A psychologist handed my partner an article to help with my anxiety. I’d written it

About a decade ago, I was sitting on the couch in my living room, surrounded by empty chocolate packets. Another episode of Parks and Recreation played on the TV. I had been there for five days, rattling in my own body. I was convinced that if I moved from the couch, I would fly off the world and die in the pressure cooker of space.

I’d had anxiety for a long time by then. I’d already spent years being roundly attacked by panic, avoiding situations that might exacerbate it, or where I might embarrass myself or be frightened without a way to escape. And I had written about what it was like: the relentless, agonising fear.

But this time was different. I had never been on the couch for five days. In the past I had always managed, around day two, to peel myself away from the cushions. Not this time.

The people who were supposed to help couldn’t communicate the absolute mess in my brain any more than I could.Credit: Simon Schluter

My family didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t seem to explain to them that I wasn’t just feeling bad, like all the other times I’d felt bad. They asked how they could help and I couldn’t get my mouth to make the right shapes.

My lack of vocabulary made my family helpless. Exhausted by pointlessly trying to fix me, my partner sought advice from a psychologist. The tools he had weren’t working. He felt powerless. This psychologist handed him an article. “This is one of the best descriptions of anxiety I’ve read,” they said. “It will help you understand.”

It was a piece from a newspaper. One woman’s personal account: she was so anxious she existed in a fog. She felt she was carrying her anxiety with her like a colostomy bag through years of relentless, agonising fear.

It was my article. My anxiety, in my own words. When my partner told me this story I was a bit smug. I had won at anxiety. No one had ever done it as well as me. I was fully on board with the psychologist’s view that, yes, Anna is the best at this. It soothed the parts of me that are always worried that I’m not good at anything. But, after that, a gentle rage began to bubble.

I stayed on the couch. Three more episodes of Parks and Recreation. Two more packets of Caramello chocolate. Someone else took my kids to school, fed the dogs, packed the dishwasher, and I did not move. I was more anxious than ever.

The problem was this: I needed to believe someone else was better at it, so they could take care of me. Mental healthcare, as an industry, did not have more useful words than the ones I’d offered. The people who were supposed to help couldn’t communicate the absolute mess in my brain any more than I could. It seemed, in my cloud of terror, that my own words were the end of the line. No secret, better way of helping a doctor understand what was wrong with me. There was nowhere else to go.

Ten years later, not much has changed. Every year, millions of dollars in funding pay for “awareness” campaigns that offer the same language: depression, anxiety, sad, lonely. Abstract words that can mean anything from a debilitating fear of spiders to nerves about public speaking to sitting on a couch for five days.

Unfortunately, the help we get is only as good as how well we describe what we need. If two patients say “anxiety” to their doctor, there’s a good chance they’re not describing exactly the same experience, but we lack the nuance to differentiate them.

Anxiety is not homogeneous. Our lack of useful language to describe mental illness means we get the wrong help. Being sick can itself make that harder: thinking clearly is hard, communicating with others is hard, having the energy to actually go and find that help is often impossible. That’s before we even touch on the systemic factors: lengthy waiting lists, huge expense, access barriers, lack of regional availability, discrimination.

If we do overcome those obstacles to get to a psychologist, we have about 50 minutes to nail the way we’re feeling so they know how to treat us. Being specific makes the right treatment possible. That’s why we have x-rays to show which bone is broken before doctors plaster us from head to toe and hope for the best.

People living with mental illness describe their experiences in non-clinical ways – that the fear is spiky, or that their body is made of lead, or that they wake each morning with a hand around their throat. The depression that makes your limbs too heavy to lift is a different depression from the one that makes you hate your family.

This allusive language is full of value. There’s an opportunity now to take patients’ words and embed them in clinical care, to improve the help that’s available. Instead of smearing “ANXIETY” on a billboard, the industry could invest in listening. Hearing. Interpreting. And, as a result, understanding.

My anxiety is not your anxiety. But when I wrote that some days the fog is light and it blows away for a while, and some days the fog is thick and it rolls in around us and we suffocate, it was at least closer. When that article was published, hundreds of thousands of people read it. Many emailed and tweeted to tell me they found comfort in it – not just because someone else knew what it was like, but because they had a new way to describe their feelings to their parents, their employer, their friends.

And to their partner, who had been watching them disintegrate on the couch for five days.

A Kind of Magic (Ultimo Press) by Anna Spargo-Ryan, is out now.

Support is available from Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636.

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