My Mental Health

My name is Elana Frances Amsterdam.

I am fifty-seven years old. I have ADHD, OCD, Complex PTSD, and RSD (rejection sensitive dysphoria). I grew up with a father, mother, and sister in Davis, California.

As a child of nine, I sat alone in our kitchen, perched on a stool, picturing dark outer space filled with bright stars. I saw myself, a lone spec, in the black of multiple universes. Why am I here, born to this family? A solitary fish out of water, I did not know how I fit in.

Early on, I learned to mask this internal angst with external achievement.

At its genesis, I was an amphibian, part swamp dweller, part land creature. I alternated between trying to stay afloat and making a splash in a home filled with piano lessons, picture books of the Holocaust, empty kitchen cupboards, and parents who were geniuses.

My name, Elana, means “tree” in Hebrew. From age fourteen on, my friend Helen was the canopy that protected me, the crown that topped my branches.

It took forty-three years for my mental health battles to reveal themselves to my closest childhood friend, a tennis buddy and one of my guardian angels.

“You never shared your mental health struggles with me,” she said recently, “it’s surprising given how open you are about celiac and everything on your blog.”

This fall when I fell into a darkness I could no longer shield myself or others from, these issues were revealed.

I was born the grandchild of Holocaust refugees, begat to a family of torment, anger, gloom, brilliant intellect, and a tremendous drive to achieve.

For decades I papered over my mental health struggles with tennis championships, Ivy League education, and award-winning career moves, then when I had a family, I taught myself how to do it all again with recipes, blog posts, cookbooks, TV appearances, and more. This habit is ingrained and I am still doing so.

Mental health bears its own cultural stigmata, making it a challenge to discuss in general, but for those of us immersed in the struggle itself, it goes beyond that.

Have I failed to discuss my mental health struggles because I am I blind to my own suffering or perhaps thwarted by shame?

No, I’ve not discussed them because it is akin to trying to describe the taste of water.

Creeping through the early years taught me to distill torment into effervescence.

Not a bad recipe for viniculture, but with no other outlets, my bubbles turned to decay under the slightest compression.

I was born to a productive varietal that lacked physical and mental disease resistance, but I did my best to hide the absence of any window of stress tolerance for life’s usual changes in atmospheric pressure, using denial and blame as tools to shied my fragile ego from the feedback of those around me.

Making light of an affliction like Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a classic defense for those of us with mental health issues and I zealously did so when I was incessantly cleaning our home or organizing to block out intrusive thoughts that made me live in near constant fear that imminent harm would befall our family.

Yet, instead of blocking out feelings, this device halted my world from spinning on its axis. Which makes sense given that I recently discovered in my studies on OCD and ADHD that procrastination is a way to stop time. My compulsions and procrastination turned back time isolating me more than I would ever imagine.

My bestie of thirty years recently pointed out that I have trouble “receiving.”

Friends let me know they feared the amount of “deprivation” I had baked into my daily routines. My tendency toward discipline became a hair shirt I donned daily.

They saw what I was blind to: my compulsive habit and drive for achievement brought me to the point of exhaustion and isolation.

Running from genealogical trauma, I could not confess to myself that I was sinking until my benzo-fueled breakdown this fall. A perfect storm of the empty nest, Covid, cancer, other medical issues (celiac, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, MS, and colitis), plus longstanding psychiatric issues and a toxic brew of prescription pharmaceuticals dissolved the last drops of discipline holding together my flawless looking life. It all unraveled on social media in a bacchanalian display.

Looking back, it began in the fall of 2018 when our younger son, went to college. The empty nest hit me much harder than I was willing to admit.

My world revolved around the boys. Caring for them served as an emotional anchor as I swam through the sea of life.

They left and although I did not realize it I was adrift, my life punctuated by medical appointments, plus physical and occupational therapy.

With no one to write recipes and cook for, I had lost my professional focus and my sense of purpose and am now working to regain it every day.


People have often told me that my quirkiness is charming, but when the boys left for college and Covid hit, quirky quickened into dysfunctional, resulting in severe isolation.

People used to stop me on the streets of downtown Davis to ask, are you Ezra Amsterdam’s daughter, that’s how much I resemble my father, but my mental health issues took root on my mother’s side in the 1930s.

Uncle Barry, a math genius and New York City school teacher with a fat public servant’s pension, was well off, but spent his life in squalor in downtown Manhattan. I went to Columbia on the Upper West Side, and had to write him letters if I wanted to see him since he did not have a phone.

