mental illness

It wasn’t until I hit my twenties that I ever remember hearing anyone discuss the topic of mental illness like it was an actual thing you could take yourself to the doctor for.

You can swear up and down that you meant it some other way, but the reality is that “crazy” and “insanity” refer to a lack of sanity, which will always circle back to and affect mentally ill people, especially when it’s used in ways that diminish or sensationalize our experiences.

These are precious years; years that pass too quickly as your little ones speed towards adulthood and the ever increasing awareness that their parents are fallible. What I never wanted, nor expected, was for these years to be punctuated by my second spell of severe depression.

Many people are aware of bipolar disorder. Most know it’s a mental illness that swings the brain between depression and mania. Most understand depression to be debilitating, a condition that combines sadness, despair, exhaustion, and lack of motivation. But most people don’t understand mania (which is experienced primarily by people with bipolar I) or hypomania (which those with bipolar II tend to encounter more than full-blown mania) — at least not fully.

Thanks to awareness campaigns, programs and organisations, our general understanding and recognition of mental illness is improving. However, it’s impossible to imagine what life with depression or anxiety or schizophrenia is like if you’ve never been diagnosed with one of these conditions. A recent Reddit thread provides a heart-wrenching insight into the realities and challenges of these illnesses — in the words of people living with them. [In December], Redditor theone1221 asked psychiatrists and psychologists to share “the most profound or insightful thing” they had ever heard from a patient with a mental illness.

“It can feel quite isolating or even invalidating when someone is trying that ‘Cheer up’ approach, or comparisons like, ‘It’s not so bad, look at the people who have it so much worse’,” explains Tal Schlosser, Clinical Psychologist at My Life Psychologists. “We have the feelings we have and someone saying, ‘Don’t worry about it’ doesn’t make it go away. In fact, we can feel even worse about the fact we can’t just snap out of it.” Part of the motivation to cheer people up is tied to how society typically views emotions. According to Dr Janine Clarke, Psychologist at Mend Psychology and The Sydney ACT Centre, there are six ‘basic,’ universal emotions — sadness, anger, disgust, fear, happiness and surprise — and we’ve been conditioned to perceive happiness as the only one worth pursuing.

I made the decision to come out of the mental illness closet and face the world without fear or shame. My son will grow up in a house that doesn’t stigmatize mental illness, but instead, strives to understand it.

I need to know that you love me with all of my brokenness. I need to know that you can see me in my most self-destructive, fucked up place, and you won’t flinch. I need to know that you understand the darkness and that the darkness is a part of you, too.