Mental health could be something that can be passed down from parents. People use drugs as a way to self-medicate. People don’t know how to deal with their diagnosis because they don’t want to believe that there is something wrong.
They are undiagnosed or are ashamed to go seek so they turn to drugs to help them cope. Drugs can also affect your physical health. People rely on drugs for fuel, and it takes a toll on your body. It can make you lose weight to dangerous levels. Your organs start to shut down, but on the other hand, alcohol can make you gain weight, your liver will develop something called cirrhosis, where the healthy cells are replaced by scar tissue. Hepatitis B and C can also cause cirrhosis. You can live with cirrhosis upwards to 15 years. Addiction can cause long term and permanent damage. Depending on what is happening your body, you won’t be able reverse the damage that drugs have caused once they start.
It’s like when you get injured, and you don’t want to go to the doctor to get it checked out because you think you can walk it off. As time goes on, that injury will become worse, making you live in chronic pain.
Injuries can also be a reason someone would start to use. They avoid the pain for as long as they can take pain killers. It makes them feel better and they continue to keep working out or play sports only to make the injury worse. The worse the injury is, the more you take and before you know it, you can’t get through the day without using or drinking.
PTSD is a common mental health issue that can result in using drugs. There are lot of people who have experienced being at war and saw things that nobody shouldn’t see. They lose friends, they do things that can’t be undone, and it takes a toll on your mental health.
Law enforcement, paramedics, and firefighters see a lot in their everyday life, that getting help on a regular basis is what keeps them in check with their mental health. It takes a lot to be able to do what they do. It’s not only physical, but mental.
Originally, it was called “Shell Shock”, and it appeared in soldiers that came back from fighting in World War One. It can be treated if you are willing to do the work, but people don’t get help first enough, so they rely on drugs and alcohol.
The CO-VID 19 pandemic brought on many more cases as people were staying at home or people relapsed because they couldn’t get the help they needed.
It’s obvious that people who live with any type of health issues, struggle to find peace in dealing with their pain. They will do whatever it takes to make the pain go away. Either it be depression, anxiety, chronic pain, people want to find answers on why this is happening and find a way to make it stop. Sometimes it takes years to find the right medication or even the right dose.
If someone is struggling with addiction and mental health, they will go to multiple doctors and get as much drugs as they can. They will lie and cheat the system to be able to feed their addiction. It’s a sad reality that happens to more people then you think. People don’t talk about mental health as much because of the stigma. Nobody wants to hear about what goes on inside of your head.
We have a fear of being judged for speaking up, but once we have the courage to do so, we feel backed into a corner because people don’t want to believe that the person with all money, the great family life, the big fancy car is really struggling to keep things together.
There are so many celebrities that mental health issues that we don’t know about. Some of them will be open and honest in hopes that it will encourage others to get help, but a lot of celebrities tend to hide behind a fake version of themselves. They feel more like themselves when they create a character that is the opposite of who they really are.
Usually, its people with mental health issues that are the most creative. They tend to use it to their advantage, but often times they will blame their mental health in why they are struggling with addiction.
In the last decade, we’ve lost countless celebrities to suicide, and we never even knew that they were going through something until after they’re gone. We should have seen the signs, but we don’t know them in our personal lives so we can’t really help them in a way we wanted to if we knew.
Some of the suicides that have happened among celebrities have been shocking. If you look back, we may know in some way that this was going to happen, but we can’t really be 100% sure on if it was actually going to happen.
Robin Williams was someone who spend so many years making people laugh, but he wasn’t able to make himself laugh. You were able to see that there was something going on. With his history of drug abuse and knowing who he hung out with at the start of his career, you knew that there was something that he was trying to run away from.
I don’t want to say anything negative about Robin, but depending on how long he suffered with depression, he may have used drugs to cope with his emotions.
Months after his passing, we found out that he had something called, Lewy Body Dementia. It shows up as the same way as Parkinson’s, which was the originally diagnosis Robin got before his passed. Mixed with depression and his history of drugs, his brain was never the same as it was.
