"Please help me I'm struggling". Five words, just five words, but five words that are the most difficult to say and words that we will very rarely use.
Mental illness makes you feel like you are drowning, drowning in an overwhelming feeling of absolutely nothing. It feels like your are constantly battling to keep your head up and above water and no matter what you do it feels like you keep slipping further and further down. It's like a heaviness in your heart that never goes away.
Try and imagine that feeling then try to imagine having to explain it to someone you love. Tough right? There are thousands of people in this country going through that exact thing right now. Having to go through the trauma of telling that person they don't want to be alive anymore, seeing that person's face change and knowing in that moment life will never be the same again.
I've dealt with this challenge more times than I can count, it's such a horrible feeling that's so difficult to describe. You know that speaking to someone will help but you also know that it'll make you feel weak, embarrassed, scared, ashamed, and like you're a failure. Seeing that look on a person's face is honestly enough to put anyone off sharing their feelings.
We all deal with things in different ways but my advice will always be to share what's going on with people in your life that you trust as much as possible because the more people that know the more help you can receive. Having the support of your family and friends can be enough to push you to get on the road to recovery and just knowing people are there for you makes an incredibly lonely experience that little bit easier.
For me, I choose to only really share my thoughts and feelings with my partner. I don't have a lot of people in my life that understand my condition and past experiences have taught me that it causes me less pain to keep it a secret than it does to tell them and have them let me down time and time again. I don't advise this in any way as I truly believe talking is a massive part of recovery and but for me, there are only so many times you can go through the process of trying to explain your condition to people who don't make any effort to try and understand. It's like banging your head against a wall and no one would continue to do that.
This leads me to the point of why it's so tough to admit you struggling, which I feel is down to the fact there's still a massive stigma against mental health. People just point blank and say they don't understand it which makes those struggling feel even more isolated. It's incredibly hard to tell people that you think you have a mental health condition or you think your getting ill again because having ill mental health is still looked upon as a burden.
In my opinion, the problem is that people don't try hard enough to understand. If more people immersed themselves in learning and spent time with those who are affected by it I'm sure we wouldn't have the same stigma that we do now. The reason that I can say this is because I've lived through it and I've seen the way my partner's mindset has changed over the many years he's knowns me. I first became depressed roughly a year into our relationship and at the start, he had no idea what depression really was, fast forward roughly four years and he now understands it nearly as well as me. The reason this change has happened is that he's lived through it and he's researched what bipolar is and how it feels until he was blue in the face. This just shows that people can understand if they put their minds to it, so I will never accept the excuse that someone just does not understand.
Another reason it's tough to tell people you are struggling is that often that person doesn't even want to admit it themselves. Telling people you love how you feel makes it real and this is why I know so many people keep it to themselves for so long. They think that if they keep it to themselves and battle on with it then it isn't real and if it isn't real then it isn't really happening.
One of my biggest challenges in sharing my feelings was overcoming the idea that having a mental illness makes you weak. For so long I had this black-and-white mindset that telling people you struggling makes you a weak person but what I was failing to realise was that admitting there's a problem and that you need help makes you one of the strongest people out there. Again this whole concept of looking weak is down to the stigma that mental health carries and the idea that having a mental illness makes you less of a person than those who don't and essentially to some, a burden on society.
Nothing will ever be able to change the heart-wrenching feeling of telling people you have a mental illness but I certainly think the more of us who talk about it, the better overall understanding we will have. Part of the reason I started blogging was to share my experiences to help others understand so that the people who are struggling get the right support that they need.
What needs to be understood is that having a mental illness doesn't make that person crazy, it doesn't mean their not successful and it doesn't mean they're any weaker than anyone else. Having a mental illness makes people's live's tough enough without them getting judged by others, I think we all need to have a little more compassion towards each other so that telling people you aren't well isn't such a traumatic experience. We can all understand physical health and would never judge a person for having diabetes or breaking their arm so why can't we do the same for those with mental health conditions.
For anyone who is going through their own battle please know that as hard as it will be to express how you feel, in the long run, it will make life easier. The advice I would give is to start by telling the closest person to you, someone you trust 100% and then seek some professional help; a GP, psychiatrist or counsellor, whichever person feels right for you. Whatever you do just please talk to someone.
For anyone in need of urgent help, contact the Samaritans at 116123. For less urgent help, my email is open to anyone whose heart needs it: chloevowels1995@gmail.com.
No comments
Post a Comment