I was so angry with the nurses who hooked me up to monitors so that I couldn’t move. I was so angry with my family, for calling an ambulance instead of letting me die. I was so angry with my close friends, for not caring enough. But most of all, I was so angry with the world for not understanding what I was going through, and for society’s subtle messages constantly telling me I was a freak—not normal—because I had a mental illness.
I was so saturated with anger that I couldn’t feel anything else for days. I just laid in that bed, heart pounding and head reeling, completely unable to acknowledge that I had just been given a second chance at life. Why would I even want a second chance when I failed so miserably the first time? The world had been telling me for years that I wasn’t good enough to deserve anything at all. I was weird, I was crazy, I was hyper-emotional…It didn’t matter if there was something legitimately wrong with me to make me behave this way. I couldn’t seem to control my emotions, and that made people scared of me.
It made me scared of myself. I lived my life with so much hatred for myself that I literally couldn’t even get out of bed some days. It was too much to look at myself in the mirror. It was too much to even see my hands or my feet in front of me. Every part of me was bad.
My stay in the hospital was absolutely excruciating. When I was finally released a little more than a week later, nobody at home really knew what to do with me. I felt even more like an outcast. What were my friends and family supposed to say to me, after I had literally just tried to kill myself? Most people just said nothing, so that they wouldn’t say the wrong thing. But to me, the silence was absolutely unbearable. It gave me a lot of time to think about how I had gotten to the point I was at.
It all started with a self-diagnosis of General Anxiety Disorder (GAD). When I started noticing my symptoms and looked them up online, I was surprised that there was a name, an actual condition, describing exactly what I was going through. I had never even known anyone with a mental illness before, though, so I didn’t really know what to do about it.
Months later, I went to the doctor because I was having trouble breathing. I mentioned to her that I had been feeling the symptoms that I read online about anxiety, and she immediately told me that my solution was to get counseling. She sent me away, with not even a referral, expecting me to go out and find the help I needed. Obviously, I didn’t.
I continued trying to live my life the best I could. I had just gotten married, and I was trying to finish up college. Being on campus was a huge struggle. I was scared of loud noises. I felt like I was under a spotlight every second of every day. I stopped eating because I was so scared of making a sound with some sort of wrapper or plastic baggie, and bothering everyone around me trying to study or have conversations. I tried not to even move, because I was so scared of people looking at me, and being a nuisance.
I was utterly exhausted all the time. My heart was constantly racing, and I often thought it would beat right out of my chest. My legs felt so heavy; even walking to class was almost more than I could physically manage. I had such a hard time breathing; I learned that yawning helped to open my throat and get a slightly larger breath, so I started subconsciously yawning a lot. That made me even more tired…So I eventually couldn’t even leave my apartment.
Once I missed one class, I just KNEW that everyone in that class would notice what a horrible student I was. If I showed up to class the next time, I couldn’t stand sitting there, feeling like everyone was judging me and wondering why I wasn’t there last time. I felt like I was no longer worthy to be in the same classes with all of my successful, ambitious classmates. It became absolute torture to just sit through a 50-minute lecture.
I dropped out of college right at the end of my second to last semester, and things continued to worsen. I sought help from my ecclesiastical leaders, but—not being trained mental health professionals—they could only do so much for me.
I went through a phase where I was constantly scared for my life, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for almost a year. Imagine the feeling you get when you watch a really scary movie…now imagine feeling that every single minute of every single day. My life was literally a nightmare. I stopped sleeping at night because I was so scared to close my eyes, and the little sleep I managed to get during daylight hours were interrupted by more nightmares. Sometimes I was so scared that I literally couldn’t even move. My body was paralyzed with fear, and I couldn’t speak or get help. I was utterly useless.
The worst part was probably the crippling depression that came along with my anxiety. I was doing absolutely nothing with my life, and I hated myself for it. Everything I had worked for up until that point had all been washed down the drain, in my mind. I had ruined everything and there was no hope for me, or my future. I was hopeless.
Finally, I moved back home with my parents. I went through a divorce and was on my own every day. I laid in my bed in the dark every day, only moving if I absolutely had to. I slept as much as I could to escape the horrible thoughts taking over my head, often interrupting my own nightmares with sobbing. I couldn’t get along with anybody—nobody could say the right thing. Even if they tried so hard to be nice, everything hurt my feelings. I didn’t know it at the time, but my father used to sit in the living room right below my bedroom, and just wait to hear footsteps above him, so that he knew I was still alive.