Leading up to his “Parkinson’s” diagnosis, Robin was suffering and experiencing things like severe memory, changes in his personality and mood. He couldn’t sleep and had a host of other problems. It was obvious that there was something mentally going on and the diagnosis was Parkinson’s disease then learning after his passing that it was Lewy Body dementia would have been devastating to Robin. He knew that he only had a certain amount of time left on earth. Mix that with depression and the damage caused by the years of drugs and alcohol would be certainly cut your time in half.
Getting a diagnosis that affects your body and your daily life, makes you take a step back and make you revaluate everything. You learn adapt to a new normal. You have to pivot and shift your life to make sure you are having the best life you can have while dealing with trying to learn to live with such a devastating illness and like everything else, it will change who you are.
Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys spend many years under the care of someone that didn’t have his interests at heart. He dealt with years of abuse.
Brian dealt with Schizoaffective disorder in which he hallucinated. Brian had been experiencing auditory hallucinations since 1965. It was those hallucinations that inspired Brian to write songs. The hallucinations would presented themselves as disembodied voices. He would called these voices “heroes and villains.”
At one point, during a tour with the Beach Boys, Brian had been introduced to recreational drugs and about a week after the first time taking psychedelics, he started to hallucinate. His supplier, Loran Schwartz said that the first dose that Brian took was 125 micrograms of “pure Owsley” and because of it, it resulted in what was a “full on ego death.”
In July of 1965, band member, Mike Love had noticed a change on Brian. He started to have irregular behavior. Brian had crashed his car into a 7-Up machine while at a gas station which seemed out of character for Brian. He had hidden his drug use from his family and his bandmates. Mike thought that Brian was strictly opposed to drugs.
By the mid 1960s, Brian would have used LSD and developed what he called “a Jesus Christ complex.” By 1966, he was using pills for more than just leisure and considered psychedelic usage as benign.
He didn’t do LSD until he was about 23 years old. His wife, Marilyn had suspected that he had used LSD more than he was leading, but she only knew the two times that he did, but in 2004, Brian said that he only used is twice in his life.
As time went on, Brian had gotten worse. He was prone to paranoid delusions. He started to believe that Satan was who he was hearing and that he was coming “in a form of other people that were competing with me and had ideas of killing me.”
When his first child was born in 1968, Marilyn was concerned that her husband’s mental health started to intensify. By later that year, Brian was hospitalized and giving medication for a severe anxiety disorder called “Thorazine.”
When the 1970s came, Brian was given the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, which since then has been retracted and with this diagnosis, he also had manic depressive psychosis. He was a patient at this time at Brotzman Memorial Hospital.
In 1976, a doctor by the name of Eugune Landy was suggesting that Brian’s issue was “being scared.” He didn’t initially refuted such a diagnosis. By 1984, Brian once again was misdiagnosed by doctors with schizophrenia, following by evidence that he had brain damage caused by excessive and sustained drug use.
Brian had developed facial tics called “tardive dyskinesia that was caused by the psychotropic medications that he was given by Landy and his medical team.
Peter Reum who was a therapist and a fan of Brian had met the singer several times and said that he would have deteriorated into a “drooling, palsied mental patient”. He would die from heart failure if he kept up with his current drug regimen.
Brian’s cousin, Stan Love sued Brian and wanted to gain conservatorship over Brian, saying that he shouldn’t be in charge of his own affairs since Brian was experiencing mental health issues and breakdowns.
By the 1990s, it was characterized that Brian was totally dependent on other people and that there were reminiscent of autism.
Brian’s mental health as improved over the years; he still has auditory hallucinations. He’s said that he credits his second wife for helping him with his career as a musician. He said that he should have been in a mental institution under sedation due to the stresses his condition.
There are so many times where people have relied on drugs that they become a shell of who they once before and being in Hollywood where you have access to money and fame, using drugs or at least know someone that as access to drugs is an everyday occurrence.
We can do whether can to help and sometimes it works. Some of us may not know what it’s like to be in the control of a drug addiction, but we always being awareness it to and be there for someone who is and we can be the person they can trust.