How Chronic Migraine Has Affected My Mental Health

As someone who has struggled with migraine my whole life, I’ve honestly never really stopped to think about how chronic migraine has affected my mental health. Over the past few years, I’ve experienced an uptick in migraine days often correlated with my hormones and my menstrual cycle. I ended up in the emergency room twice for IV treatment for my migraine attacks after I had miscarriages in 2020 and 2021.

How did I manage the worst migraine of my life?

This past winter I was diagnosed with bacterial meningitis, and for about 4 weeks, I struggled with the absolute worst migraine of my life. It felt like my skull was being crushed, and every small movement made me cry out in pain. As the IV antibiotics fought the infection and reduced the size of the abscess in my brain, the throbbing head pain was slightly reduced, but for an additional 10 weeks I lived in a migraine cycle that no medication seemed to be able to break. I even tried trigger point injections and occipital nerve injections in addition to the Botox I regularly get for migraines, and I found no relief. I ended up needing to be admitted to the hospital to receive DHE infusions (a very specific protocol to break up the headaches I had been living with for months).

How was my mental health affected?

One thing I noticed during this period of my life was that chronic migraines significantly impacted my mental health - not just the physical pain I was constantly experiencing and trying to outrun, but the emotional distress the pain was causing me. It was preventing me from sleeping well, it was increasing my anxiety, making me feel hopeless that there would never be any (or enough) relief to move forward with my life, then there was the brain fog, the short term memory loss, and the cognition challenges - things I’ve been lucky to have never struggled with before in my life.

What were the drawbacks of hiding out in a dark room?

Additionally, there were the confines of “the best option” to manage the migraine attack — to lay in silence, in the dark, in my bedroom which means social isolation, an inability to work, no ways to distract myself, getting lost in my own thoughts, and again worrying that this would never improve.

What coping strategies did I implement?

Over time, I found that I had no choice but to develop some coping strategies, or watch my mental health get flushed down the drain. I couldn’t accelerate the trial and error process of medication or treatment options, but I could (and did) get a second opinion on my approach, which for better or worse basically matched the first opinion I was working with.

Next, I found that when I could talk about my migraine challenges with my family, my neurologist, and my therapist - being open and honest about the severity not just of the pain, but of the impacts it was having on my life and more specifically on my depression and anxiety helped me to feel less alone in my struggles.

How did seeing a therapist and neurologist help?

For me, managing a several month migraine flareup meant adhering to all medication and therapy recommendations from my providers, changing my diet and increasing my hydration as much as possible, practicing mindfulness and meditation, and utilizing professional help as mentioned above via my therapist and neurologist at least made me feel like I was able to obtain comprehensive migraine management. It felt like this provided me a little bit of mental health relief as well, and it made me feel less hopeless than I had been.

What has changed since the attack ended?

Once the migraine broke, my doctor made some changes in both my preventative migraine medication and my abortive medication options — but I’ll share this — I now live with a sort of persistent anxiety that a migraine of that status and length will come back one day, any day, without any warning, and that I’ll find myself struggling in that place of depression and anxiety again. The only way I’ve found to manage these fears is to take it one day at a time, and to remind myself that hopefully, the meningitis related migraine was a one time only disaster which will (fingers crossed) not ever return.

Do chronic migraines impact your mental health? How do you manage this - both daily and overall on a regular schedule? I’d love to hear your story below.