling her desire to avoid anxiety-inducing situations.

 

"I'm sure she'll tell you there were times she really hated us," he says. "We had to do some really hard things in forcing her to push herself to try to get better."

 

Hrudey recalled times when she would phone, begging to come home from a dance class, or begging to stay home while in the school drop-off zone. She would even call family friends for a ride and lie, saying she couldn't reach her parents.

 

"For us, we had to make sure we followed through and not let our heart get in the way, and do what we wanted to do but couldn't," he says. "I did wrestle with it, in my head, but when it came time for action I just did the right thing."

 

In their case, supporting meant helping her stick with her doctor's recommendations, which ultimately helped her live a better life.

 

For Greatrix, her own mother's support was instrumental in helping her through her mental illness, but for a very different reason.

 

When she was doubtful about the medications she was on, or doubtful about her doctor's philosophies, her mother would encourage her to get second and third opinions.

 

It's a message she hopes every other young person out there struggling with mental illness hears loud and clear.

 

"It's OK to say, 'I don't think we're seeing eye to eye, and I need to find someone else,'" she says. "I don't think we give kids or people in general that power to say, 'just tell me what you need.' "

Treatment options

While patients struggle to find therapy solutions that work best for them, doctors too are working to better understand the various treatment options.

 

Dr. Michael Trew, Alberta Health's chief addictions and mental health officer, says the scientific understanding of mental illness and the treatments have evolved over the years, but says it's important to recognize the science is not perfect.

 

Nonetheless, there are plenty of options out there that work for people, whether it's a pharmaceutical option or otherwise. Cognitive behavioural therapy is one non-pharmaceutical option that has had a lot of success over the past several decades.

 

"Really, the idea there is when you're anxious or depressed, that drives your thought patterns so you tend to think in overly negative ways, to expect bad things to happen," he says.

 

Using cognitive behavioural therapy, patients can learn to recognize when their own thought patterns are contributing to their depression or anxiety, and over a few weeks or months recognizing those thought patterns, their outlook can improve significantly.

 

"We can actually show that when people are moderately depressed, for instance, if you do some of that cognitive behavioural therapy work, you actually see increased activity. So a certain kind of talk therapy can actually change some of that activity in the brain," Trew says.

 

Pharmaceutical options work on the same principle, whether they're being used on a long-term or short-term basis. The intent is that the drugs will help enhance those connections within the brain, in a way similar to what can be achieved with cognitive behavioural therapy.

 

Thomas Holmes, a psychologist with the Sturgeon School Division, says the key to treating mental illness is for a patient to confront it and develop strategies to manage it, rather than avoiding it.

 

"Certainly that can create that cycle of avoidance, where we continually avoid what makes us anxious, and, of course, it can get worse," he says.

 

More significantly, he notes, we must look at prevention and early intervention as being as important as cures. He spoke of the rule of five, where youths should have five solid connections to adults in their lives, whether they're parents, coaches, teachers, or otherwise.

 

"As a child, it's not that having the anchors would prevent a child from having difficulties, but they're able to provide the types of supports for that child so they can manage it effectively," Holmes says.