Today we jump right into the nitty-gritty of how and why my mental illness started. I share this with you as a real-life example with a view to offering a better understanding of mental health issues. A word of warning: this post contains a discussion of childhood illness including cancer.
I was seven years and seven months old when my mother first noticed a small lump on my neck. The lump was a swollen lymph node, hard though painless, the start of a pattern over the next couple of years which would see similarly swollen glands appear under my arm and in my groin.
Many different medical tests and biopsies followed the discovery of the first lump, although no definitive diagnosis would be made for a long time. At first the visits to doctors, specialists and pathologists were little more than an inconvenience for me. However, despite my young age, or perhaps because of it, it didn’t take long for my mental wellbeing to start to suffer when the problem persisted.
A Feeling of Being Different
The uneasiness which accompanied my ill health was made worse by all of the various procedures, including countless needles and x-rays, that I underwent as the doctors tried to make a definitive diagnosis. I remember thinking how ‘different’ to my peers at school I must have been to have to endure all of this.
A little over a year after the first lump was discovered, I developed a nasty cough which tormented me after any physical exertion. I remember having to sit out sporting activities at school, sometimes in plain sight of everyone. It reinforced in my young mind a humiliating feeling of being different to others.
The cause of the coughing was apparently a different affliction to the cause of the swollen glands, a connection very likely though. A chest x-ray revealed what the doctors concluded was pneumonia, and I was admitted to hospital so that both illnesses could be dealt with.
I remember looking at the x-ray as the doctor cast his eye over it. The right side of my chest was one big white shadow – not a healthy lung. However, the treatment in the hospital – a regular needle in the thigh – did not work, and the doctors were bemused by the energy I was showing for someone supposedly with pneumonia.
Further tests ultimately revealed the rare condition ‘chronic cholesterol pneumonia’, a term rarely used today and which I believe is now known as ‘lipoid pneumonia’. I went home after spending my ninth birthday and seven long weeks in hospital, the cause of the swollen lymph nodes still unresolved.
While some kids came to the hospital to be treated and went home quickly, my stay there exposed me to a cruel reality in which some other kids were extremely sick. In fact I learned that one or two of them were “not going to grow up”. Although I found this shocking, it didn’t change how I viewed my own situation; I still considered my peers to be all the kids back at school, and with respect to them, I still felt different, and not in a good way.
It wasn’t until a month before my tenth birthday that the doctors were finally able to make a diagnosis regarding the lymph glands.
By this stage both illnesses had required an endless number of x-rays and blood tests, a lymphangiogram, lung biopsy, broncoscopy, bone marrow test, several operations (mainly to allow biopsies on swollen lymph nodes), repeated spirometry tests and multiple hospital stays.
Despite all of this, at that stage the main impact on me from a mental standpoint had been the feeling of being different to my peers. Although that was far from ideal, my mental challenges were about to get a whole lot more demanding.
I think it was when I heard the word ‘cancer’ that things in my head started to seriously change, not that I was a part of the conversation when the doctor, whom I remember by his dark-rimmed glasses and dark hair (he wasn’t my usual doctor), told my mother exactly what I had. Mind you, I was close enough to hear him say the ‘C’ word, after which I think the pure shock meant that I heard nothing more that was said.
Chemotherapy started immediately after the diagnosis had been made. That was fifty years ago this year. Although this signified the start of what would be a long, difficult road to eventual physical recovery, my mind was about to travel in a very different direction.
I say this for context, not as some sort of idle brag: I was a reasonably smart kid. Regardless, you didn’t need to know a lot about cancer, even as a child going on ten years of age, to be aware that it was a very serious disease. Prominent in the media of the day was the fact that there was no cure, and that actually finding a cure for cancer was one of humanity’s biggest challenges.
Life Becomes Dark as Worry Takes Hold
Great – now I have cancer, this disease from which people die and for which there is no cure. Yes, of course I started to worry. I was a child, not a robot.
Generally speaking, I think kids are underestimated in terms of their capacity to query things going on in the world around them. Although they usually have a carefree persona, we seem to think this inhibits their ability to think deeply or even more critically, to worry. They’re certainly inquisitive and love to know why things are the way they are.
Personally, I worried a lot. My outlook started to change, and life became dark. The fact that I didn’t ask many questions of anyone was partly because of my young age but more because I was too afraid to hear the answer I would’ve been given.
There was also a sense of embarrassment or shame that I found myself in the situation in the first place. Nonetheless, for better or worse, I did not seek answers to my overwhelming concerns. And I did have a lot of questions.
Furthermore, I made every effort to conceal my fears and appear as unworried as possible. Even at a young age, I ‘knew’ that to show fear was not cool. Tragically, many adults still live by this flawed philosophy.
It’s important to note that I have no misgivings whatsoever about what I was and wasn’t told. My loved ones had an impossibly difficult situation to deal with – in more ways than one – and I completely respect the way that they went about things. They did what they thought was best based on all the information they had. And I was certainly never lied to.
Start of my Inferiority Complex
The seeds of my self-doubt had been sown during the two years or so leading up to the diagnosis. From early on in my sickness, when I started to feel different to my peers, my mind was heading in a very undesirable direction. Those two years were the genesis of what would become a significant inferiority complex. In simple terms, I’d come to believe I was much less worthy than everyone else.
