Angelika: Living Fully and Sharing Insights About Her Mental Health Online
Angelika Matson remembers feeling low and unsafe with herself. She lives with treatment-resistant depression and credits a medical procedure, Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT), for changing her life.
Today, Angelika is hopeful.
“Basically, this saved my life. People think saving lives can only happen with things like heart attacks or trauma, like car accidents. But sometimes it’s our brains.”
ECT is a medical procedure administered under anesthesia. It uses small electric currents to trigger a seizure, which can change the chemistry in the brain to quickly reverse symptoms of mental health conditions such as severe depression and schizophrenia.
She has this to say to the team of experts at Alberta Hospital Edmonton (AHE) who helped her, “To know there is a team out there and a place where I can go and make sure that I am still around for my family and friends to experience all the great things that life has to offer, that’s awesome. My (time) at AHE gave me hope that I thought I could and will get better.”
She is grateful for the efforts of MHF to raise funds to help AHE create programs and spaces for those who need help.
Angelika shares her story on Instagram @angeegabs with personalized content based on her mental health journey. She chronicles her struggles as someone working hard to build up the strength to swim upstream when a tsunami hit.
A lot of people ask, isn’t it hard to open up and share? And I am like yeah, but it’s much harder to pretend I’m okay when I’m not. And so, it’s been freeing. I feel like I am fully myself now.