Anxiety, ADHD, and Bipolar Disorders

It is estimated that more than 1 out of every 5 American adults live with a mental illness, and 85% of them are on prescription medications. What's even more shocking is that only 10% of these individuals received counseling or therapy!

It's not just adults, either:

• A staggering 50% of adolescents are estimated to have a mental disorder.

• 10% of these adolescents are treated with psychotropic medication.

• Of adolescents with mental disorders, over 20% of them struggle with severe impairment.

Among these individuals, the most common mental disorders being treated are anxiety, depression, ADHD, and bipolar disorder.

What’s causing this, you ask?

According to the Mayo Clinic, the top 3 reasons listed for causes of mental illness are:

1. Inherited Traits

2. Environmental Exposures Before Birth

3. Brain Chemistry

Well, if that’s true, and if the average person suffering from a mental disorder saw these as the causes, I’d bet they would feel screwed, because:

• Since when can you change your inherited traits?!

• You certainly can't do anything about the environment you were in before you were born!

• And what the hell can you do about brain chemistry?!? Seems like you’d need medication for that.

If these are indeed the causes of mental disorders, then here’s the only reasonable conclusion:

The problem and dysfunction fall directly on the individual suffering from the disorder.

They simply have bad genes. Mom was too stressed out when she was pregnant with these individuals, and their brains got messed up.

In other words—according to Mayo Clinic—the person is essentially broken.

Somehow, prescription medicine is always the most convenient solution

What I find most fascinating is that the reasons for mental illness, as listed by the most prestigious medical institution in the world, are all things that strongly imply the need for prescription medications.

This may explain the insane statistic that 85% of adults with mental disorders are treated with medications.

Not to mention that these medications—which claim to balance brain chemistry (one of the listed causes)—don’t seem to be very effective at treating the underlying issues that cause imbalanced brain chemistry in the first place.

What medication does effectively, it seems, is allow people to “live” with the unfortunate reality of being broken.

There is something SERIOUSLY wrong here.

In this article, I’m going to share why I do not believe there is ANYTHING “wrong” with the majority of individuals suffering from mental disorders.

I think these individuals are more RIGHT than anything.

My goal is to share a perspective that empowers those who may be suffering from these “disorders” so they have other options besides “living with it.”

THE REAL PROBLEM

People are being medicated to tolerate environments and situations they should not be living in.

I don’t believe that the individuals suffering from the following symptoms (listed on the Mayo Clinic website as signs of these disorders) signify in ANY way that there is something “wrong with them.”

• Feeling sad or down

• Confused thinking or reduced ability to concentrate

• Excessive fear or worries or extreme feelings of guilt

• Extreme mood changes of highs and lows

• Withdrawal from friends and activities

• Significant tiredness, low energy, or problems sleeping

• Detachment from reality (delusions), paranoia or hallucinations

• Inability to cope with daily problems or stress

• Trouble understanding and relating to situations and people

• Problems with alcohol or drug use

• Major changes in eating habits

• Sex drive changes

• Excessive anger, hostility violence

• Suicidal thinking

I’ve suffered from these things myself and have worked with individuals for the last 20 years with similar experiences.

What I’ve found is that these symptoms are:

1. Communications from the body that there is a problem or threat to address in their environment

2. A result of these communications not being processed (indicating that the problem has been unaddressed for far too long)

Here are three recent case studies illustrating exactly what this looks like.

Jessica, 35-year-old female

Jessica’s mom dominated the household and attempted to have complete control of her kids - mostly as a way to “keep them safe” due to prior traumatic experiences that her mom experienced as a child.

Throughout her childhood, she was continuously berated with reminders that she was incompetent, dumb, ridiculous, and difficult—especially if she ever thought for herself.

Her stepdad was emotionally abusive, singing the same songs of judgment. He gaslit her and her sister to believe they were the reason for any pain or stress that they or the family endured.

She suffers from a myriad of the symptoms listed above, and they are amplified 2-3x whenever she interacts with her family.

She has been diagnosed with ADHD and has been medicated for it.

Hana, 44-year-old female

Hana was raised in a culture where you’re expected to do ANYTHING for family, regardless of whether they take any accountability for themselves.

She has continually been asked to put her life on hold because of the needs of the family. These needs include a mother who refuses to be responsible with money, and a brother with a wife and child who abuses alcohol, doesn’t work, and is in and out of jail.

