Four Reasons I Hate Mental Illness

Mental health matters and mental illness sucks. I have a running list of reasons I hate my mental illness. Here are four.

Mental illness sucks. There. I said it. It doesn’t just impact your brain. It makes nearly every part of your life go sideways. Here are four of the most pressing reasons why I hate having a mental illness.

Mental Illness Steals My Motivation

Do you have grand ideas of what you want to accomplish? Do you act on those ideas? Turn them in to goals that you fight to achieve?

I have grand goals that I want to achieve. I’m a driven person who seeks external validation in every part of my life. The problem is, I don’t often act on the goals that I know will make a huge difference in my life.

Give me a work project with a deadline, and I’ll attack it. Push me to do a work-related something new that will set me apart, and I am here for all of it. But, tell me that monitoring my diet and getting regular exercise will help me feel better, and I fall into a puddle of failure.

Most of the time I’ll blame this behavior on being lazy. I’ll respond with excuses and sometimes even anger. That’s a fear-based response because my brain tells me I can’t do it. Anxiety takes over and then it’s all about the overwhelming feeling of failure from before I even start. My brain lies because of my mental illness.

For example, I’ll wake up early on a Saturday morning and have grandiose plans of accomplishing my to-do list of those should-do items that I think about all week. I’ll sit with that feeling for a bit and then become exhausted. The thought of leaving the house to pick up some organizer bins or just go to the FedEx store or even have a lunch treat with my husband, and I’ll collapse under the pressure I put on myself. I’m an all-or-nothing type of person, and the “all” makes me tired. My motivation is gone. Mental illness lies and tells me that I can’t do any of it.

Finding a Medication for a Mental Illness is Frustrating

If you’ve ever had to take a medication for your mental health, you know what I’m talking about.

It can take months for the medicine to build up in your body, to be effective and make you feel better. Or, it can work from Day 2 and then taper off after a month. There is no cure-all that starts from the moment you swallow a pill, or four, and then feel stable for the rest of your life. At least, I haven’t found it. It’s like Alice taking a bite If a biscuit and morphing into a giant, her feet and arms pushing through the doors and windows of the White Rabbit’s house, and then she swallows another carb and shrinks to an eighth of her original size. In between, she nearly drowns herself with her own tsunami-sized tears.

Okay, I don’t remember the timing for all those scenes in Disney’s movie, but you know what I mean.

Finding a medicine – or a cocktail of prescriptions – is a tedious process when you’re tying to improve your mental health. I’ve been on so many different medications that I have lost track. Most recently it was lithium, that Big Daddy of the mental health world that scared me from the start. But, I’d take it for two weeks, feel great, and then the dosage would need tweaked. There’s a limit to what you can take, obviously, so we switched to something else. I’m feeling better right now with the current med cocktail, but there’s a lingering thought that the other shoe will drop and I’ll have to start all over once my body gets accustomed to another medication.

Mental Illness Makes Me Act Like a Victum

The t-shirts and the stickers are right for most people. Their mental health matters and they’re fighting through their struggles. They’re accomplishing things and sharing their stories.

I want to share my story, too. But right now, I’m in a cycle of victimhood as I blame others for the past and I’m not moving forward. I’m stuck at the blame-and-shame stage. I don’t believe that everyone can pick themselves up by their bootstraps and recover alone. You need a team, a tribe, a push forward.

I say “right now,” but if I’m being truly honest, I’ve been this way for decades. And that makes things worse. I hate that I’m not holding myself accountable for every part of this. Yes, bad things happened to me, but I haven’t made peace with those things yet. I hang on to the pain. And that exacerbates my mental illness and fills me with more lies that grow like mold in my brain.

Mental Illness Changes Your Relationships

This is the biggest reason why I hate having a mental illness. My depression and anxiety impact my family every day. I hate that my kids have become attuned to me hiding in the bedroom and sleeping away the afternoons because I’m so exhausted by life. I hate that I have to talk to them frankly about mental health. I hate that I don’t do the Pinterest and Instagram mom things because I’m mentally ill. I question if my love is truly enough when I can’t show up with enthusiasm and action unless I push up against the walls of the deep, dark hole that depression dug around me.

I hate that my husband feels he can’t talk freely without my emotions taking over in response. I hate that he’s dealt with my mental illness as much as he has. I hate that he anticipates a “no” from me before he asks if I want to do something, so much so that he’s stopped asking. I hate that I haven’t felt right with him in months because I can’t relax. I don’t know how much longer he can hang on. He knew what was wrong before we married, but my mental illness has gotten worse, and it’s incredibly unfair to him.

The Tipping Point of Mental Illness

The tipping point is near. The fear remains that I’ve gone past it and can’t go back. The lie remains that I will be this way forever. It’s not something I’m handling well. Maybe I just want to be miserable. And that’s fifth reason I hate having a mental illness.

