Why I started writing about my mental health history

So, like I covered in my last essay, that visit to the ER with heart palpaltations was my final straw that killed my trust in doctors.

After being forcibly drugged in the emergency room when I KNEW I wasn’t erratic or upset enough to warrant it, I made a decision.

Fuck help.

I would help myself.

I would lean on nobody. I would not let anybody see me struggle.

And I would not admit I had mental health issues to anyone ever again.

I stuck to that until this past summer. I stuck to that for an entire decade.

Until a guy online caught my attention, and I admired the fuck out of him. I thought he was so brave to talk so openly about his mental health struggles.

He was outspokenly anti-psychiatry and I’d never seen anybody express the same sentiments I’d held for so long and, I have to admit, been too afraid to openly talk about. And he was severely mentally ill, like me. I count severe as anyone who has been in-patient. I have no patience for the basic bitch ‘I have depression and anxiety’ noise. The whiney little white girls crying about seasonal depression, all while spewing platitudes like ‘mental health is SOO important!’ Bitch, you could swap out therapy with an extra yoga class and be fucking fine. If you’ve never detached from reality, GTFO with your ‘Therapy UWU!! i’m quirky because I have mental health problems! But only the manageable mental health problems. It doesn’t affect me except for when I’m in a down mood every once in awhile’

Of course, the middle class, totally together, just sad every once in awhile, bitches love therapy. The therapists treat them like actual people.

I don’t want to hear fuck about the psychiatric industry unless you’ve been committed against your will. Then I might give a fuck what you have to say. When people talk about mental health awareness, they aren’t talking about me.

If you give a fuck about mental health, advocate for Big Pharma to NOT have any hand in the education of doctors. The pharmeceutical industry has too much influence. Like the main manufacturer of opioid drugs, Purdue, they make course content for medical schools. Course content on pain management.

Usually it’s the hippy-dippy lefties jerking themselves off over mental health awareness. And y’all supposed to be so suspicious of corporations and capitalism. Now, I’m a mixed bag politically. I’m pro capitalism, but anti-corporatism. Capitalism, were it all small businesses, would work wonderfully. Corporations, on the other hand, are powerful and dangerous.

Why aren’t the lefties freaked out about how much power the drug companies have in influencing how patients are treated?

Guys, get the fuck on that. NOW.

And if you aren’t going to, then shut the fuck up about mental health awareness.

Here is the issue that I have. I can not always tell what is real and what isn’t.

I have a delusional disorder. It’s fucking horrible.

I don’t hallucinate. That might actually makes things simpler. Because I could say, “hey do you see X-thing over there?” and people could go “Nah” and I could go “cool, that shit ain’t real.”

A delusional disorder means everything I perceive is there, but I add it up to conclusions that do not make sense.

I probably need to be on drugs.

The problem is, I let doctors try to drug me for almost ten years. From the time I was 14 until I was in my early 20s. As nuts as I still am, I was a LOT worse when they had me on drugs.

Even at my worse, I have more lucid moments. I can talk myself down. Mid-delusion, I can tell myself, “Bitch, that isn’t real. Your feelings are bullshit. Go do something else. This is imaginary.”

I could not do that on drugs.

I also didn’t break the revolving door of in and out of in-patient stays until I insisted on coming off all the drugs.

Everybody spouts therapy like it’s some magic cure. Nobody is suspicious of it. And if you do not have severe mental health issues, I don’t give a fuck what your experience in therapy was like. I just fucking don’t.

I want to hear from the bitches who have choked down tubes of charcoal in the ER. I want to hear from the people who have seen the inside of the ‘quiet room’ (pssst…this is the infamous padded cell). I want to hear from my fellow crazies who know you can’t have shoelaces inside.

You need to be on my level of mentally ill for me to give a single fuck what your opinion of the mental health industry is.

All you ‘oh, I have seasonal depression and I’m taking time for myself, self-care, decompress, pintrest, and bladdy-blah’ basic bitches. I’m so sick of you assholes acting like you know what’s best for me. None of you assholes advocate for the severely mentally ill. None of you ever pipe up about how few resources there are, since the deinstitutionalization of the 1980s. I never see y’all pipe up about how the vast majority of the homeless are mentally ill. I never see y’all advocating to stop the over-drugging of the people who can NOT effectively advocate for themselves.

