Tomorrow, I will have my first appointment with a psychotherapist since I moved here in Austria. It took me a long time to find one who speaks English. When I first moved here, I was a lot more depressed than usual. I was happy that I can finally be with my boyfriend but the thought of living in a different country didn't really sink in. I remember walking around the streets of Vienna and seeing the beautiful architecture but not really appreciating any of it. Even when I experienced snow for the first time, it felt like I was watching a movie of someone else's life, aching to get back home but nothing really felt like home. Every day, I would go back to my apartment and remember the guy from the baggage check-in telling me how lucky I am to be able to live there. I can't help but feel ungrateful.
Soon enough, I found myself in the psychiatrist's office. I was put on medication for anxiety and depression. It helped numb the feelings down but also made me feel like a zombie. There were several instances where I would just feel dizzy during the day. I'll be walking on the way to work and feel like throwing up or have this intense feeling of dread. We've adjusted my medication several times until those symptoms became less but I still felt weak and less like myself. I didn't feel angry or sad but I also didn't feel excited about anything anymore. When you're in pain, the numbness is a welcome change but you can only stay in that state for so long before you also get tired of it. I eventually worked with my psychiatrist to get off the medication. I had to get back on it a few months later because of an issue with my previous employer which ended up escalating into court.
Although getting a job in Austria was pretty easy, my time here has been very stressful especially on the first two years where I felt constantly threatened of losing my work and residence permit. Systems were also difficult to navigate with the combination of bureaucracy and language barrier. I thought of moving back to the Philippines a lot but I still try to make it work.
Mental Health in the Philippines
Mental health isn't taken as seriously in the Philippines. It's changing but due to the lack of education on the matter and the country's strong religious beliefs, mental illnesses are often attributed to weakness, insanity, or lack of faith. I grew up in a criminal neighbourhood with a messed up family. I experienced a lot of trauma at an early age. I hesitate to write everything here but I have to remind myself that the whole point of me writing on this website is to get all my thoughts out.
- At around age 6, a fire spread throughout our neighbourhood late at night. I remember being in our burning house, pulling at my parents' clothes as they try to save as much furniture as they can. When we got out, we stood on the other side of the street and watched the houses burn down. We lost everything overnight. My grandmother's house where my aunts and cousins lived burned down too. We were all separated because my uncle can only take in my parents and my siblings until our house was rebuilt.
- Violence was a frequent theme in our neighbourhood. There was never a dull moment. Some people get drunk and start stabbing each other. All the neighbours go out to watch the spectacle like some weird medieval entertainment. I've seen more blood and dead people than a child is supposed to see.
- My uncle had a fight and was slashed by a machete once. That one, I'm glad I didn't see because they said he was holding his intestines in while running away from the guy who was intent in killing him. I remember bringing a knife to school when I was less than 10 years old. My stupid child logic is if I saw the guy, I would kill him. My uncle thought it was funny.
- The worst part of it all was the animal torture. Maybe I'm too fucked in the head but I feel worse when I see animals suffering. I remember walking around the alleys and in front of one of the neighbour's door was a dog hanging upside down. All its fur was burned off with a torch but I can still see its mouth and eyes twitching. Later, they turned it into "adobo" (a dish) and ate it while drinking alcohol. I've also witnessed my father torture cats at the back of our house because he believed they were bad luck.
- My family hated and hurt animals. For this same reason, I've only ever wished suffering for all of them. My oldest brother used to feed any dog we had with chicken bones and all kinds of trash that make them sick. They kicked our pets a lot, especially my father. That's why as much as I liked pets, it always made me angry when my second oldest brother kept bringing home new ones. I remember when one of the dogs got too sick and started vomiting all the time. They asked the neighbours to "deal with it". I remember hearing him cry and scratch at our gate, followed with a loud noise from being hit with a thick piece of wood. He was eaten later that night.
