’Tis is the Season to be Jolly.
Unless you’re one of the 25% of Americans diagnosed with a mental disorder — which is something like 85 million of us. If you’re one of those unfortunate souls, the Holidays have a way of dragging you into the sewer, like an ethereal version of Pennywise the Dancing Clown, who at least shows his victims the common courtesy of murdering them quickly and then eating their corpse. Not the Holidays, mind you. The Holidays prefers to make it slow. They lull us into a false sense of security with innocent carols and eggnog lattes, but they can still be just as dangerous to a depressed soul.
Also, let’s also do a quick shout-out to the unsung sufferers of mental illness. Sure, everyone knows about depression. It’s what all the movies make their characters when they want them to be all dark and brooding. But depression isn’t the only thing out there. A good old fashioned anxiety disorder can wreak just as much havoc.
Obsessive-Compulsive, Panic, Generalized Anxiety, Social Phobia, Post-Traumatic Stress — these are just a few of the various anxiety disorders that many of us deal with day in and day out. Don’t forget the Mood Disorders like Bipolar and the Psychotic Disorders like Schizoaffective or the dozen different types of Schizophrenia, or Somatoform Disorders or Personality Disorders, be they Cluster A or B or C. They all have their own special way of sowing chaos and discord.
Finally, roughly 10% of the population meets diagnostic criteria for a substance use disorder. The technical term for the thing killing 96 Americans every day is Severe Opioid Use Disorder, but let’s not forget the similar diagnoses that exist for alcohol, cannabis, stimulants, cocaine and sedatives. They each have their own way of killing you, too. Sorry, that last statement applies to cannabis, too. If you think it doesn’t, clearly you have never worked at a substance abuse clinic like I have.