“I just wanted to sit by myself in a space and close the whole world off.”
Meet Garry*, one of 6 courageous Kiwis who shared their lived experiences with Authentic Storytelling for Mental Health Awareness Week 2021. This is his story.**
TW: Medical trauma
“I’m in the middle of changing meds, which has been its own sort of roller-coaster. It sort of feels like little electric shocks in my brain and also sometimes a little bit high or buzzy almost. While I adjust, I’m never really quite sure if I’m going to feel perfectly level and normal, or a bit up and down.”
Garry started taking anti-anxiety medication a couple of years ago in the wake of his daughter’s extremely premature birth at just 24 weeks. What followed was a harrowing journey for Garry and his wife through the paediatric medical system: 3 1/2 months in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit in Dunedin, followed by another year and a half of treatments and procedures. In processing the trauma of that experience, he’s realised that the challenges he’s experienced with his mental health date back much further.
“After we went back into Level 4 [COVID-19 lockdown in August of 2021], I went for a check-up with my GP and I basically told her I was not doing so good. She said it sounded like we never really got to the point we were hoping for with my previous medication. We started talking a bit about my history and what was going on; she said that, even though I’d had 5 years of shit which would be enough to cause anxiety issues in anybody, it actually sounded like there was stuff going on for a lot longer than that. Where she would typically be prescribing medication to get people back to feeling ‘normal’, maybe that baseline didn’t really exist for me, and she wanted to try another way. So we eased me off of Venlafaxine and then three days ago I started on Setraline.”
While never formally diagnosed, Garry believes he has Generalised Anxiety Disorder which, he says, can present in a number of unexpected ways. “I wish people knew more about the physical manifestations of mental illness and its treatment. For me, it can feel quite literally the same as being physically sick with a cold or flu. It’s not just in your head and it’s not just a way of thinking.”
Garry lives with his wife and daughter in Dunedin and says that the people he knows are most likely to describe him as eccentric, introverted or even argumentative. “There aren’t a lot of people in my life, to be honest. I have my wife and my closest friend — who I tend to butt heads with a lot — but I’m at that glorious age of 39 where you don’t have lots of friends around the way you used to when you were younger. My family moved overseas when I was in my first year of university and I’ve been fairly independent from them since. We have really different takes on life and the way we see the world. There’s also an added layer with my birth father who lives in the UK and who I haven’t spoken to since the mid ‘90s.”
It was during those university years on his own that Garry says he experienced his first mental health crisis. “The breaking point was at the end of the semester, with a whole bunch of unfinished assignments all due on the same day and me trying to do all the things all at once. And it ended up with me sort of cowering under a computer desk at 4 o’clock in the morning and my friends telling me that I wasn’t alright and I needed to go talk to somebody. I went to a counsellor but I wasn’t really given any meaningful advice. They put it down to over-work and over-stress and basically told me to just chill out. Which was fine, I guess, except it wasn’t.
“My experience with counsellors since has mostly been advice to get out and do the stuff I know I need to do anyway, but which practicality doesn’t always allow. I don’t really have the time left for passion projects once I’ve done everything else that needs to be done in the day. And, of course, in this current situation I can’t go out and do all the things that I enjoy doing, like climbing and DJing, because they’re not possible in the pandemic context.”
Both his chosen home in Dunedin and his chosen profession in the live events industry contribute, for better or worse, to his mental health, he says. “Dunedin is a really quirky place to live which can be quite appealing, but we also have a lot of challenges here. There is a sort of culture of self-pity and an ill-hidden jealousy in Dunedin because we aren’t big enough to get the same funding and attention in national conversations as other New Zealand cities. And that’s not helped by the fact that we get like 4 days of sunshine a year,” he laughs.
