Mental Health and Marriage Episode 6 (05172023)

The podcast episode discusses the connection between mental health and marriage. The host mentions the increasing prevalence of mental health issues in society, including violence and suicide. She wonders if medication may be a factor in causing harmful thoughts and actions. The host also shares her own experience with medication side effects affecting her mood and behavior. She raises the question of how to address mental health issues within marriages and seeks input from her audience on possible solutions. Welcome to this episode on Bridging Our Gap. I'm your host, Karen Penn. And our podcast is about bridging the gap between mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, husbands and wives. Today's episode, we're going to be talking about mental health in relationship to marriage. Mental health in relationship to marriage. I'm noticing, and I'm sure you have too, the epidemic of mental health issues in the world. From the murdering of people in the street, particularly Black people, Black men being gunned down by police officers, to random shooters going into hospitals, banks, just shooting neighbors on the street. There seems to be an epidemic of people killing one another. And sometimes we're hearing that, well it sounds like they are mental health issues, because why are you killing people? Why? Is it a power struggle? We know some things are just blatant racism when it comes to the races, the cops killing Black males mostly. But there's got to be something else going on. More and more it's coming out that people are writing suicidal notes and they have very successful careers going on and they're found dead killing themselves and they leave a note because they had intentions of taking their life for no apparent reason. It's got to be mental health. Is it meds though? Could meds that people are taking, um, have they been over time speaking, causing their mind to speak to itself and tell them to do things to harm others or to harm themselves? And what about in a marriage, which is our topic today? Personally, I have been married for 43 years coming this October 2023. And through the years, I was diagnosed with a disease called sarcoidosis. It's not known where it's coming, where it comes from. And for some people, this disease that affects the lungs, but also other parts of the body randomly, by causing a conglomerate of nodules to form. I had them in my lungs and it was causing scarring in my lungs. So it's affected my respiratory system. Through the years, I was diagnosed to take, um, well, I was prescribed to take prednisone, which is sort of like the miracle drug these days. Every time someone goes to the doctor, they're prescribed prednisone for some reason. It helps whatever the situation is. But there are side effects, of course. I had started having a lot of water retention and I couldn't figure out why I was suddenly gaining so much weight. But this medicine, one of the side effects is water retention. Another of the side effects, which I didn't know when I started taking it, was it caused me to be angry. It caused me to go into mood swings where sometimes I went into deep depression. Just the thoughts would flood first thing in the morning. Negative thoughts. What's the use? You're this age and you have a lot of negative thoughts. This or that. Your house is never going to be fully clean. And then what are you going to do after that? You have to clean some more. Just crazy, crazy thoughts. And my husband going to work because I was a stay-at-home young mom would come back and wonder what in the world was the temperature going to be at home when he came in from work. Then I would be angry about that because I could tell he was gauging the weather of the house. And I didn't want him to come in that way. I wanted him to just come in and say hello and not tippy-toe in to check and see what kind of mood swings I was going through. And I didn't know this for a while and I kept saying to him and to my family that looked at me with a raised eyebrow when I was angry over small things, there's nothing wrong with me. It's you people. And they continued to look at me like I was crazy because I got angry over small things. For example, one time I had this particular muffin that if you didn't buy this muffin by a certain time of the morning, they were all gone. I don't know why they didn't make a lot of it because people were buying it. It was very good. It was called a cappuccino muffin and you could only get it at Honeydew Donuts. That was the most delicious muffin I have had in my life since. They discontinued it, but when they were serving it, I would go early and sometimes I would get two, have one for coffee and plan to have one in the evening after dinner with some coffee. Well, one time I bought two, had one and left the bag on the kitchen table because I was going to have it that evening with coffee. One of my daughters was cleaning up. She threw the bag away. When I found that out, I went bazooka. I had it in my mind that I was going to have an enjoyable moment no matter what happened all day. I was looking forward to that muffin with that cup of coffee and she just destroyed that dream unbeknowing to her. So her not knowing my mental plan and seeing the explosion that I had about throwing away the muffin, couldn't figure out what on earth was wrong with her mother. Well, that was one of many times that I seemed to overreact and I realized, wow, this medicine is really affecting you mentally. And so today when I reflect back, matter of fact, I am still on that medicine, but on a much lower doses. So I don't have explosions like that anymore. And that was probably about 30 years ago. So I have changed, but it makes me wonder today if people that are on medicine, the side effects of them, of the medicines are causing them to have mental distress that affects their relationships with everyone. And most of all, the intimate relationship in a marriage. I had, I won't mention names because these people might listen to my podcast, but someone shared with me that a friend of theirs called him and said, there was a guy, he says, I messed up man. And so the guy, he says, he answers and says, what did you do? He says, I killed her. I said, what? She was coming at him so much, that he blew his top and he shot her and killed her. Wow. In a marriage, you kind of think those things are outside of your house and there's some safety zone or safety net, at least inside your house. But now this kind of, this mental health has been filtered as closely as a married couple's relationship relationship where they want to kill each other. Wow. What a way to destroy not only family, but the society we live in just crumbling at our feet. And we're feeling helpless with what to do, how to resolve this. Of course, you know, those who are Christians believe in prayer and the power of God and that prayer can change anything. But what about those who don't have prayer in their life? What about those who don't know God and don't have God as an anchor or his word that is a healing salve when you read it? A lot of times people are busy combating it and they haven't even read it. And then they don't read it trying to gain understanding, but they read it in order to refute it and combat every word. You'll never get anything out of the Bible when you read it like that. You have to come with an open mind and ask that your, that clarity be brought to you because you can't understand the Bible on an intellectual level and expect to get something out of it. So my question to my audience is, how do you suggest that the world goes about resolving mental health issues that we have in the world and particularly mental health issues that get as close knit as in a married couple? How do you resolve these kinds of things if your mate is on medicine? I had, before I close, I had another person share that their husband got Alzheimer's and having Alzheimer's itself, not even with medicine, altered his personality so much that he was, he would snap into rages. And the last rage episode that this wife endured, she had to run into the bathroom, hide. Good thing she had her cell phone to call for help. She was afraid to leave the bathroom. And this was so out of character of her husband that she had been with for many years. I don't remember how many at this point, but to be out of character like that suddenly, wow, what is attacking our minds that affect our actions in the world today? This is an attack that we can't readily resolve with our hands, with medicine, with anything that we know of on the earth. And it's getting, you know, more and more prominent while we struggle to figure out what to do. But I'd like my audience to chime in, share your thoughts. How do you believe that this situation of mental health that's running rapid in our world today would be resolved? I'd like to hear your comments. Feel free to send me an email at info at bridgingourgaps.com. I'd love to hear your input. I welcome your comments. And I pray that we will someday find a result. This is your host Karen Penn. We'll talk with you on next time. Take care. Transcribed by https://otter.ai