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But You Don't Act Like You Are...
Written by a young adult guest blogger who wishes to write anonymously
I have bipolar disorder. After years of struggling to find an appropriate diagnosis, years of misleading, suggested, and “not otherwise specified” attempts to pin down what was “wrong” with me, I finally feel satisfied with the diagnosis I’ve been given. This is, of course, after an odyssey of inpatient psychiatric hospitalizations and a couple of times at residential treatment centers, which spanned almost a decade of locked treatment in my 23 years of life. That doesn’t even include the time spent in therapy.
I have been out of psychiatric facilities for over two years now, after years of truly believing that I was forever destined to either be called “crazy” and locked up, or take a path that would lead to my eventual, self-induced demise. I was absolutely convinced that I was an awful person who deserved that bad hand that I’d been given, and that I was better off dead than living as a burden to my friends and family.
The other day, I shared my new diagnosis with a close friend, and their response was one of complete surprise and misunderstanding. “But you don’t act like you’re bipolar,” they said. I blew it off as something they said out of a lack of knowledge or understanding about mental health. But then I realized that that’s exactly the problem. Too many people dismiss people with serious mental health needs as being too “normal” or their symptoms as not being “severe enough” to need treatment. When they most need the support, they are apparently not to be taken seriously...
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