Some great advice I was given, a few years ago: Imagine you have a heart condition. It is treatable with some tried and tested keyhole surgery, but there’s an

Some great advice I was given, a few years ago: Imagine you have a heart condition. It is treatable with some tried and tested keyhole surgery, but there’s another problem. You were bitten by an insect and the bite became infected. You can’t go into surgery with a fever, but if you take some antibiotics then the infection will pass and you can get back on track for your surgery. The bite hurts a lot. An antihistamine cream will help. One body. Three different problems with it, all linked together. The way your mind’a chemistry works, the way you think, and how you got there are three very similar things. SSRIs are there to help bring you stability. They don’t make life magically better. That requires a lot of hard work on your mindset. Talking therapy (CBT) is the best place to start. It’s custom coaching to help you look to the future and move forward in life with tools to hold back the demons of anxiety and rumination. When you have those two things under your belt — the bite stops hurting and the infection clears up — then you can turn around and look back on your past, with Analysis. Finding a good psychoanalyst is time consuming and expensive and not always even a necessary or desirable step. You can live with a heart condition if you accept that you are willing to drop your plans to climb Everest. That’s the outline. Don’t be scared. Be brave and talk to a doctor*. They will help you with all of these steps. *…or two, or more if you want to five-space-shuttle-computer-votes your medical care! I once took three eye tests in the same day because I was convinced opticians were quacks!