ANXIETY is not DEPRESSION: Questions and Answers

By Cliff Wise

People have a lot of questions about Anxiety, Depression and General Mental Health. They are asking, “What is it that I have, and why?”

THERE IS NO ONE PLACE TO FIND ANSWERS.

For us there are three stages in our lives:

1st—You decide you need help.

2nd—Scene one—You look for help. Most of us

• Language: English
• Publisher: Book Vine Press
• Release date: Aug 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9781950955602

Cliff Wise

Cliff Wise has been struggling with anxiety and depression issues for about sixty-four years. He has tried many methods to fight against these ailments without knowing why. Anxiety is very difficult to self-diagnose, especially in a society that frowns on mental issues of any kind. Cliff sat down to write the great American novel in the 1990s and this book appeared instead, unraveling the tangle of events that dominated the directions of his life, of which there were many. The use of his life events to explain the methods that may be useful for others is only used to give a context to the events. Coincidentally, there is a lot about him as an individual in the book, and quite a few opinions. If you are interested in the details, then read the book. Cliff currently resides in Manhattan, New York, and Cape Cod. He has lived in six states, Puerto Rico, Europe, Asia, Africa and sometimes rolled up in a ball in the corner in all of these places.

Book preview

Copyright © 2019 by Cliff Wise.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Printed in the United States of America.

Book Vine Press

2516 Highland Dr.

Palatine, IL 60067

To my tolerant wife Marilyn who takes the time to learn about me and others, and the other members on my team, Bob, Ileana, Debaki, and Anika. Thank you.

The late Margaret Lewin MD. She made the referral that got me on the right track. She is missed by many.

I would also like to thank Professor Jordan Peterson PhD for several things. Being who he is, speaking out on what he knows from experience and study - and not bending in the gale of flack he gets for being honest. He speaks from the heart of his life. If you open yourself up to real truth it can rattle your cage. It did mine. He has swept away the cobwebs and dust that was accumulating up there. What a role model!

Introduction

If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.

—Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison passed away August 5, 2019 as I was putting the final touches on this book.

Why did I write this book?

(You don’t have to read this, really)

There are three stages in the life of a person like me who is undergoing successful treatment for mental illness. (Yes, I did cringe when I wrote that.)

Stage one is your life leading up to the moment where you seek help.

Stage two is the time during which you are looking for the help that you need.

Stage three is the time from when you start getting help until the present.

Stage two is the most critical time for the individual. They have decided to seek help. They are very vulnerable. There is no readily available information about how to get help. They don’t know the right terminology or even what it is they are looking for. Many soon find out that they are on their own, lost. They often withdraw from the search and give up. I experienced this stage two dilemma myself.

This should not happen. The information they seek should be readily available. My hope is that the answers in this book will give them the knowledge they need to begin the search in earnest - and to succeed in finding the right diagnosis and treatment. It is what I have to offer from my own bad experiences.

Just yesterday, after all the writing was done, I got into a conversation with a young bright employed thirty year old woman about this. We got into a conversation about my writing and she told me of a time when she was still a teen. She was having frequent anxiety attacks. She finally decided to seek help. Stage one was complete. She walked in to a building with a sign on it which read (the town name is made up) Fairfield Mental Health, and told the receptionist briefly about her problems and that she wanted help. I said, Oh, wonderful, what did they do for you. The answer was Nothing. This woman mustered the courage to walk into a strange place and open herself up to a total stranger and was turned away. This business should not exist with sign like that over an open door. This is ignorance and cruelty in the extreme.

Some background. My first book Anxiety is not Depression, Bring Order to the Chaos, was about my life. It vaguely followed a timeline and described the methods - which I learned and developed - to keep the the anxiety and depression at bay. I used stories to describe how I came upon and used these techniques. I thought that stories would be more interesting than a bulleted list of things to try out. I told my story from the inside out, the way we see it. My hope is that readers with anxiety and depression issues will be able see themselves in my experiences and find some help and relief.

The second Book, Anxiety is Not Depression, A Daily Reader, was more free form than the first book. I thought the format of the first book was too restrictive, even though I tried to make it like a story. Every day, one of the first things i do is to write a daily ‘blurb’, as I call it, about how I feel and interpret my feelings through the lens of anxiety and depression. it is very random stuff. I publish them on Medium Daily Digest, on line. These are short one minute reads, more in a poetic style. I don’t use much punctuation. I want the reader to decide the meaning for themselves. Punctuation is the writer giving the reader guidance, in my opinion too much guidance. All of the blurbs in the book, and many more I write and publish daily are available on Medium Daily Digest. (medium.com). I also publish these blurbs on my website http://anxtdepr.org.

