I recently saw this meme while scrolling through my Facebook feed:
Serotonin, like whatever drug they put in the mystery meat in Lunchables, is a substance that, in layman’s terms, makes one happy. It’s a naturally produced neurotransmitter (fancy schmancy brain chemical thing) that’s responsible for regulating mood.
And if you don’t have enough of it, it will frick you the frick up.
I’m talking clinical depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, all that fun stuff.
It recently hit me that I don’t think I’ve ever not been mentally ill. I wish I could remember those halcyon days of running wild and carefree with my biggest worries being missing Dragonball Z at 6:30 or whether or not my Charizard was strong enough to beat the Elite Four. But even my fondest childhood memories have a shadow of constant sadness and anxiousness looming over them.
And it’s all because of PANDAS.
(No, not that guy.)
PANDAS is a misleadingly adorable term for a really sucky problem. It’s the abbreviation for a scientific term I’m not going to bother writing out, mostly because it would take like five hours to type it. (If you’re curious, you can read more about it here.)
When I initially described my symptoms to my current psychiatrist, including how long I’ve dealt with them, the first thing she asked was the seemingly irrelevant question of if I’d ever had strep throat as a kid. I didn’t have strep throat; I freaking was strep throat. I have more memories of being sick with it than not, to the point that I couldn’t eat like a regular human and spent a solid portion of my childhood looking like the lost daughter of Skeletor.
Little did I know that my near-constant bout of strep was an underlying factor in the specific type of crazy I’ve wrestled with my entire life.
I’m not far enough into my psychology degree to be qualified to tell you exactly how it works, but somehow, having a strep infection when you’re very young can jack up some stuff in your brain and cause lovely things like OCD symptoms in children. And yep, it can be permanent.
After hearing about PANDAS from my doctor, everything started to make a lot more sense. Suddenly, my obsessive, intense fears and odd behaviors, which I clearly recall going back as far as age two, had a name. (Speaking of which, one of these days I’ll write about some of those weird early anxieties — there’s a couple of doozies. Like the headless guy I was convinced lived in my grandma’s furnace. That’s a fun one.)
I’m writing this as much for you, whoever is reading this, as I am for me. If you’re like me and can’t remember a time when you weren’t scared or sad, if you have that gray cloud of mental illness hanging over what should have been happy childhood memories, you’re not alone.
JESSA JOYCE 