On Mental Illness

 

I met up with a friend the other day that I hadn’t seen in a very long time.  We were mates in primary school, and since then she’s gone on to get a well paying office job and a lovely, professional boyfriend.  From what I could ascertain from my brief troll of her Facebook, she was living an awesome, successful life.  So I was pretty apprehensive in the lead up to our lunch- what would she think of my career choice?  Would she look down on me for having spent so much of the last five years bumming around and trying to figure out what to do with myself?  Should I embellish a bit to make myself sound more… like her?

In the end I decided against it.  I’m a shithouse liar and would probably have ended up tying myself in knots, anxiety niggling at me as I analysed the convincingness of my creative additions.  I told her the truth, as we sipped our lattes, and of course, she was encouraging and gracious as ever.  As she marvelled at how generous our country is to support its young creatives through grants, I must admit a hint of jealousy crept into my thoughts.  This woman was not only successful, she was unfailingly put-together.  To me, she had the perfect life.

So when eventually she confided that she’d experienced difficulties with her mental health, I was thrown.  I suppose I’d already put her up on a pedestal.  Finally, I’d been thinking, I’ve found someone who hasn’t struggled through their 20’s!

Is it possible that every single one of us has at some point experienced a mental health disorder?  Whether it’s anxiety, depression, or bipolar, I don’t know a single person who has been let off scott free.  Life is tough.  It gets too much sometimes.  And yet, apart from the odd intimate conversation, we don’t talk about it.  Of course we’ve come a long way, but the accepted wisdom still seems to be that mental illness is a relatively uncommon problem. 

I know so many people who have struggled for years before finally realising that they have a clinical illness; that they need to be treated.  For the most part, once they have sought help, their lives have significantly improved.  I am one of these people.  I denied the gravity of my ‘stress’ for years, labouring under the weight of anxiety day after day until I cracked.  If we talked about it more, if we acknowledged that this is something that happens to nearly everyone at some point, we would be in a better position to recognise it when it happens to us, rather than explaining it away until we’re almost at breaking point. 

In theory, we don’t stigmatise mental illness like they did in the old days.  We have awareness campaigns, education in schools, and famous role models.  This is all fantastic.  But day to day, at work, at uni, we are still under an enormous amount of pressure to be ‘happy’.  It’s not really the done thing to admit in everyday chit chat that we cried into our pillows last night, unable to let go of the sadness we’ve held onto since our grandmother died a year ago.  We don’t tell each other that we’re not just ‘stressed’ over study, we’re tied up in knots of worry so pervasive and complex they are consuming our every thought.  The implicit message, for better or worse, is that there’s something slightly wrong with you if you’re not sparkly and content.  Even if we’re not saying it out loud, the daily pressure to be happy means that there is still a degree of shame surrounding mental illness.  My attitude toward my friend, that she was not the ‘success’ I’d assumed her to be due to her experience with mental ill- health, was simply reproducing the incorrect notion that to have a mental illness is somehow to ‘fail’.

It’s not exactly an environment conducive to recognizing mental illness.  We spend so much time faking it that often we fail to understand or accept that we need help.  In my case, I held the misguided belief that there would be a really obvious ‘episode’ or warning sign, that someone would hold a big ugly placard in front of my head blaring ‘YOU HAVE AN ANXIETY DISORDER’.  For most of us, it creeps up slowly, and our misconceptions on the issue mean we’re not adequately prepared to respond to the signs.  Then, when we finally do accept that we have an illness, we cover it up and discuss it only in the most intimate of circumstances.  We participate in the culture of shame. 

But it’s not shameful to have a mental illness, and it’s not at all uncommon.  We can claim to understand this all we like, but the only way we are really going to believe it is if we lift the lid and start talking.  To talk about it would be to normalise it – to break down the ridiculous expectation that we should always be content.       

Next time I meet up with an old friend, I am not going to omit the fact that I suffer from anxiety.  I am going to challenge the voice in my own mind that tells me I am less of a success because of it.  Wouldn’t it be great if we thought of mental illness in the same way we do physical- we all expect to fall ill from time to time, but we also expect to be able to talk about it, to treat it, and to receive unconditional understanding from everyone around us, not just our closest confidants.