The Four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse

“My health is mental. How about yours?” Does that sound like one of your recent conversations? Or did your conversation sound more like this; “How are you doing?” “I’m good, thanks.” “Okay, great…” It seems like more often than not, the elephant in the room remains invisible, because someone has chosen to remain silent about their struggle with mental illness, even if that person is just a little down at the moment. It wasn’t that long ago that if someone had a mental illness, it meant that person was pushing a shopping cart down East Hastings, talking to invisible people, and even though things are getting better that sense of stigma attached to mental illness still exists. We worry that if we admit that we struggle with mental illness that we’ll lose friends, lose our partner, lose our job, and be labelled forever as a nutcase, a whack job, a weakling that can’t handle the stresses of life. That fear can be a really hard thing to get rid of…

I was diagnosed with clinical depression when I was 40, after years of anger and self-medicating, and once my doctor, my psychiatrist, and myself got my medications set right it made all the difference in the world. For one thing, I was not as much of an *bad word*, and I wasn’t angry as much. But did I start telling people I had a mental illness? What, are you crazy?!? People would just judge me… I think if we fed everyone a truth serum and asked who has a mental illness that we would be shocked by the answer. So what is a mental illness? The American Psychiatric Association defines mental illness as changes in emotion, thinking, and/or behaviour that are associated with distress and/or problems functioning in social, work or family activities. Perhaps the scariest statistic, according to the World Health Organization, is that around 20% of the world’s children and adolescents have a mental health condition. Just let that sink in for a moment – one in every five children or adolescents seriously struggle with mental health. Wow.

In the Book of Revelation in the Bible, the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse appear to signify the beginning of the end. These four horsemen are Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. With apologies to biblical scholars, however, I have come to the conclusion that mental illness has its own four horsepersons of the apocalypse, and they are Depression, Anxiety, Hopelessness, and Despair. Sadness that never seems to go away? Check. Anger in excess of what the situation seems to merit? Check. Never sleep, or never get out of bed? Check. Paralyzing fear in anticipation of overwhelming circumstances, even if that circumstance is just leaving your house? Check, check, check. What a burden for anyone to carry alone, never mind for someone who is in elementary or high school… Then time progresses, and nothing improves, and it feels like nothing ever will improve, and hopelessness smothers every effort we might make to fight for change. It’s never going to change, so why try? I used to think that hopelessness and despair were the same, or at least two faces on the same coin. I thought of despair as the absence of hope, but I don’t think that anymore. I think it is possible to feel hopeless but to believe that it might be possible to find hope somewhere again. Or maybe if you can hope for the possibility of hope you are not truly hopeless. I’ll leave that decision to you. Either way, I believe that despair is not just the absence of hope, but also the belief that hope can never again be found. When we come to a place of hopelessness, with the belief that nothing we do or anyone else does will ever give reason to hope again, then I believe that is when despair kills our reason to go on. When that happens we either stop trying to live, or we start trying to die, and so many people are lost that could have been helped if they had only talked about living with a mental illness before that illness took everything from them. We can save lives, just by making it okay to admit that we are not okay. So let’s talk. Let’s share, because when we walk together we care for each other.