It wasn’t that he never got a cell phone, he had no phone at all, not a landline in the apartment –nothing.

I used to chuckle about this, but now I see the parallels.

I got my first cell phone in the early 2000s. I didn’t want one but knew it made sense when toting our boys around in case of emergencies. Landlines were still common then.

Fast forward to 2024, still using my landline, I refused to give my cell number to even my best friends which meant I was unreachable.

In addition to the isolation of not giving out my cell phone number, came the isolation of Covid. When its terrible dust settled a single silver lining appeared. Our boys came home for 10 glorious weeks during which we cooked and ate dinner together each night.

When the boys left, I was devastated and I locked down on lock down, not letting anyone into our home for years because of my fear of Covid which I rationalized given a new cancer diagnosis.

I was diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer in July 2021.

I had a double mastectomy six months later in February 2022 with surprising results. The surgical pathology report showed that more tissue was taken from the healthy side than the cancerous side.

I felt a constant stabbing pain in what had been the healthy side of my chest. I tried to distract myself by joining a writer’s group in the summer of 2022. But instead of finding joy, I began to write about my mastectomy trauma in a relentless fashion.

In July 2023 when I was diagnosed with my third cancer in less than two years. The day I found out I went into shock and threw up dozens of times until there was nothing left in me and I was taken to the emergency room at our community hospital.

This cancer was another early-stage, but instead of breast it was uterine. In October 2023 I had a robotic radical hysterectomy at MD Anderson and to my great relief, I was back in the gym lifting heavy weights in six weeks.

My respite was short lived when the insomnia set in. Many sleepless months later, the years of medical stress plus lifelong mental health struggles caught up with me.

My team of doctors suggested benzodiazepines. Desperate for sleep, I agreed. Although I have never written about it here, my neurotransmitters were already swimming in a stew of mighty pharmaceuticals including Seroquel, Lithium Carbonate, Pristiq, Propranolol, Halcion, Silenor, LDN, and more.

My insomniac devastation was compounded in June 2024 by the results of a routine colonoscopy that revealed I had a fourth autoimmune disorder: colitis.

Thankfully I did not have colon cancer which I had tremendous anxiety about while awaiting the pathology report results which took a couple of weeks to receive.

When I told my fantastic psychiatrist of nearly two years that I was upset about this fourth autoimmune disease diagnosis he scowled at me through the Zoom screen, very atypical for him, then out of nowhere called me a “victim,” then a “hypochondriac.” This uncharacteristically hostile tone went on for three sessions total.

Shattered, I emailed asking if this unorthodox response was part of my treatment, to which he replied that indeed, it was not. In July 2024 I ended the treatment when he wrote to me that he couldn’t guarantee this type of rupture in the therapeutic container wouldn’t happen again. Heartbroken, I did my best to move on and that was when I knew I needed more help, that this was out of my hands and deserved strategic professional attention.

According to my friends and loved ones, by August, things had really begun to boil over but given that I was prescribed double the FDA recommended dose of the benzo temazepam.

I don’t recall much because benzos can cause memory loss, but friends shared their concerns about my mania and dysregulation with me, and told me I was behaving in a paranoid, untrusting way and did not “look like myself.”

According to the NIH, benzodiazepine use “can significantly impair short-term memory by causing ‘anterograde amnesia,’ which means a disruption in the ability to form new memories while under the influence of the drug,” and this happened to me.

With the help of friends, in October 2024 I went to in-patient treatment in Southern California.

Then, when I sought treatment, I suffered severe trauma and had a social media meltdown.

My friend said they were frightened after I began posting disturbing photos on social media.

Until these incidents, I hid my mental health struggles all too well, and few, myself included, knew what was going on. But a toxic stew of drugs combined with a lifetime of trauma distilled into perfectionism was a recipe for a crisis.

In December 2024, I spoke to my fabulous psychopharmacologist who said that the benzodiazepines had caused a paradoxical reaction. Instead of sedating me the drug had made me very manic.

As the fog is lifting and I’m beginning to piece together what happened, I find it very unlike myself to bring this type of unwanted attention to my family. None of this is what I wanted, but strangely it is what I needed.

Now I’m tapering off the benzos. I cry when I’m sad. I cry when I’m happy too. I’m feeling my feelings for the first time since the boys left, some of the feelings for the first time ever.

I had a healing crisis, and my lifelong struggles with mental health were revealed.

I’m going into treatment this week and will keep you updated on my progress as things unfold. I’m looking forward to this next chapter and to staying connected to all of you, my fabulous friends and readers.