If they reach out to her for help and she doesn’t immediately jump to their rescue, they would tell her what a TERRIBLE human she was, that she didn’t care, and that she was so difficult.

Hana has severe mood swings and suffers from deep anger and resentment, followed by extreme levels of guilt and sadness.

She recently went to a psychiatrist convinced there was something “wrong with her,” and was told she had ADHD and was probably bipolar. And, you guessed it, was offered medication.

Gabriela, 39-year-old female

Since she was very little, Gabriela was identified and valued within her family as the “dependable one” who was always there for everyone. She had an amazing ability to help anyone in need.

Ensuring everyone and her family was ok kept her very busy, because her family members had limited capacity to care for themselves. This, unfortunately, didn’t leave much room for Gabriela. Her needs and the life she would have loved to create for herself were constantly last on her list.

This left her with significant tiredness, low energy and problems sleeping, excessive anger and hostility, feeling empty inside, depressed, and suicidal.

This also manifested in her body as an autoimmune disorder, which also has made it very difficult to function.

She was also being medicated for ADHD and Anxiety disorder.

If you placed any human into any of these environments, their experiences would be almost identical.

Imagine if I gave you a basic skills exam to take, put you in a room filled with venomous snakes, and evaluated how you did. And just for the sake of this thought experiment, you had to stay there, taking exams for an entire week.

After observing you for the week, here are the symptoms I noted:

• Trouble concentrating

• Excessive fears and worries

• Extreme mood changes

• Significant tiredness and trouble sleeping

• Excessive anger, hostility, and violence

• Major changes in eating habits

• Inability to cope with daily problems and stress

And based on those symptoms, I concluded that you had ADHD, Anxiety Disorder, and possibly bipolar.

I then prescribe you some medication to treat these disorders, recommend that you meditate every day, and schedule time for us to meet once a week to talk about your feelings. And then I send you back into that room.

Prescription medication will never fix a toxic environment

This room of venomous snakes is exactly the environment these three individuals lived in daily.

Telling these women there’s something wrong with them for feeling what they’re feeling, and giving them medication to tolerate that extremely toxic and dangerous environment, is an absolute travesty!

To top it off, all three of these young women are extremely sensitive, good-hearted, and empathetic. The worst traits to have in these environments.

Putting highly sensitive individuals in these types of environments is not much different than putting someone with fair skin and a nasty sunburn on a Florida beach in July with no shirt on - LITERAL TORTURE.

Giving this fair-skinned individual some SFP50 and sending them back to the beach is just as insane as prescribing these three women medication for ADHD, Anxiety Disorders, and Bipolar and sending them back into these environments.

We have to start considering other options.

The “Is It Me or the Environment?” Assessment

There are a few steps you can go through to assess if it is you that has some disorder, or if it’s your body responding to being in a dangerous environment.

Try going through the following steps and writing it out in your journal:

1. Assume the way you feel is not a mistake or wrong.

2. Pay attention to what the emotions are telling you.

3. Write it all down on a piece of paper.

4. Consider that what is being communicated is accurate and in your best interest to understand & integrate.

5. Ask yourself if feeling this way is context-dependent

   1. Are there times when you DON’T feel this way?

   2. What are you doing in those moments?

   3. What environment are you in?

Suppose the general communication is anger, resentment, obligation, frustration, anxiety, and feeling powerless. If it’s then followed by feelings of guilt, shame, isolation, loneliness, and emptiness, AND is amplified when you’re in certain environments… then it’s time to make a change.

What if I’m in a situation where I can’t make a change?

You may think, “But Matt, I can’t disengage with my family?!”

And to that, I would say, “Yes, you can.”

Sometimes, it would be very smart to do that, but I do understand, if possible, that you’d rather not.

So the second best option is to follow these 3 Steps:

1. Establish some SUPER clear boundaries of what you are willing and not willing to do for them.

2. Understand they will be unhappy with whatever boundaries you set.

3. Do it anyway and start living YOUR life.

A sign that you’re on track is when you feel guilty about living your life for yourself, followed by long periods of freedom, peace, and joy.

Although this is not always easy, I promise you, it will absolutely be worth it.

Time to live YOUR life’s template.

Yours in Vitality,

Matt

References

CDC: Mental Health Treatment Among Adults

National Institute of Mental Health: Mental Health for Adolescents

National Institutes of Health: Psychotropic Medication Treatment of Adolescents

Mayo Clinic Article: Mental Illness - Symptoms and Causes