The third book, this one, is comprised of questions I have answered on Quora, a site where you can ask any question you want and receive answers from readers. I found out about Quora from Jordan Peterson, PhD, a clinical psychologist. He used his answers on Quora as the basis for his last book, 12 Rules for Life, an Antidote to Chaos. I am a big fan of his. He delves quite deeply into depression and he touched me deeply. (I actually got depressed and my psychiatrist suggested that I take a break from watching his YouTube videos). Back to Quora. I first started answering questions about guitars, learning how to play them, etc. I love everything about guitars. When you join Quora you are asked your interests. Quora (meaning the mysterious algorhythm behind everything) sends you questions (and answers) about your topics of interest. I was getting questions about anxiety and depression, of course. I thought it was very dangerous for an amateur to be answering these questions, and at first I didn’t dare. I discussed this with my team, including a psychiatrist and a psychologist. They agreed that it would be a good idea for me to write answers ‘from the inside’ like I had been doing all along, to show people, including the psychological community, how a person with anxiety and depression disorders thinks. After answering a few questions, people looking for answers started asking me questions personally. When I got to the point where my answers had been viewed 14,000 times I started thinking that I might have something worth sharing with people. All of my answers, those and others, are available on Quora. I also have questions and answers on guitars and music. I will also be publishing new questions and answers on my website http://anxtdepr.org. Currently my answers are getting about 10,000 views a month, over 50,000 total. I am amazed. There is a demand for information on these topics.

I left the questions as they were, spelling and syntax errors and all. I may have changed minor stuff, but not the meaning. I don’t want anyone thinking I made these questions up. This is what people are asking.

I did edit most of the answers that I gave on Quora. When I write the answer for Quora, I’m answering off the cuff, quickly. For this book I wanted to give more considered answers. (As mentioned, I left the questions unedited for the most part).

I put the following disclaimer before every question that I answer:

All personal questions about anxiety and depression should be answered by a trained professional in a clinical setting. I can only give you my opinion based on my personal experience which I have detailed in my book, Anxiety is not Depression - Bring Order to the Chaos.

I’m not going to repeat this for every question and answer in this book. There is already a lot of repetition in the book. Repeating the disclaimer for every answer would make the whole thing an overwhelming bore.

Why all of the repetition of ideas anyhow? (You will see what I mean when you begin reading). I repeat certain things because of two reasons. Number one, is because I answer similar questions on different days. People have similar questions with small twists based on their lives. Some of these I answer in a general way with my own twist based on their twist. I don’t know how else to do it unless I wanted to make this like an Army manual. Number two, is because I want the reader to get my drift. (A nice way to say banging my ideas into someone’s head). If they are interested in my philosophy on the subject, they have to put up with the repetition. Im not a good enough writer to have someone get the idea the first time I write it and then remember it. Don’t forget, I have these afflictions too.

Like all of my writing, I feel like someone is writing through me, that I am just a conduit. This could be true. I do have a belief that these things can happen. For this book I think I know who it is. I don’t feel comfortable disclosing who it is to anyone outside of my team. I have a feeling that this person is trying to reach a lot of people. They can write whatever they want. It takes up a lot of my time but it is time well spent. I’m having fun doing this. My mentioning of this is based on a belief in my own inadequacy. Metaphysics has something to do with it, as well.

This is all written through my own personal experience. Writing is a good way to get my feelings out into the outside world where I can take a look at them, and you can also. Expression of any kind can be whatever you want it to be, art, therapy, journaling, etc. Mine is intended to give the reader an honest insight to what goes on in the mind of someone with these disorders. I am working hard to get better. Get better is a generic term because I don’t want to describe each individual move forward here in this book. These disorders have been extremely disruptive to my life. I was constantly on the move physically and mentally. I had a lot of interesting experiences. I went over the danger line a lot.

There are some conflicting ideas in the previous paragraphs. Don’t worry about it.

What this book is.

