There is a flip side to mental health awareness, and I don’t know how to deal with it
I’m lucky to have been born in an era where mental illness is being pulled out of hiding and given the attention it deserves. Although I know technology is the magna causa for this century’s mental illness epidemic, it has also enabled the sufferers among us to gain self-awareness and seek help and support.
I fall on the depressive spectrum — I have, off and on, for several years — and have started suffering from anxiety and panic attacks more recently.
I suffered from mental illness long before I realised I did. Looking back, I see a childhood rife with grief-riddled poetry that I hid aggressively from family and friends.
I come from a normal, slightly orthodox middle-class family and had a normal, if a little dysfunctional, upbringing. I was a brilliant student, most often described as ‘happy-go-lucky’. But I was fat-shamed from a young age and also faced restrictions families like mine place on dating, going out, sleepovers, wearing clothes of your choice — in general any expression of my identity that was less than ‘ideal’. It seemed like a necessary part of growing up, and I imagined everyone around me was suffering equally.
What I couldn’t imagine at the time was how much my fairly ‘normal’ upbringing would continue to shape my life as an adult.
In my early twenties, I stepped out of home to receive a bitter shock: I was an under-confident, closed individual with poor self-worth despite a lot of talent and opportunity.
It was only after years of being grief-stricken, low on motivation and energy, and persistently hopeless that I began to suspect I suffered from mental illness.
Unable to understand or vocalise my condition, I went away to university hoping the new environment will help. To an extent, it did, because it was there that I began seeing signs of mental illness first-hand and developed a vocabulary to express and understand it in. I still didn’t have the courage to admit my own condition. So I suffered in silence while helping everyone else deal with theirs.
Eventually the day came when I knew I needed help, and I sought it.
Pulling through that dark time on my own, I moved back in with my family. I was convinced I had the mental bandwidth and tools now to deal with my problems and lead a better life.
What I did not understand was that therapy isn’t a one-off thing
It isn’t like a crash course in salsa dancing, where you turn up for five weeks and earn the right to call yourself a salsa dancer.
I should have stuck to the program. I should have found a new therapist and understood the underlying causes for my suffering. I should have made an effort to develop coping mechanisms for when the demons struck again.
But I did nothing of that sort.
I tricked my mind into believing I was capable of doing this on my own with the help of loved ones. I chickened out, because deep down I was afraid of changing the status quo and falling even harder than before.
Even when the panic attacks hit, I told myself — I can deal with this. All I needed to do was eliminate the source of my troubles. But neither the source left me, nor the anxiety. Instead, a heap of trauma built up on a rickety foundation of poor self-worth, until a time came when I was able to get rid of the source, only to find out the anxiety had become a part of me.
My short stint with therapy had taught me the importance of building relationships and surrounding myself with loved ones who understand — and that’s what I did. Thus far, it has helped me stay functional and make a lot of personal progress.
But the suffering returns every now and then. A stressful situation or an aggressive argument triggers my anxiety and pushes me into a destructive spiral, leaving behind a flurry of self-doubt.
How do I know what is my real personality, and what is just my mental illness?
How much of my daily behaviour and reactions is caused by my illness and its psychological effects, and how much of it is just my deficient character?
Am I really suffering, or is it a convenient front for a poor personality and lack of self-awareness?
Can a therapist answer these questions for me? Can anyone?
And that’s where my problem with mental health awareness lies.
When you’ve been on both sides of the net, not only do you understand the suffering, but also the effort it takes on a supporter’s part to put up with a loved one when they are suffering.
It’s a slippery slope with a lot of margin for mistakes.
Worse still, it impairs your sense of judgement, so you’re often stuck with some uneasy questions.
Do my loved ones — those who know me and have seen me through my worst — even believe I’m suffering? Or are they just being kind to a delusional friend?
At what point in any argument do I stop being a person who suffers from mental illness and become just another person who has to be held accountable for every shortcoming and failing?
How long into a supportive relationship can I expect the kindness and sensitivity to run out and the frustration and finger-pointing to start creeping in?
These are uncomfortable questions I can’t bear to ask anyone I love. Instead, I live in mortal fear of the day they’ll stop believing my suffering and start pegging me as a shitty person living a lie to gain sympathy and leeway in arguments.
On a brighter note, perhaps the day this happens, I will finally have the push I need to get me to the therapist’s couch. I like to keep that glimmer of hope alive.