I was in and out of the mental health clinic, trying different medications and therapy. I tried really hard to force myself to go to therapy, but it was so hard. Nothing seemed to work. If anything, the medication they gave me only made it worse. One scary thing happened when I started taking one prescription: I started cutting myself.
I had horrible scrapes and scratches all over my face. I hated it so much that I literally tried to scratch it away. The infections from the cuts made my face absolutely burn, adding to my misery. I cut song lyrics and depressing phrases into my arms, shoulders, wrists, and legs. It was oddly comforting…It felt so much better to feel the physical pain, because I could control it. As soon as I put a wet washcloth over a fresh cut, it felt instantly better. The pain was still there, but that feeling of relief was absolutely blissful to me at that point. I became addicted to the fleeting feeling of relief.
I was so frustrated with my doctors and counselors. Nobody seemed to really understand what I was saying; it almost seemed like nobody was really listening to anything I was saying. One of the biggest struggles when you have a mental illness is just trying to deal with the system that is supposed to help you, and make you better. Our mental health care system is so antiquated—if you look at it next to physical medicine, there is no comparison.
There’s also no comparison in the way people treat you when you have mental illness, as opposed to a physical illness.
If your friend had cancer, you would feel overwhelming sympathy for them. You would watch them slowly deteriorate after chemo and radiation treatments, you would do anything you could just to spend time with them and get them to smile. So why is it, then, when somebody has a mental illness, nobody knows what to say?
People watch those afflicted with mental illnesses from the sidelines; we see someone deteriorating in front of us due to a mental illness, but in our heads, it is somehow their own fault. The schizophrenic on the street is homeless because he is crazy and refuses to get help or hold down a job. Our prisons are filling up with criminals who refuse to take their anti-psychotic medications. People are committing suicide because they are cowardly and shallow. People like me—the people you grew up with or went to school with—we are lazy and silly for not finishing school or getting a job. These are the stereotypes that people with mental illnesses face every single day.
You wouldn’t judge someone who was born with HIV for his or her parents’ mistakes. You wouldn’t judge someone with cancer as being lazy after his or her chemo treatment. You wouldn’t laugh at someone with a broken leg for not being able to walk. So you shouldn’t judge someone with a mental illness as anything other than a regular person with a serious medical condition. Mental illnesses do not make any person weird, lazy, crazy, or freakish. When a person has a mental illness, it only means that there is a chemical imbalance in their brain, which needs to be fixed by a medical professional, or that person has gone through something so traumatic that it literally damaged their brain. It can be just as genetic as cancer, or it can be just as environmental as someone breaking his or her leg. Mental illness is legitimate—it is more than feeling sad, angry, or scared all the time. Until you have experienced it for yourself, it is hard to understand the difference, but it is definitely more than just what you see on the outside.
Eventually, I started a new medication that actually worked for me. I very slowly started feeling like I could do more things. I got a part-time job, which led to a full-time job, which led to me feeling like I was a normal person again. I still struggle dealing with all the things I know I have lost due to my mental illness, and it still hurts to experience the memories from that part of my life. I will always have to deal with this issue—it’s a chronic illness. But at least I now know that I can manage it and still live a normal life. I now know that it is possible to feel happiness again, and I appreciate that happiness so much more when I feel it; I know what it is like to feel its absence for years at a time.
If you know someone with mental illness, gently encourage them to seek help from medical professionals. Tell them to stick with it—the mental health care system is extremely hard to navigate, but we need it. For the sake of your friends or family with mental illness, and for people like me that you don’t even know, please help us fight the stigma of mental illness. Please help us reform the mental health care system. Please help us—there is so much we cannot do alone.
My purpose in writing this article is to promote mental health awareness. So many people who have struggled with mental illness cannot talk about their experiences, simply for the fact that they are not here anymore. If I can reach even just one person with my story and that person changes how he or she looks at mental illness, then I will consider myself successful. Next time you see someone struggling with a mental illness, listen to them, be a friend, care about them, encourage them to get help, but most of all, please do not judge them.
I want to hear about YOU! I want to hear your mental health stories, whether about you, or someone you know. Share with us in the comments of this article at HealthyCellsMagazine.com/specific URL here, or email me personally at jessi@limelightlink.com. Shoot me an email/leave a comment if you have any questions about mental health issues, or if there is a mental illness-related topic you’d like to see more about in this magazine. Together, we can get people talking about mental health issues, and increase awareness and understanding!
