Now, this is a nice confluence of events. Over the last few weeks I've noticed a proliferation of guilt-trippy facebook posts that run something like this:
- Mention of mental health awareness
- Mention of being there for people, having chocolate etc
- Guilt trip - I bet X% of people won't post this
These posts have left me torn. I am pleased that people are mentioning the words 'mental health' without getting all weird about it. And the offer of chocolate, real or virtual, is rather nice. But then I read the guilt trip and my heart sinks. As though our moral worth is dependent on whether we copy and paste a facebook status. And all the lovely, open-hearted words in the rest of the post vanish into thin air. I've wanted to post a riposte, but other events have rather taken over in the last week or so.
And then today is Time to Talk day, spearheaded by the Time to Change campaign. A perfect opportunity to talk about mental health awareness and really being there for people who are suffering and struggling.
And in an even more interesting confluence of events, I read this today: http://www.frominsultstorespect.com/2015/03/14/from-psychiatric-name-calling-to-plain-humane-english/. It resonated pretty strongly with me, although I know I don't have a lot of experience to draw from. What I do know is that I have a really ambivalent attitude to seeing my own suffering as 'mental illness.' On the one hand, a label like 'depression' was really useful, at various points. It meant that people treated my erratic behaviour with a bit more kindness than perhaps they might otherwise have done. I think it helped me a bit to move away from the persistent 'you are weak, pull yourself together, snap out of it' stream of thoughts that plagued me. It helped me not to feel quite so much that it was a moral failing on my part. It had practical benefits too - a bit more time to finish my Master's dissertation, in particular.
On the other hand, I never really bought the 'brain chemistry' explanation for what I was feeling. I knew that my emotional responses were all over the place, and there was no apparent reason for me to feel so disproportionately empty, and angry, and bleak, and wanting to disappear. And yet, it did have meaning. My episodes of depression - especially the two more recent ones - have been followed by breakthroughs and new insights. Through plumbing the depths of my own suffering, I realised how much of it was caused not by my brain chemistry but by my lack of kindness towards myself and by some deeply ingrained false beliefs about who I was and who I felt I should be. It took a lot of hard self-examination, supported by very kind friends, teachers and therapists, to have those breakthroughs. It was painful, and I often didn't have the energy for much else. Not to mention that it was expensive. And perhaps if I'd believed in the brain chemistry explanation I wouldn't have gone down that road. I might have tried other, more medical means, to 'fix' myself. I might even have believed that I wasn't fixable.
I'm still not sure what really caused my depression, or how to think about mental illness in general, not just mine. There are more conversations to be had here, I am sure.
But there's also a more immediate conversation to be had. One of the reasons I'm so passionate about Time to Talk day is because I tried and failed to hide what was going on for me and it made it worse. I felt more isolated and more desperate. And when I shared it, I realised that people did understand, and they didn't think less of me, and, to my enduring shock, they love me still. And so it matters to me that you, reading this post, have somewhere that you feel safe to share your suffering as and when you need it - whether you call it mental illness or not. And if I'm that person, then that's an honour and a privilege and I will honour it as best I can.
