Bipolar Burble welcomes today’s guest author, Nate Huyser. Nate suffers from major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. He contacted me to talk about what Bipolar Burble meant during his journey, and I’m honored to share his story below.
Seeking professional help is often the first step in managing mental illness, but what happens when therapy and medication don’t work? Millions of people struggling with depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions find themselves frustrated and hopeless when traditional treatments fail to bring quick relief. It’s natural to question oneself, asking, how do I maintain the will to live and persist on my journey of recovery?
If your mental health treatments have failed to bring relief, and you have asked yourself those questions, you’re not alone. I faced these same questions while struggling with major depressive disorder (MDD) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). Despite seeking professional help, my symptoms persisted, leaving me lost and questioning my future.
In this article, I share my journey of navigating depression and anxiety, the role of online mental health communities like Natasha Tracy’s Bipolar Burble blog, and how finding the right support can make a difference—even when standard treatments fall short. If you feel stuck in your mental health recovery, this story is for you.
Seeking Professional Help for Mental Illness
When struggling mentally, the first steps often stressed are to tell someone close to you and seek professional help. When I moved away from my family and arrived at college in 2012, I became aware that my life was unlivable due to intense mental illness symptoms. My heart raced, my hands shook, my lungs felt constricted, and my thoughts circulated around worry and fear. It felt like a hungry grizzly bear was chasing me every moment of the day. This was anxiety combined with the symptoms of my depression: a dark veil covering my perspective of the world, heaviness in my body, despair, hopelessness, lack of interest, and more. As a result of the immensity of the discomfort, suicidal thoughts often flickered into my consciousness and threatened my life. I did exactly what one is supposed to do: I shared my struggles with my family and sought medical and therapeutic support.
When Therapy and Medication Don’t Work
Unfortunately, it took an agonizing year and a half from the point I sought help until I found effective treatment in the form of two medications. I also attended mental health therapy during this entire time span. In the 13 years since my diagnosis of MDD and GAD, treatment has proven difficult to discover and maintain. My symptoms and suicidality have returned for years at a time. Together with a psychiatrist, a therapist, and my family, we frequently try treatment after treatment until we land on a combination that allows me to function with relative comfort.
The Questions that Come with Long-Term Mental Health Struggles
With the longevity of my suffering and the lack of improvement from therapy or medications over periods of years, questions arose in my mind:
Finding Support Through ‘Bipolar Burble’
These thoughts and questions only added to the despair in my already sick brain. The lack of relief from treatments made suicide seem like my only option. When I did start receiving professional help in college and got my official diagnoses, I turned to the internet to learn more about my disorders. Fortunately, Natasha’s Bipolar Burble blog was one of the first to pop up in my searches.
Although I am not diagnosed with bipolar disorder like Natasha, I found much to relate to in her words. Specifically, when reading posts about her personal experiences with mental illness, I often thought, “Me too!” Her words gave external representations for some of my internal experiences, the types of experiences that can’t be seen in lab blood work or diagnostic imaging. These were some of the first times I thought, “Maybe it’s not just me,” and, “These are real and serious illnesses.” She explored some of the very questions that tormented me and provided insights from her own journey that I could try to apply in my life.
How an Online Mental Health Community Helped Me Hold On
Reading Natasha’s writings gave me a sliver of comfort, knowing I wasn’t the only one having these experiences. I knew Natasha and the community she built online were also trying to survive and live as well as possible amidst these grave and terrifying illnesses. When my family was weary of supporting me, when therapy wasn’t helping, and when the meds weren’t providing relief and instead gave me side effects, I turned to Bipolar Burble to give me a small measure of comfort and inspiration.
On many occasions, reading the variety of her articles gave me the will to live just a little bit longer while mentally in some dark and terrifying places. Treatments, such as medications, therapy, and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), have provided me with the most dramatic improvements in my mental health in the long run. But the powerful effect of Bipolar Burble helped me hold onto my life a little longer and is one of several reasons I am alive and doing as well as I am today.
The Role of Mental Health Advocacy in Creating Meaning
Natasha was one of the first to use her voice on the internet to create meaning out of suffering with mental illness. She uses her challenges as fuel to help serve others with similar experiences and has shown great bravery in being a pioneer in the mental health advocacy space. I am one beneficiary of the work she does.
Natasha’s work inspires me to try to do the same. I’ve long thought that if I had to go through years of mental anguish, then I’m going to make that suffering mean something by helping others. I have this sense that, even though experiencing severe mental illness and writing my story are nowhere near what I had planned for my life, it is what I now need to do.
Why We Need More Voices in Mental Health
We need many different voices in the mental health sphere. And I do believe we are accomplishing this more and more! Others’ experiences may relate better to someone than Natasha’s and vice versa. We need all these voices to contribute to making life on Earth as good as possible for those with mental illness. I hope you will take the time to explore Bipolar Burble and use it as a companion in dark times, just as it was for me. Perhaps you will feel inspired to use your story to help others, too!
About Nate Huyser: Nate works full-time in an organization that cares for those with intellectual and physical disabilities. He is active in the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and does his own writing at his Substack, Braving the Brain.
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