2023-05-11 22:19:00
A year ago, two days before giving a partial, Pilar Ibáñez began to feel a lot of anguish. He did not want to eat or bathe, he might not sleep either: when he lay down he trembled. In the end, he decided not to take the exam and drop the subjects he was taking in his first quarter of his fourth year of medicine. “It seems silly, but I knew that what was happening to me went beyond having to take tests. I was mentally and physically exhausted.”dice.
What she felt was not new to her, but having to leave the race was. That “relapse”, as he calls it, was followed by weeks of crying and visits to nine psychologists until you find the right one and treat yourself, at the same time, with a psychiatrist. To Pilar, who is 22 years old today, he was first diagnosed with depression in 2019, following he started having suicidal thoughts.
Pilar managed to go back to school his fourth year of college following dropping out twice due to mental health issues. Parallel to medical treatment, she found a tool that encourages her to motivate herself and keep progressing: He shares his day-to-day life in one-minute videos on TikTok, where he has more than 93,000 followers.. “I wanted to show what it’s like to really study medicine, but I realized that it was impossible to share it without telling what was happening to me,” he says in dialogue with LA NACIÓN.
The videos of his daily routines, which carry titles like “When everything that can go wrong, does go wrong” or “What is it like to study medicine with depression?”, have accumulated more than 4 million views. Are compilations of what happens in his day, with his fluctuations in his state of mind, narrated in a “tragicomic” way. In addition, they are full of comments from people who encourage her to continue and who, in many cases, feel reflected in her experience.
an average day, Pilar gets up between four and six in the morning, has breakfast, takes her medication and leaves her house in Loma Hermosaon Tres de Febrero, heading to the Faculty of Medicine of the UBA. @diasenvideo, as he calls himself on his TikTok account, was planning to study law when he finally became interested in medicine. A high school teacher encouraged her to follow what she wanted and she signed up. In addition, her decision also had to do with some history of depression in her family: “I thought if I became a doctor I would be able to help”.
At the moment is in fourth year “for the third time”, as she affirms in her videos. She does internships in a hospital and takes two subjects: Pathology and Semiology. “I don’t know if my teachers know regarding my diagnosis, but when I quit overnight, I assumed that my classmates, who knew what had happened to me, told them,” he says, adding that “luckily” he had a ” very nice group”.
The diagnosis of depression was not something that surprised her. She had started college “very excited,” but by the end of her freshman year she began to have a hard time concentrating and she didn’t want to go to college. Besides, he began to have suicidal thoughts and came to try to take his own life more than once. That’s when she and her family decided to seek help.
However, following a month and a half of treatment with a psychiatrist, he left it because he “was ashamed” that his mother was paying for it. “I thought that she had improved and that she was going to be fine.” Late last year, when she had a “very big meltdown” and she decided to drop out a second time, she told her mom regarding it and she made her come back for help.
The videos had come a little earlier, when he decided to go back to school for the first time. “I watched student content and I didn’t feel identified at all. Most of them showed a fairly perfect reality, with their brand coffee and receiving an average of 9″, Explain. So she decided to show what it was like to “really” study. But following leaving medicine once more, she realized that he had to tell what was happening to him.
“I didn’t want to say it because I was ashamed”, he admits, but it seemed strange to him to tell his followers that he was leaving without saying why. So he made a video in which she recounted “the health problem” that led her to quit the race twice. It was seen by 125,000 people: “Most of the comments were positive, I felt grateful and thought I had to keep uploading videos.”
“Destigmatize the disease”
Far from being an isolated case, Pilar’s story has points in common with the mental suffering suffered by thousands of girls and boys. Child and adolescent psychiatrists and psychologists do not hesitate to describe this global phenomenon as an “adolescent mental health crisis”. In Argentina, following the pandemic, consultations for suicide attempts, thoughts of death, self-harm and depression pictures doubled.
Manuel Villapriño, psychiatrist and former president of the Association of Argentine Psychiatrists (APSA), explains that one of the great health problems in the country has to do with mental health: “One in three Argentines over the age of 18 presented a mental health disorder at some point in their lives“, according to him first National Epidemiological Study, carried out by the Faculty of Medicine of UBA and financed by the Ministry of Health. The most frequent illnesses are depression and anxiety. “These diagnoses are growing more and more and being able to talk regarding these realities can be very positive”clarifies the psychiatrist.
“For a person with a picture of depression, being in contact with people in networks is good and helps to destigmatize a disease,” he adds. If the message is careful, positive and also motivates other patients, “sharing it can be very good”as long as a network of understanding is put together.
“There are days when I wake up very distressed and it is difficult for me to get out of bed. It also happens to me that I wake up very well, but Throughout the day I wear myself out and an anguish grips me that doesn’t let me do anything”, says Pilar. Before dealing with professionals, she felt a great lack of interest in everything she did and it was very difficult for her to study. “I was concentrating at first and then I would think regarding how bad I felt”.
She often comes across messages that encourage her and ask for advice. “How do I study if I’m sad?” o “How do you get out of bed?” Those are two questions you get often. That motivates her a lot to continue with the TikTok account, especially when they are experiences of people who are going through the same thing as her, or even, who have already obtained their degree with depression, anxiety or some other diagnosis. “That gives me a lot of hope,” says Pilar.
Also, receive negative comments: “How do you plan to be a doctor if you are now depressed during your degree”, they have come to comment on their videos. “Yo I am very sensitive and I get sick. I don’t care that it’s a person without a profile picture and a false username, I can’t help it”, admits Pilar.
Carina Tornatore, her psychologist, works with her on receiving comments that might harm her. “Pilar uses the networks as a resource to be able to express herself and puts the creative into play with the playful,” she says. For a person suffering from depression, reading these messages can exacerbate this and worsen, in some cases, the mood. “That is why it is important that these patients can sustain a therapeutic space where these issues can be addressed and managed”.
Pilar even tries to understand some of those comments: “Before I had depression I thought the same as the people who criticize me saying that it can’t be that I don’t feel like doing anything”. But when he happened to her, he realized that it was “a disease that is not cured ‘willingly’ or ‘with desire’, and that it is better to find out before commenting.”
He recently submitted his first partial since leaving the race for the first time. “I was very scared, but sharing it with my followers gave me a huge push that helped me see what I was capable of,” he says following having approved with a 9. “I feel that I help to make something visible, the career is not a linear process,” he says. “Sometimes you start off well, you go back, you go back, you come back. You can get sick on the way and nothing happens”.
Advice for those who see this type of content
Psychiatrist Manuel Villapriño, former president of the Association of Argentine Psychiatrists (APSA)offers three recommendations for those who consume mental health content on social networks:
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