Mental Illness
The Isolation You Experience When You Have a Mental Illness
The reality of living with a mental health disorder.
Recently, I witnessed a Twitter conversation about mental illness. One user commented about how their experience felt like it was unlike anyone else. As isolating as mental illness can be, their unique experiences made them feel even more alone. The comments I read have stuck with me since.
Living with mental illness is a lonely journey. When the mental illness is bipolar disorder, isolation seems to increase, or at least it feels like it does.
What do you do if your experience isn’t like anyone else’s? Does that mean you’re somehow strange? Are you somehow divergent from everyone else with the same diagnosis?
Let me preface the rest of this story with this: I am not a mental health professional. I base the articles I write about living with mental illness on my personal experiences and those of people close to me. That said, let’s look at this topic a little deeper.
You are different
There is no cookie cutter way to describe mental illness. As no two people are exactly the same, no two experiences with mental illness will be the same. Let’s take bipolar disorder as an…
