I have bipolar disorder. After years of struggling to find an appropriate diagnosis, years of misleading, suggested, and “not otherwise specified” attempts to pin down what was “wrong” with me, I finally feel satisfied with the diagnosis I’ve been given. This is, of course, after an odyssey of inpatient psychiatric hospitalizations and a couple of times at residential treatment centers, which spanned almost a decade of locked treatment in my 23 years of life. That doesn’t even include the time spent in therapy.
I have been out of psychiatric facilities for over two years now, after years of truly believing that I was forever destined to either be called “crazy” and locked up, or take a path that would lead to my eventual, self-induced demise. I was absolutely convinced that I was an awful person who deserved that bad hand that I’d been given, and that I was better off dead than living as a burden to my friends and family.
The other day, I shared my new diagnosis with a close friend, and their response was one of complete surprise and misunderstanding. “But you don’t act like you’re bipolar,” they said. I blew it off as something they said out of a lack of knowledge or understanding about mental health. But then I realized that that’s exactly the problem. Too many people dismiss people with serious mental health needs as being too “normal” or their symptoms as not being “severe enough” to need treatment. When they most need the support, they are apparently not to be taken seriously.
How exactly is someone with bipolar disorder, depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, PTSD, you name it, supposed to act? Because I believe that that’s part of the problem, the belief that people with mental health needs have noticeable traits that set them apart from the rest of society. That you can pick out the “crazy” people from the crowd and somehow “protect” yourself or your family from their “dangerous” influence, as the media would have us believe. And it’s this negative misconception that leads people who need treatment, often for their own safety, to not seek it out, to be afraid of what the people they love might think.
Well, let me reveal something to you. Mental health struggles can happen to anyone at any point in their lives. That’s right, I said anyone. So it could be your kid’s kindergarten teacher who’s bipolar but manages well enough with the right medications and her weekly therapy sessions. It could be the employee in the office who makes everyone else laugh because bringing people joy helps keep his depression in check. And it could be you, someday. The thing that all three of those examples have in common is that all those people would be categorized in the “normal” category. They don’t “look sick”…but they are.
So I guess what I’m trying to say is that if someone confides in you about their mental health status, support them. Don’t discount their experience or not validate them because you’re only seeing the good days. And, as a whole, we need to stop thinking (consciously or unconsciously) that mental health is this scary, dangerous thing that should be feared and will *hopefully* never happen to us. Because believing that, and acting accordingly, reinforces the stigma that so many of us who receive treatment experience. And who wants to contribute to that?
Written by a young adult guest blogger who wishes to write anonymously
