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Anxiety: A Symptom

I began seeing psychiatrists when I was 14. Puberty had hit me with a vengeance. 13 lucky years later, I'm learning the truth.

By Katherine ApuzzoPublished 4 years ago 3 min read
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When I say puberty had hit me with a vengeance, I mean I went bonkers. Everything became harder. I began feeling more. Some serious dysfunction was happening at home that didn't help, and I dropped out of high school my first semester junior year due to depression and anxiety.

Beginning when I was 14, I just seemed to feel too much. Certain events would trigger my anxiety, and I just couldn't keep up with everyone else my age as they lived their young lives. These feelings were so heavy and so real, and so painful.

Anxiety was the norm. Screening my best friends' calls because of a panic attack was just Tuesday. Isolation was home. It was a dark time.

Fast forward to today, I am the Office Manager for a medical practice in Connecticut. After 13 years of struggling with generalized and social anxiety, I learned a new piece of information no one in the psychiatric field had ever been able to tell me: Anxiety is a symptom of Adrenal Insufficiency. The doctor I happened to end up working for specializes in this kind of body-breakdown, and so he's been helping and teaching me.

DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS? I'll tell you:

This means I AM NOT BONKERS. This means my body has been running on empty since I was a kid. The stress hormone- Cortisol, is released when a traumatic or stressful event happens. Guess what? My body just doesn't have enough of it. So when I was young, and some stressful stuff was going on, I had some minor adrenal insufficiency (we can assume), but since there was so much trauma and stress happening around me, I never had time to recover. This started a snowball effect. Low cortisol > stressful event > even lower cortisol because it's all been used > no time to recover > another stressful event > cortisol lowers even more > and so on and so forth.

So this blew my mind. I was prescribed a temporary steroid to get my body back on track. The first day I took the medication- my anxiety went down 90%. I've been on a variety of benzodiazepines before, and those couldn't even do the trick.

And so now, I share this information because I know I'm not the only one. I know there's people out there struggling with seemingly incurable anxiety. I was one of them. I was on addictive medication to manage it. I was treatment resistant. Until I started looking in my body for the answers, instead of in my mind.

I'm reminded these days, since starting the medication, of who I was before puberty, before I experienced trauma, before anxiety got the best of me. I never thought I would have the chance to feel this way again.

My emotions haven't changed. I feel as much as I always have, but now it doesn't take me out of commission. I feel stronger, I feel hopeful, and I feel the need to get the word out about this.

If you resonated with any part of this story, I encourage you to seek the guidance and care of an experienced MD, and ask them about adrenal insufficiency. It only takes a couple of blood tests to find out what's really going on, and it could be change you've been seeking.

I stumbled upon this information when I started working at the medical practice I currently work for. I brought up the link between anxiety and adrenal insufficiency to my psychiatrist, and he did not know what I was talking about. This needs to be more common education. It could change the lives of so many.

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