What We Talk About When We talk About Mental Illness

Roseanne, Kanye, and Mental Health Awareness Week

Photo Credit: What I Be Project by Steve Rosenfield

October 7-13 was mental health awareness week, with NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) starting a CureStigma campaign. You may have seen posts on social media of friends or acquaintances posting about their struggles or their allyship/offers of support. If you hadn't seen or heard, I don't blame you-- I had to google it prior to this post. I had heard the term "mental health awareness week/day/month" floating around, and I figured now was as good a time as any to share my personal thoughts.

In addition to NAMI, the constant news cycle reminds us of how prevalent and even marketable serious mental illness is. Kanye West, for example, was recently at the white house, rambling about our country's problems, his solutions, men, male energy, alternate realities, the 13th amendment, and more. He mentioned the Unabomber and prison and bipolar disorder. In general, it was an extremely disjointed and fantastical discussion. (If you are interested, here is the full transcript)

Roseanne Barr, an up and coming (and subsequently fallen) reboot star was recently on the Joe Rogan podcast. She discussed her infamous tweet, her personal history with serious mental illness and psychiatric hospitalization, and the fallout from her drugged out post. I have not finished the full episode yet (it's a two hour podcast), but it is available here if you are interested.

This is a lot to dig through. This is a representation of not only our attention seeking culture, which values the extreme, but also is subsequently a version of how we understand mental illness, specifically psychosis or other dissociated forms of reality. 

To be fair, it could be worse-- at least we're not talking about mental illness because someone with a firearm took that constitutionally protected firearm and used it to murder innocent people. And at least these people in the spotlight are successful in some regards. They are creative geniuses despite their demons. There are so many angles to approach this question of celebrity culture and mental illness.

What is a self described mental health advocate to do?

I describe myself as a mental health advocate, among other things. On my Facebook profile, you can see a list of labels, such as "avid knitter" "planner lover" "blogger" and "creative writer". I categorize these as aspects of my identity, the parts of myself I want to highlight and put at the forefront. But there are other labels and experiences that define me as well.

I suffer from chronic depression. Usually I am stable, with bouts popping up every few months, when life gets too intimidating to manage, and I suffer quietly with nightmares and tears.

I am a suicide survivor. I attempted to take my own life once, in a half baked impulsive attempt, but I spent years with suicidal thoughts and plans to leave this Earth.

I have generalized anxiety and occasional panic attacks. I don't experience too many panic attacks these days, as I have learned to manage by regulating the number of activities I participate in as to not overwhelm myself. But the anxiety is there, always has been, always will be.

I have been going to therapy since elementary school. In the early days, it was play therapy, learning to express my emotions and understand myself and why I still had tantrums and crying fits. Later, it was talk therapy, a brief time with Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) and a couple of very successful years of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) as I recovered from my years of misdiagnosed.

I have been misdiagnosed as Bipolar II, subsequently spending high school being fed intense anti-psychotic drugs I did not want or need. If you read my blog post describing my journey, you will see influenced a huge portion of my teenage years and contributed to my choice to speak up and speak out. There's not really a term for that, I am not a "misdiagnosis survivor". I don't exactly have post traumatic stress, but it's something that defines who I was and who I have become.

I have ADHD. It is unclear whether I have always had ADHD, because I was in general a quiet and collected child, or whether it was something influenced by those years of over-medication and illness. Perhaps it is just something that developed as I grew up, a result of a technological culture filled with instant gratification. What I know for sure is that the medication helps, the treatment works, so with that, I am grateful.

There are other labels I have, other aspects of my identity influencing my day to day life. When we talk about mental illness, we rarely talk about the collection of labels comprising personal identity, the reasons why we speak out. And it has to be said, there are so many who suffer silently, who choose to live every day in pain and silent struggle because speaking up is so much worse than staying quiet.

Mental illness is an aspect of my identity, just as my love of knitting or my writing skills are. It makes me who I am, sometimes for better, usually for worse. But it is who I am, who I was, and who I will be.

This national conversation around mental illness must include me and people like me, people living every day and managing life to the best of their ability. We are not as seen, it is not as glamorous, but we are here. We are not the stars of sitcoms or rappers with imaginative ideas about the state of our universe. We are just here, living with our identity, be that silently, outspoken, or something in between.

We are here, and we matter. Sometimes it's hard to remember that, in the bouts of depression or the constant failures that accompany ADHD. But we exist, we are strong, we are often unseen. And yet, we are here, and we persevere.

With love and strength,

Rivi