5 Ways To Deal With Relapse
Posted by fxckfeelings on August 9, 2018
If you live with a recurring, debilitating mental illness, you may, like our reader from earlier, be hoping to find a routine, a management plant, or just an ancient spell that will keep unpleasant, disruptive relapses at bay. Unfortunately, mental illness doesn’t reliably respect our routines—it is, for lack of a better word, crazy that way—so instead of looking for ways to prevent relapses, here are five ways to deal with a relapse if and when one does occur.
1) Don’t Confuse A Few Symptoms With Something Bigger
Beware the urge to overreact every time you find yourself dragging, getting overly anxious, feeling miserable, or generally exhibiting some of the symptoms that come with your illness, especially when they could have an easy-to-identify cause, like PMS or stress at work. Instead, force yourself to look at the bigger picture; review your list of prior symptoms and ask yourself whether these ones are occurring in the same bad combination that interferes with your work and relationships and refuses to disappear after you’ve tried to chase it away with some healthy, happy activities. Then get input from your therapist or just people who know you as you decide whether to declare an illness in progress and implement your relapse plan.
2) Put Your Relapse Plan Into Action
As described in our earlier response to our reader, you should already have prepared a list of the interventions and medications that did or did not seem to work in the past and used this experience, together with advice from clinicians and others who observed your responses, to devise a plan for stopping future relapses. Of course, you may not know for sure what worked because clinical symptoms are often slow to respond and circumstances make it hard to tell what treatment, among the many you may be trying at one time, is actually doing the trick. As such, your plan must take these uncertainties into account while offering you clear options.
3) Know What New Treatments Are Out There
After reviewing your current relapse plan with your current doctor, ask her about any new treatments that may have been developed since your last episode. While remaining open to new treatments and ideas, remember to trust your own ideas, because your doctor is less likely to remember what worked for you in the past than you do. Also, there is currently no way for doctors to make good predictions about what will or won’t work for you based on an analysis of anything but the most basic symptoms and, of course, your previous response.
4) Push Back Against Fear and Pessimism
Drawing on your previous experience with depression and anxiety, as well as any ideas you have picked up from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), doctors, and friends, ask yourself whether your current thinking is distorted by symptoms, e.g., whether your depression or anxiety is making you believe that nothing seems to be working, you can’t tolerate your symptoms, your health routine has failed, etc. Then use your knowledge about the facts of depression and your own experience with it to respond to those false, negative perceptions of reality that your illness is flooding your brain with.
5) Begin Treatment While Staying Both Positive And Pragmatic
Knowing, as you do, that the results of current treatments for mental illness are always hard to predict, even when a certain treatment has worked well in the past, focus on how well you do with the process rather than the quality of its results. If improvement is delayed or a particular treatment fails, remind yourself that other treatments may well succeed and that keeping your life on track and persevering with your work and relationships when you’re impaired and distracted by psychiatric symptoms is always an achievement to be proud of and feel good about, even when you feel terrible overall.