Broken: A (Funny) Tale of Mental Illness

Book Review: Broken (in the best possible way) by Jenny Lawson

Jenny Lawson writes with honesty, vulnerability, and power. She brings truth to the page as she explains what it’s like to be in the dark hole of depression and anxiety while you lose shards of your soul. She brings levity to the story as she shares her wild experiences at the dentist, in Puerto Rico, and in her backyard. Her love of taxidermy — including Allie McGraw the alligator and Daenerys Targaryen the prairie dog/squirrel — as well as her late night Twitter sessions and her insistence that her missing phone is in the floorboards (really in her pocket) are just a few of the laugh-out-loud instances from Broken.

But it’s so much more than that. Jenny is helping to end the stigma of mental illness. She is open about her dark days and shares what of feels like to walk into the light — to be unsettled when you have good days because you’re not sure when the dark will come again. There’s a reason I used up nearly all my sticky tabs and almost an entire highlighter while reading this book. Because it’s that good. And because it’s that real.

Overcome Negative Thinking Patterns

I’m a negative thinker. From what I understand, negative thinking patterns are pretty common for people with depression and anxiety. It makes sense, really. My thought patterns feed me. I want to get healthier, so I’m working on identifying and rebutting these negative thinking patterns. Frankly, I’m struggling with it all.

Negative Thinking Patterns

According to an article on VeryWellMind.com, negative thinking patterns occur when you face a situation and cause stress. In my life, I imagine these thoughts creating sneak attacks on my brain when I’m vulnerable. These attacks have been occurring for so long that I’m actually accustomed to their warfare and no longer recognize what is false and what is truth.

For example, one negative thinking pattern (also called a cognitive distortion) that I battle is mind-reading. I might tell my husband about an event in my day. He’ll be occupied with some happening in his own day, and he might not react to me in the way that I expect him to. That leads me to think that he isn’t listening, he isn’t interested, he doesn’t care, and he clearly thinks I’m stupid.

See what I did there? In reality, if I stopped for a moment and asked myself, “What is the truth in this situation?” I would have been able to figure out that my dear, loving husband was actually just busy at the moment and would have been more than happy to talk about my day at a time that was more convenient. He’s proven this again and again. The truth is that he is kind and willing to listen at nearly any moment.

Stop. Rebut. Find the truth. It would save so much time and decrease my anxiety and stress – my husband’s too.

Another cognitive distortion is catastrophizing. This means that I assume that because X happened today, then it will happen tomorrow as well, and on and on until the world ends because X happened on October 31, 2020. In fact, the world ending will solely be caused by X happening to me on this date.

Do I sound crazy yet? I think I do. But, I’m being raw and honest here. I think catastrophic thoughts regularly. I use words like “always” and “never” to describe stressful events and interactions. I assume that because a coworker criticized my work on one project, that she hates everything I do and that I’m always going to be a target of her criticism, and she’s out to get me fired.

Again, fully acknowledging the crazy here.

When I type out these examples of my own cognitive distortions, I see how ridiculous I sound. So, I guess I need to continue to write about them. To make sense of them and understand what I’m doing when I have these thoughts. And, remember: Stop. Rebut. Find the truth.

4 Truths About Mental Illness

I have a mental illness.

Those five words are stark on the page. Despite so much growth in mental health awareness, a powerful stigma remains against mental illness. Is she psychotic? Is she dangerous? Why can’t she just get over it? Just a few of the questions that are bounced around when people come to conversations about mental illness and aren’t familiar with what being mentally ill really looks like.

Having had mental health battles for nearly 28 years and having been diagnosed, misdiagnosed, and re-diagnosed, I have some experience with what mental illness means. I’m not a doctor or a licensed therapist, but I live in the darkness much of the time. Here are four truths I’ve come to realize about mental illness.

1. My mind lies to me.

Depression and anxiety are pretty little liars. Because of my brain chemistry and thought patterns, I’ve set up a nice home for these liars in my mind. Improving my life means I have to rebut those lies on a daily basis and start evicting them.

2. Nature and nurture play roles in my mental health.

It’s not an either/or situation. My heredity and my lifestyle impact my mental illness. I’m predisposed to having a different brain chemistry because there is a history of mental health issues in my family. Life events have caused me to be more depressed, anxious, and to even battle manic episodes at times. We’ll talk more about those at another time. Also? I haven’t done myself any favors by feeding into negative thought patterns, digging deeper trenches in my neural pathways to feed into the depression and anxiety.

3. Taking medicine does not make me weak.

This truth has been a long time coming for me. I have been under a psychiatrist’s care for more than two decades, but I’ve fought the idea of treating my mental health like an actual illness for about just as long. As my dear father once told me, “If you had diabetes, you’d take insulin. Taking care of your brain, and taking medicine for your mental health is just as important.” He was a smart man (I miss him so), and I’ve finally come to understand that using medication to help treat depression and anxiety is not wrong.

4. I’m not a bad person.

My severe depression and generalized anxiety disorder do not control my conscience or my character. They are liars. (See Statement 1.) I need to improve in different areas — as a wife, a mother, a daughter, a human being — but I’m not innately bad because of my mental health.

I know there are more truths here, but these are the four most powerful ones that I’ve realized to date. What would you add?