I don’t see that. I see ‘self care! UwU!’ because it’s about feeling quirky and special for you.

And that shit pisses me off.

Well, as mad as all that shit made me, I kept it all to myself for a long time. For ten years, I stopped telling people about my mental health problems. I was sick of being judged for it.

When you basic bitches with your self care and depression talk about destigmatizing mental health, you aren’t talking about people like me. You aren’t talking about people who have landed in the ER because they convinced themselves they were living inside of a movie and being followed by a talking rabbit. That shit isn’t cute or quirky. That shit isn’t pretty. That’s the messy ugly side of mental health and nobody wants to destigmatize that.

So, now here I am, talking about it. Because I saw some guy online doing it and I thought it was brave and I thought somebody else should say they agree, and I wanted to be brave like him.

My opinion of that guy has since changed. Actually interacting with him was fucking awful. Stuck two fucking sock accounts in my discord and then called me “crazy” for wanting to know what the fuck he was doing. I didn’t even suspect account number two. That information was just volunteered to me. Criminey.

As awful as that experience was, I’m still kind of glad I was inspired to pipe up and start talking about this stuff.

When I first wrote about it on this blog, I didn’t tell the whole truth. Maybe that’s something you guys should know about me. I usually don’t lie (I won’t say I never do). But I find ways to tell only part of the truth. Usually because I’m embarrassed.

I first wrote about my experiences with the mental health industry and framed it as “My family was abusive and that’s the only reason I had emotional difficulties and the mental health industry never empowered me or helped me to escape that toxic environment.’ Well, the whole truth is my family is terribly dysfunctional and there is a lot of abuse. But I also can’t always tell what’s real and what isn’t.

I kept my mental health problems to myself for so long, because I wanted to get better.

I needed people to believe in me for that to happen. My family didn’t believe in me. The doctors didn’t believe in me.

Ernie did. He has always believed in me, probably even when he shouldn’t.

My experience being a severely mentally ill person is that people are upset and frustrated when you behave erratically. There is little understanding that you just don’t know how to manage your emotions effectively.

My experience as a severely mentally ill person is one of having toxic positivity constantly thrust on me. Nothing sends me into a spiral of trying to talk myself into obtaining a firearm and blowing my brains out than some toxic positivity condescending bullshit.

When you feel so low and you feel like you can never just BE how you are, like you have to walk around the world with a big stupid smile pasted on your face, and then people pipe up to say stuff like…Well, if you read enough of this essay series of mine, you’ll see some of it in the comments of earlier posts. “Enough is enough” “stop wallowing” etc.

There is so much pressure to be happy.

Mental illness is only okay if you are the perfect neat and tidy little mentally ill person. If you do all the right steps and in just the right time frame.

Nothing makes me feel lonelier than the pressure to be happy and get better.

Nobody knows how long I’ve been trying.

And I’m getting there. Really really slowly.

And people have to pipe up and act like you aren’t getting there fast enough.

It makes me hate being alive. It makes me feel so much worse.

I guess all of this is to say, I’m so much better than I used to be, but I am still very messy.

I will keep writing about my experiences as a severely mentally ill person anyway. Even though I’m not being mentally ill “right.” Even though I’m not the perfect polished mentally ill person.

I’m messy and I have disregulated emotions and erratic behavior.

And I’m not shutting up.

Mental health awareness is never meant for people like me. I’m making it about people like me.

I’m not going to take drugs. I’m not going to therapy. I’m not doing DBT or mindfulness or buying a goddamned adult coloring book or keeping a retarded gratitude journal.

I’m doing none of that. Fuck anybody who wants to tell me I should.

Stop pushing therapy on people. And if you ARE pushing therapy, you have a responsibility to SERIOUSLY advocate to make therapy less predatory and harmful. If you recommend therapy, you have an ethical obligation to research the pharmaceutical industry’s influence in patient care, and THEN start lobbying-actual writing to your congressman lobbying, to change things.

Am I gonna do all of that?

No. But I’m also not a self-important fuck telling other people to go to therapy.