- Pornography was easily accessible by children. We had vendors selling porn CDs everywhere without regard on who buys or watches them. Children tend to copy what they watch. I witnessed and stopped one of my male cousins when I saw him going on top of a female cousin. They were less than 10 years old. When I told the adults about it, they just gave him a slap on the wrist and then dismissed it as nothing serious. They said, "He's too young. He doesn't know what he was doing."
- When I was a kid, I had a friend who drowned with all her other cousins. They found their bloated corpses washed away in the river of a neighbouring province. This must be one of the many experiences where I shut down because I don't remember how I went from playing with them every day to coming home from school and hearing that they were all dead.
Plenty of tragedies and all kinds of abuse happened in my family, my neighbourhood, and my entire life. Some of them are worse than what I mentioned above and I'm too ashamed to even talk about the things that happened directly to me. Some of these experiences were so normal to me that I only began to realise how fucked up they were when I see the shock on people's faces after telling them a "funny" story from my childhood. Despite all of this, people often make me feel like I wasn't allowed to be depressed or angry. Like I was just supposed to live through all this shit and not have it affect me. Even writing all of these down, I feel like I had to provide justifications as to why I'm depressed. The first time I was diagnosed with depression, I had to hear all of these:
- "It's because you don't pray. I guess I'm just not as weak. I go to church and surrender all my problems. Maybe you should try it." That's what my brother said. He's blacklisted from several banks because he didn't pay off his credit cards and was at the time making his financial issues mine.
- "Maybe it's because you live alone. You should be with your family." That's what a general practitioner said after making it clear he doesn't believe in depression and I was just being dramatic. He said he can give me a sick note for fever though so yay, silver lining?
- "It's because you stopped hanging out with your friends." That's what the people who just wanted to get drunk with me said. I always found myself in situations where people pressure me to open up to them, only for them to minimise my experiences or use them against me whenever it suits them.
I had so many of these experiences with people that I started to find mingling with them repulsive. I still socialise when necessary but I keep my distance. I find most people insensitive and draining.
Mental Health in Austria
When it comes to acknowledging mental illness, Austria is a million times better than the Philippines but definitely not without its flaws. I've experienced presenting the medication plan from my psychiatrist to a doctor and being told that I didn't look sick. The same doctor proceeded to scold me over and over again about how she couldn't just give out sick notes to everyone who claims to be "sick". I also noticed that every time I talk to someone from "more civilised" western countries, they tend to assume I'm naive and haven't seen enough to earn my "depression badge". With men, it's especially invalidating because some of them think I had an easy life because I'm a woman and since women get so much privilege and coddling in their country (that's what they say), my life must have been like that too.
The worst are some of the people from rich countries who either visit a third world country for the first time or get deployed somewhere when they enter the army. They act like they've seen it all and say shit like:
- "Oh, you would never understand!"
- "You would never last a day in my shoes."
- "I've seen true suffering. It's real life, you know."
And then the condescending lecture begins on what true suffering is like, with it, the assumption that everyone else they meet has never experienced anything comparable. It's as if they forgot that the horrors they saw during their visits to third world countries were daily occurrences for people from many third world countries. You don't need war to be surrounded with human suffering. To many people, hell is every day. They didn't choose to be there and they definitely didn't get paid to experience any of that shit. This is the annoying thing when people try to virtue signal. In an attempt to look humble, they end up looking like spoiled brats who piggyback on other people's terrible fortune just so they can look "awakened" in a conversation.
Regardless, there's no need to compare. It doesn't matter if it's a dysfunctional family, a break-up, a stressful job or school, a dead friend, whatever. If you're depressed, you're depressed. All the other bullshit that surrounds it just makes things worse for everyone. Treatment or even acknowledgement of mental illnesses still have a long way to go. Dealing with trauma is a long process of trial and error. When someone opens up about their mental health struggles, we shouldn't be dismissing them based on stupid assumptions about their lives because we never truly know a person. Sometimes, people get out of difficult situations and are able to build a better life for themselves and yet, memories from their old life make it hard for them to live in the present. Sometimes, people never get out of difficult situations at all.
In a way, we all need help.
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