Jenny
Jenny
Life is worth fighting for
I want others to know that it is so important to seek treatment because their health—their life—is worth fighting for.
Jenny has been fighting to get the treatment she needs and deserves for much of her life. As a teenager, she experienced trauma and struggled with major depression and PTSD.
At age 13, she was removed from her home and put into state custody.
I was moved a lot and saw many different providers at each placement.
No medications ever helped my symptoms as a teen.
Because no approach successfully addressed her symptoms, Jenny went some 15 years without treatment. In her 30s, she experienced additional trauma, and her symptoms got worse. She reached back out for help.
I started experiencing severe depression in the fall of 2020.
I knew my depression was getting worse, and I was declining fast. I begged for help.
Many phone calls were made. My primary care provider tried to help but, due to the pandemic, no one was seeing people in person.
I couldn’t find a therapist that accepted my insurance.
After several months in a severe depression, I ended up attempting to end my life.
I was found and while on the way to the hospital, I stopped breathing. I was placed on a ventilator, and I was flown by helicopter to another hospital.
After a week in the hospital recovering physically, I was desperate for treatment, but no psychiatric hospital beds were available.
I was eventually sent home without any follow-up care.
This harrowing experience left Jenny feeling “hopeless and numb.” Still, she kept fighting.
I remember going home, truly feeling my death was imminent. Somehow, I survived and eventually the depression started to lift.
When the depression lifted, I was able to look back with clarity and identify that getting treatment is not as easy as it should be.
If I had been flown to that hospital for any other medical diagnosis that was life-threatening, there is no question that I would have received follow-up care.
But when it came to mental health follow-up care, especially during the pandemic, that seemed ‘optional,’ not a necessity.
I did survive that last period of depression, but just barely.
Because of her experience, Jenny is speaking out, advocating for changes in how mental health disorders are treated. She works with her local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, as well as a domestic violence agency called Through These Doors.
She wants mental health conditions to be treated just like physical health conditions.
Depression definitely has different levels of severity and can have various treatments, but treatment-resistant depression needs to be considered as deadly as cancer and treated as such.
This is not a moral or character issue. I never wanted to die. I just desperately needed relief from the unbearable hopelessness and inability to feel.
Fighting stigma is central to Jenny’s commitment to changing our approach to mental health.
For me, stigma can prevent one’s ability to heal. Stigma prevents the patient’s voice from being heard as the most important voice in the room.
Stigma is not seeing someone with a mental health disorder as intelligent and capable of making good decisions.
Stigma is being talked about rather than spoken with. Stigma is why seeking treatment can be a humiliating experience.
We do not strip dignity from patients entering the ER for any other medical reason than for mental health.
I would just love to be involved in changing the way we treat patients and ending stigma.