Initially I didn’t know what type of cancer I had, although I often heard the generic term “blood disorder” used to describe it. I learned that the chemo would go on for two years, reducing in frequency over the duration of that period.
So I figured there was a good chance I had at least two years of life left, but what after that? Wasn’t the chemo keeping me going? Why would there be two years of chemo and no more? I reasoned that maybe the chemo would fix me up after all, although I wasn’t particularly confident about that. After all, cancer did not have a cure.
Then I heard the doctor talking about “remission”. As a child I loved word puzzles and dictionaries. You could say I was a young wordsmith. Even so, one didn’t need to be a linguistics genius to discover in a dictionary that ‘remission’ was not the same as ‘cure’. In fact, ‘remission’ seemed to suggest that things might get better for a while, but that eventually the disease would be too powerful.
This supported my fear about the chemo only going for two years, but again I reasoned that perhaps ‘remission’ was just a fancy way of saying “You get better for a while, but after that, who knows? It could be good, it could be bad.”
Again, by reasoning that a good outcome was at least a possibility, as slight though it seemed to me, it gave me a hint of respite from my mind’s constant state of worry. While it’s normal for someone’s mind to identify and guard against threats – a human trait which goes back thousands of years – for me this process had suddenly become palpably more acute.
The mental actions I was taking to console myself at this point were perfectly normal and quite reasonable based on the situation in which I found myself. However, although I had no idea at the time, these mental behaviours were the germination of what would later develop into OCD.
Despite the constant reassurances to myself, I felt increasingly as though my fate was not in my hands. My fear was accompanied by a feeling of being helpless and completely trapped. Unless you or a loved one has been in that situation or one like it, words can’t possibly do justice to the gravity of the feeling.
School Life Sees My Inferiority Complex Worsen
Of course I’d go to school and continue to see hundreds of my peers at close quarters. There would’ve been about eight hundred kids in total attending my school. “They’re all going to grow up,” I thought. “They’ll have boyfriends or girlfriends, get married, have kids and grow old. I’m the only one in the school who won’t. Good things will happen to them. Not me. Only bad things happen to me.” And of course school being school, this was an unavoidable, regular, long-term situation.
In an effort to blend in, or to appear normal or ‘cool’, people (both adults and kids) are brilliant at covering up their true feelings. Everyone thinks everyone else is happy, mentally at peace and problem-free. From the outside we don’t get to see the inner turmoil that someone may be experiencing. Living in a world of smiling facades played a big part in my thinking how uniquely bad my situation was.
On top of that, we naturally tend to feel our own suffering (or that of a loved one) more intimately and more acutely than we feel the suffering of others, and we take it more personally. We may even think that our own situation is different, or somehow worse than others. With everything thrown in, I was utterly convinced that I was the one singled out by ‘the gods’, or some other supposed force, to be treated especially badly.
This all had a devastating effect on my self-image. By this stage I truly believed I was inferior to everyone else. This was painful and privately humiliating, so much so that I kept up a smiling facade myself to appear ‘normal’ and to hide what I thought was my own inferiority from others. I couldn’t bear the thought of others finding out how pathetic I really was.
Yet this all happened at a relatively low level of awareness. I rarely thought consciously about it whether at home or school. I didn’t want to face it. I instinctively pushed it to the back of my mind and tried not to dwell on it. After all, the emotions that it evoked made me sick to the stomach.
Although I pushed the painful beliefs that I was inferior and that bad things happened to me out of my conscious mind as much as possible, the horrible effect that these beliefs had on my day-to-day existence was not eased.
I was ashamed of what I was. Although the actual word ‘subhuman’ probably never entered my thinking back then, this is the best way to describe how I truly felt about myself at the time. My fear of humiliatingly being exposed was ever present, and my ongoing ‘cover-up’ made me feel like a fraud. And of course my smiling facade was all part of it.
The beliefs and related feelings that I was experiencing at this time were pivotal in the development of my long-term state of mind. As I’ve just described, this was the essence of how I viewed things at that stage:
- I am inferior to everyone else.
- Bad things happen to me. Good things happen to others.
- I fear what will happen. I feel trapped and helpless to do anything about it.
- I feel shame for what I am and fear being humiliated by having my inferiority exposed.
Of course we all have memories of past events, some more vivid than others, some happy, some sad. Unbeknownst to me, these stark beliefs and emotions from what was my most traumatic period had such an effect that they became etched in my memory as a ‘snapshot’ so profoundly that the mental state I’d had during my period of trauma became my norm, underpinning everything I did for decades.
It’s important to understand that this state of mind was perpetuated by the chemical interplay between mind and body, something we’ll look at within the next few posts. And I reiterate that I was completely oblivious to any of this as I lived my life, year after year after year.
Unfortunately I’m not alone. I have little doubt that the large majority of, if not all people carry similarly negative beliefs and feelings with them throughout their lives.
Often referred to as ‘limiting beliefs’, these mental shackles are borne out of traumatic times or events, and are hidden in the recesses of one’s subconscious mind where people have practically no awareness of them. This is something else I’ll be exploring further within the next few posts.