More than anything, it’s a step. If you are fortunate enough to be able to decide you are going to fight a mental illness and you do decide, whatever it’s clinical definition, that is a step. Many steps create a path. The path has many choices, all based on awareness, learning, kindness, trust. My path includes writing and sharing. It is what I can do. We all share a commonality. It is through this commonality that I try to communicate what my experience is on my particular path. What greater gift is there than touching someone from afar? I may never have seen you or met you but I know you are out there. Perhaps our paths will cross.

I have a cyclical mood disorder. Things go up and down, in and out, back and forth, like anyone, but disorders bring surprises, big surprises. I liken my cyclical disorders to parallel roller coasters with anxiety and depression moving along side by side. Both are on different cycles and they cross tracks at times. Every circuit the roller coasters make, the hills and troughs are different. I actually love to go on roller coasters. I feel like I’m in a familiar place.

Anxiety and depression events are very difficult to self-diagnose. Sometimes I don’t realize what is going on until it is over. My experiences may point someone to some sort of understanding, I don’t know. I question everything. There may not be any validity at all to any of this. It may be a pointless exercise, but it is out there. I can only offer what I have.

What this book is not:

A medical level analysis of any kind.

A guide for people to follow.

From a clinical, training or educational standpoint, I don’t know anything about psychology. I enjoyed Psychology 101 in college. That is it.

I do know a lot about the disorders of anxiety and depression from the inside out, from my perspective. I have read tons of stuff about it, subscribed to Psychology Today for years, and I have been in therapy on and off since about 1965. My longest stretch is the last 6 years. Previous to this I had a long stretch in the 1990’s. I have been evaluated by trial programs (like OCD) and all wired up by a top neurologist. I’ve had my brain scanned, ultra sounded, all of that. I found there was a part of my brain missing, literally. It just didn’t develop. Part of my cortex, the thinking part, is missing. I always knew that. When you are a kid and ask your mother where your drawing pencil is, she goes through this map of the house, car, everything until she finds it, all in her mind. With me there is a door off of the kitchen that goes nowhere. Have you ever seen a house that was built with a door that goes nowhere? What probably happened was, when they were building my brain they got to that point and said ‘this is not going as planned’. ‘We can stop now and maybe nobody will find out. If we finish this, anything could happen’. So they stopped. They have recurring nightmares about me finding them.

What I would like this book to be

I want it to create a thought process in the individual that they are not strange or alone and that there is a way forward that will lead to a life that is really worth living, is fun and interesting. I believe ‘we’ have a other ways of perceiving things than the ‘normal’ way, whatever that is. (I always put ‘whatever that is’ behind normal, because that is the way I perceive it. Normalcy is a concept. It doesn’t necessarily have to exist).

For it to be a ‘we’ book. There is stiff resistance by society in general to the acceptance of mental disorders. From society’s viewpoint they are expensive and they take up too much time. Society and government move at a glacial pace. Change takes forever. We don’t have forever.

A voice. I know from all of my experiences that there are a lot of people out there with no understanding of their issues. They are in denial or just don’t know. A voice is not just someone speaking out on your behalf but also a voice talking to you. There is a chasm between wanting to deal with your issues and actually making contact with someone who can help you. The chasm is also a small step if it is the first step on your path. You are stepping over into the ‘We’ group, where I am.

It would be cool if this book changed something. That remains to be seen.

What about me?

I’m not trying to make a lot of money from this. I self publish. I do not cover my costs with revenue. It’s not about that. What it could be about is getting things out in the open where I can take a look at them. My psychologists think this is a great idea. I’m not trying to sell anything. It would be nice if my website anxtdepr.org became a point of information for us. Im working on that and will continue to do so, for awhile at least. The ideas may reach more people and touch a few. That would be nice.

I don’t have much else to speak out about. I have had a very interesting life. I have done most of what I wanted and travelled to most of the places I have wanted to go. I am privileged and experimental in nature. If presented with an opportunity I take it, more often than not. I will not say that my life could have been better if I had access to today’s CBT and DBT therapy and medications. The past is the past and I’m more interested in the present where I am - in a wonderful relationship, I have some toys, mainly guitars, and enough money to not have to worry about that. I’m in great health, physically. Whose got it better than me?

Contents

I decided to only have four sections. I didn’t break it down further into sub-topics for several reasons. It was too complicated to do it that way, and after thinking about it, I don’t want people looking only at specific micro-topics that they are interested in. (The proof of this is the next thing that you will do, open the book to the section you are interested in). I feel that the reader will get more of what I want them to get out of this by reading through it. There are no quick answers to any of these disorders.

