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Shedding the stigma of mental illness
June 8, 2010
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- Mental Health
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One of Vancouver's most popular bloggers, Raul Pacheco, and his friend and follow blogger, Isabella Mori, organize "Mental Health Camp". Raul has written a great piece about mental health and how every one of us can suffer from a mental illness of some kind.
This year Mental Health Camp is focusing on breaking the silence of this pervasive and often debilitating condition. I am so pleased that Raul and Isabella take on this project; the more people learn about mental illness the better. I think of our young people and how many of them have serious mental illness concerns and how their lives could/would be better if a) they had been diagnosed earlier and b) their families understood the symptoms of their illness. Left untreated, the symptoms of bi-polar and schizophrenia, for example, are often "masked" with self-medicating -anything to make the "voices stop" or to numb the pain.
Mental illness is a mystery to a lot of people unless you've experienced it, or know someone who has. A few years ago, I had a bout of depression and at the time I was so worried about what "people would think" - would my employer think less of me? I sought treatment but I struggled with telling people, especially my parents: i was embarrassed and felt like a failure.
Do you have or have you had a mental illness?
If so, how did you deal with it?
Comments
thank you
Submitted by isabella mori (not verified) on June 16, 2010 - 10:42.
thank you so much for telling people about mental health camp. we are SUPER excited to have you present there!
i personally have lived with a mild form of bipolar disorder all my life. for the longest time i did not want to know that because i did not want to be like my father, who had very serious bouts of bipolar illness throughout my childhood. now that i have admitted to myself that this is something that affects me, too, i have a MUCH easier time dealing with it. two things that are indispensible are to be constantly on the lookout for any signs of depression or mania, and to manage my time really well so that i have lots of "buffer time". i used to pooh-pooh small signs, and half of the time they'd be actual forerunner of a new episode. now i don't care if the sign is "true" or "false", i immediately go into "look out!" gear and step up my self care.