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The Words That Saved Me From My Anxiety

Author Georgie Dent reveals the heartfelt advice from a 70-year-old GP that halted her mental health decline

Photography by Theo Verhoeven

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Words from a 70-year-old physician changed my life. It was a winter afternoon more than a decade ago, but I remember every detail vividly. I was driven to the appointment by my mum, and I was in disarray โ€“ both physically and mentally โ€“ when I arrived. A few months earlier I had been living in Sydney, working as a junior lawyer in a big firm, but now I was effectively unemployed and had spent the past four months living back with my parents at their home in northern NSW. I spent most days on their couch.

At the time, it felt like this change happened quickly: that one minute I was a fully functioning 24-year-old member of society, the next I was not.

โ€œGeorgie, I am so sorry for what youโ€™re going through,โ€ the physician said. He looked into my eyes and his gentle, sympathetic manner was more than I could bear. My own eyes welled with tears. โ€œWhat youโ€™re experiencing is real, Georgie,โ€ he said. โ€œIn my medical career, treating patients for nearly 50 years, I have learnt that whenever there are unexplained physical symptoms, stress is always the cause. Always.โ€

That was the sentence that changed my life. The โ€œunexplainedโ€ symptom in my case was vertigo: I had been unsteady and nauseous for months.

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Iโ€™d had every test and examination to explain the debilitating dizziness that had been dogging me for months. It had started with a vertigo attack one night at work. I was knocked off balance and felt woozy. Once I arrived home to my apartment, I made a beeline for bed. I pulled a pillow over my face to block out any light, but also to hide. After a restless night, I took myself off to the doctor and so began my ride on the medical merry-go-round from hell.

Within a few weeks, I had moved back in with my parents and left my job. I couldnโ€™t function with the dizziness. It wasnโ€™t my first experience with illness. At 19, Iโ€™d been diagnosed with Crohnโ€™s disease, an autoimmune inflammatory bowel disease. Around the time the vertigo struck, my Crohnโ€™s was particularly bad, but it was familiar at least. I knew how to cope with my wretched stomach, but I couldnโ€™t manage my spinning head, so soon enough my world went with it.

No-one could give me an answer. That is until the elderly physician said I needed help. He wasnโ€™t the first person to suggest anxiety was a problem for me โ€“ it had been raised gently by many of my loved ones โ€“ but he was the first person I believed. He said I needed to see a psychiatrist, probably start medication and be admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Realising he was right was shocking and relieving at once. For the first time, I had hope I might recover and that, at some point, I might be able to return to a version of life in which I was a participant, not an invalid on a couch. A week later I checked into a private psychiatric hospital and was treated for generalised anxiety disorder.

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A few years after my breakdown, I wrote an article about it, which was published online. The response was so overwhelming that it buoyed me to keep writing. Itโ€™s no wonder my story struck a chord: one in four Australians will experience an anxiety condition in their lifetime โ€“ making it the most common mental health problem. Itโ€™s worse for women: one in three are likely to suffer an anxiety-related episode in their life.

Despite how prolific it is and the fact that we speak more openly about mental illness now than we ever have, there is still a stigma attached. This is the reason I wanted to write my book: to show that mental illness can happen even when you spend your life working hard to do all the right things. And, importantly, that itโ€™s possible to be treated and recover. Anxiety remains an issue I have to manage, but my life improved immeasurably almost from the minute I realised I had it. Treating anxiety was far, far easier than leaving it unchecked.

Breaking Badly (Affirm Press, $29.99) is out now. This article originally appeared in the September issue of marie claire.

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