For the same reasons, there is no Index.

Questions and Answers about Anxiety

Questions and Answers about Depression

Questions and Answers about Anxiety and Depression

Questions and Answers about General Mental Health

Disclaimer

I am not a doctor a psychiatrist or a psychologist. I have no medical training. All diagnoses of Anxiety Disorder Or Depression should be made by trained medical professionals. I am not making any suggestions in these writings, to anyone. Reading this material may give rise to negative thoughts and feelings in individuals that they were not aware of or increase existing ones. If this happens, I strongly suggest that this be reviewed with a trained professional in a clinical setting. learning about a disorder is only the first step in treatment.

Questions

and

Answers

about Anxiety

I put the following disclaimer before every question that I answer:

All personal questions about anxiety and depression should be answered by a trained professional in a clinical setting. I can only give you my opinion based on my personal experience which I have detailed in my book, Anxiety is not Depression - Bring Order to the Chaos.

I’m not going to repeat this for every question and answer in this book.

This first answer is out of order but I put it here because it breaks down the different levels of professionals (and others) that you will be interacting with in your quest. I repeat this for all four sections of the book because of people’s tendency to skip ahead.

How do I know if I need medicine for social anxiety?

The only ‘sure’ way I know of is to be diagnosed by a psycho-

pharmacologist. This is a medical doctor that is often a psychiatrist who specializes in medication for psychological disorders. Gulp! That is a lot to swallow. These doctors usually only see patients who are referred to them by other medical doctors, like your family physician, and sometimes by a psychologist. They also work closely with psychologists, usually also called doctors but with a PhD at the end of their name instead of a MD. I would suggest first talking to a ‘GP’ general practitioner, or internist - medical doctor (like a family doctor that gives you physical examinations). They should automatically give you a referral to see a psychologist when asked. I would recommend one specializing in CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) and/or DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy), because these practitioners have helped me greatly. They will refer you to a psychopharmacologist if they think you need one, or if you ask specifically to see one. Family physicians ‘MD’ can also prescribe common drugs like Prozac or Paxil. (This book is not an advertisement for medication in general, or any specific named drug). My internist wrote the first prescription for me. When we determined that I needed the care of a specialist, she referred me to the psychopharmacologist. He, in turn, prescribed additional medication but required that I start seeing a CBT/DBT psychologist as part of my treatment. I think this is so important to understand that I have made a separate list of functions below.

Medical Doctor—a person trained and licensed to practice medicine. Example, pediatrician, internist, general practitioner, (Family Doctor) ‘MD’ after name. A medical doctor may be a psychiatrist but not necessarily.

General Practitioner, internist or family doctor—all the same. (MD at the end of their name). A medical doctor who takes care of your general health, annual physicals, colds, etc. if you need to see a specialist, like a psychologist, they will refer you to one.

Psychopharmacologist—a medical doctor specializing in psycho-

pharmacology, the study of the effect of drugs on the mind and behavior. These doctors also use ‘talk therapy’ to understand your personal psychological issues. ‘MD’ after their name.

Psychiatrist—a medical practitioner specializing in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. (I would see a psychiatrist about social anxiety problems - as a matter of fact I personally would welcome it because these people are very highly trained). Usually a ‘MD’ after their name.

Psychologist—An expert or specialist in psychology. These people specialize in ‘talk psychology’. Usually a ‘PhD’ after their name. CBT and DBT therapists are usually psychologists.

Therapists—a person skilled in a particular type of therapy, like DBT. Another term for psychologists.

Counselor—a person trained to give advice on personal, social or psychological problems. (I would only work with this level of person if specifically referred by a medical doctor).

Free Advice Givers—Me and everyone else. The only time you listen to us is for suggestions (after you ask) about which psychologist or medical doctor to see. When you meet with that professional person it is up to you to decide if they are a good match for you, not us. Good friends, parents and Law enforcement officials can suggest that you ‘see’ someone, but it is up to you. It never hurts to talk to a professional about your issues. Never.

The law—There may be a case where a judge in a court, might refer you for counseling or evaluation in extreme examples. If they do, go.

I would only work with individuals who were licensed to practice.

Which one relieves your anxiety better: Writing or Running?

Writing