Today marks world mental health day.
We all have mental health, you might not think you are affected by mental health problems, but you probably know someone who is. In this blog i'm giving a small insight into my mental health. I thought when setting this blog up that i would only post about happy things, but since when is a person happy all of the time. I'm sure as hell not.
Depression
Depression is defined as: feelings of severe despondency and dejection.
To some extent everyone has experienced this. The problem comes when you experience this 'all of the time'.
I have always been a glass half empty kind of girl, years of bullying at school left me feeling like a shadow of a person. Not worthy of time or notice by anyone. I grew up with a mother with severe mental health problems. When I was 16 she was placed into a special hospital unit. I had to grow up fast. When she came out, 'mom' was gone. I would get home to from to school to find her still in bed, unable to function as a person. For any 16 year old the kind of situation i was in was difficult to deal with, you aren't emotionally mature enough for it. I couldn't cope with the pressure and responsibility put on my and i completely messed up my AS-levels.
At 19 i went to uni and slowly came out of myself, i discovered a love for the gym, but 'mom' was still there with her issues, using emotional blackmail to get me home, for me i was so stressed i experienced constant and excruciating migraines, coupled with decreased sleep of around 4 hours a night. At 21, on my 21st birthday, with a smile on her face as i got through the door from uni, 'mom' announced she was self harming. Happy Birthday to me right? It occurred to me at this point, i would be spending my life as a carer. Hard to deal with, even harder was returning home from uni and living back with the parents. dealing with the unstableness of my mother's bi-polar.
I got a job, i meet a great friend, who was super encouraging, she gave me the confidence to take up Judo, which helped massively with my self-esteem, she encouraged me to go back to uni and get a masters degree. Cheers Pea, you are a star.
So here is when it happened. I got through my masters, sleeping regularly on 2-4 hours sleep a night, i was the healthiest and happiest i have ever been. I had met wonderful friends, a fantastic judo club, loved my degree. So decided on a PhD. And then I cracked. BOOM. FULL STOP. HALT. NOPE NOPE NOPE.
Like a bolt out of the blue, my life flipped, turned upside down. I couldn't function. I didn't function. I wasn't happy, i wanted to cry all the time, i felt apart from people, i could sit in the same room and feel so utterly, despairingly alone. Life had no colour, it was varying shades of black. I was down to 2 hours of sleep or less a night. I was in a situation i couldn't get out of, that i had no help or support with and then i had to do my PhD. I was less than a person, i'd get to judo and then find myself having to leave the room to cry. I didn't want to exist, do not understand me, i didn't have suicidal thoughts, i just didn't want to exist.
In adverts they always show a person alone in a corner, this was literally me.
People would ask what was wrong, the answer was always 'i'm fine' - yeah, no, i was anything but fine. I couldn't tell anyone that though, who would understand?? People don't understand something they can't see. Even worse, what if someone said i was like my 'mom' -crazy, needed to go in hospital, never ever going to be able to lead a normal life. Therefore i couldn't tell anyone. I had to deal on my own. To tell people you're fine when actually:
To get to the point, i eventually told someone, and they told someone else, that someone else helped me, he made me understand on an intellectual and emotional level i was not my mother. I was DEPRESSED. I got help. I take medication daily. I'm still prone to depressive episodes, mostly i think when people see me being mental and hyper, it is me trying to deal with the fact i'm not happy and i am trying to bust through that temporary wall.
I also used to be totally anti - anti-depressants, i never wanted to take them, but now i do, and you have to take them daily, it isn't like paracetamol, you have to take them even when you don't think you need them. I function as a person now.
Key thing here, anti-depressants don't make your life perfect, in fact far from it, i'm still a sensitive person, i still get upset at criticism, or when i think people dislike me for no reason, it really bugs me and hurts me. And they can have side effects, i suffer from irregular nightmares and it has made me gain a LOT of weight. And this is an issue for me, i eat well, train lots (arguably too much) and yet i continue to steadily gain weight and this makes me really upset and it makes me feel ashamed of myself and my body. I look in the mirror and i feel so embarrassed. But the tablets also make me well enough to go to uni and work, to get to the gym and sweat stress out, to get up and dressed and face the day.
So here it is, my brief tale of 2 years of dealing with depression. I can count on one hand all the people in my life that know about it, and only two of them are family (no not my 'mom). I still feel the need to hide it and we shouldn't, depression and other mental health issues should be talked about. It is nothing to be ashamed of.
So if you take one message from this, then take either the message you aren't alone if you suffer depression, or take the message of World Mental Health Day and spread it to engender understanding.
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