The Shame of Mental Illness
Thoughts on bad brain chemistry.
I like to say that I have more letters after my name than most doctors. cPTSD, MDD, OCD, ADHD, EDNOS, PMDD… and those are just the most impressive ones.
Mental illness is a complicated topic to talk about, because on one level it’s such a profoundly unique and isolating experience. On another level, it’s just science. It can be hard to reconcile these two truths. People get angry and scared and defensive. People don’t want to hear about it. People want to convince you that it’s your fault that you’re like this. Which is utter, rancid bullshit.
I am not a doctor, nor am I any other sort of medical professional. I am not offering any medical advice. That would end badly for everyone. My qualifications for talking about mental illness are this: I’ve survived them for over 30 years. My goal with this is to share my own experiences: what worked for me, what didn’t, and what it’s like living with a brain that does not like to do what it's told. I don’t speak for anyone but myself here. It’s time to demystify mental illness, and take some of the power back from that fucker.
Because there’s still a silence and a shame surrounding mental illness, and that’s horseshit. Pull it screaming into the light. Talk about the scary parts, the funny parts, the gross parts. Talk about the parts where you think you can’t go on but somehow do. Talk about how fucked up it is to have to actively fight your own mind just to function.
These things are real, whether you acknowledge them or not.
Sometimes I think the hardest part of mental illness is the isolation and loneliness that often comes with it. And the shame. People expect you to be ashamed for something you didn’t ask for, don’t control, and in all probability hate more than they could ever comprehend. Mental illness sucks. Feeling ashamed over having a disease makes it worse.
And I’m not here for that. I think we’ve all spent long enough feeling guilty for things we can’t control. That’s not an invitation to use your mental illness as an excuse or justification for shitty behavior - it’s simply saying what’s already true. This is what life is like with mental illness.
I truly believe that if we talk about mental illness more, discuss the hidden sides of it, we can get rid of some of the stigma surrounding it. Maybe I’m being naive and overly optimistic, which would be a first for me in nearly forty years on this planet.
But if I’ve learned one thing so far from all this nonsense, it’s this: It doesn’t necessarily get better. It doesn’t always get easier.
But you get better - better at knowing yourself, better at surviving, better at beating on against the current.
And I think in the long run, that’s far more important.
I think talking about it certainly helps humanizes the stigma that is faced with mental illness, another thing is having community spaces where they don't stigmatize and listen, there's one near by my house it's nothing I've ever seen in my life which is a good step. I'd love to see more community spaces, groups and meet ups where people can come out of loneliness and isolation, and have that support system that is needed. One of the major parts of stigma doesn't just stem from society itself, but within the psychology system. Many of the descriptions of the DSM were created by men, and sometimes going back to the times of the 20s when we had even a less of an understanding of how the brain functions. The good news is that we're heading in the trajectory that everything is genetic and neurobiological thanks to neuroscience which is combining with psychology (and neurogenetics.) It may not happen over night but it will happen. Change can happen from within the system and without the system (community) and finding community and your people is really, fuckin hard. I know all the ways how I find myself isolating in guilt, shame, because I feel like I'm protecting the world from me, when in reality, I am protecting nothing, just refusing to experience the world, and the shifts. I think this a very interesting topic, and your human experience, is wholly unique to your own, valid, and real. I hope like you, others continue to reduce the stigma, because we don't need to repeat the 90s again.