In the live events industry, where Garry has built his career, there are a number of baked-in challenges stemming back long before a pandemic de-railed the whole sector last year. “It’s high-stress, long hours and hellishly unstable at the best of times, which means that mental illness and addiction are both quite prevalent. It’s also seen as a bit of an outlier profession by many who work in the 9–5 world. People who don’t understand what we do for a living will tell you that you need to grow up and get a real job, not understanding that when you’re working creatively in the field gigs aren’t just work, they’re like a part of you… Since COVID, I’ve seen my fair share of people either not getting work or not getting subsidies. The industry is emptying out now because a lot of our staff have figured out that working in a warehouse is the same kind of work but it pays better and you get to go home afterwards to your family and turn it all off.”
Garry suspects that his journey to treatment and his own understanding of his mental health may have been impacted by what he categorises as some high-functioning traits on the Autism spectrum. “This manifests itself mostly in the way that I interact with people. I hate making eye contact. I hate talking on the phone. I try to avoid large gatherings and putting myself on display. Holding someone’s gaze is incredibly uncomfortable for me, which people then wrongly interpret as rude or arrogant. And it changes the way that people treat and relate to me. I’ve been called out on it a few times and it was only then that I even realised it was happening. Which, of course, just made me hyper aware and self-conscious.”
This, too, has been exacerbated by the pandemic context and the resultant mandatory use of masks. “Everyone’s being forced to communicate much more facially, which I already disliked and now can’t avoid. Going out over the first weekend in Delta Level 2 with everyone in masks, there was an increased need to make prolonged eye contact, which I can find quite triggering. I also can’t really shut people off and put my headphones on in public like I used to. With so many temporary rules, you can’t block out the outside world any more. There could be new arrows on the ground at the supermarket today that weren’t there yesterday, which means that you have to pay more attention and engage more.”
Garry says that he and his wife are still processing everything that happened after their daughter’s premature birth 5 years ago. “Even after she made it out of NICU, there was another year and a half of hell. I once had to go with her into an operating room where she was under general anaesthetic, not knowing if she would ever wake up. Afterwards, they ran out of room in the post-surgical unit, so they put us up in the paediatric oncology unit, somewhere I would describe as the most harrowing place in the world. Holy fuck, that was horrible. Even now, if we see TV programmes about the paediatric medical system, for instance, that’ll still set us off.”
When it comes to trying to manage or maintain his well-being, Garry says that he prefers to escape into media. “In the first lockdown last year, I was definitely drinking too much. My wife pointed out that I was getting through quite a lot of spirits. So, I’ve curbed that a lot since. And I can’t really drink much on my new medication anyway, so that’s good. Mostly I just try to drown out the bad stuff now with music and movies and books: whatever I can escape into.”
Reflecting on his mental health journey, Garry’s only wish is that he’d started sooner. “I’m still trying to figure out where I am. Having the answers to exactly what’s wrong and how to fix it would be fantastic, but even just trying to figure those things out sooner would have been better. I wish I had started dealing with it before everything got super overwhelming.”
For others in a similar situation, he would offer the same advice. “Don’t wait for it to get to the point where it’s absolutely vital that you go and seek help. If it feels like you’re over-reacting, you’re probably not.”
He believes that open dialogue about mental health is important, though this is the first time he’s spoken publicly about his own journey. “I haven’t talked to a lot of people about my mental health. I’ve sort of defied that obligation to tell people about it. Nobody at my work knows about the medication I’m on; neither do my parents. I’m more than happy for them to know, but I don’t want to get to that next part of the conversation where they change the way they behave towards me. The reaction from them is the bit that I don’t want. I guess that doing it this way allows me to get my whole story out, without inviting comments from anybody.”
Looking ahead, he is hopeful for the future of his young family. “We came so close to losing our daughter a few times, which is something that I’m constantly aware of. But now I see her flourishing and I get to enjoy all the happiness and hope that she brings into my life. Whatever else happens, as long as she’s a part of my world, I know I’ll be ok.”
* Some identifying details in this series have been changed to protect the identity of the participants.
** The stories in this series reflect the lived experiences of the participants only, and are not intended to be used as a reference for diagnosis or treatment of any condition. If you are experiencing mental distress, please find emergency resources through Mental Health Foundation, contact Lifeline or a reach out to a medical professional in your local area.
