Living With an Ignored Mental Illness
By: Charlotte Scott
Tags: Anxiety, Mental Health Awareness, Recovering, Mental Health, Depression

Something I have always found is my ability to hide how I am actually feeling. I could seem like I was having the best time in the world on the outside, whereas on the inside I felt like curling up in a ball and never seeing light again.

Something I have always found is my ability to hide how I am actually feeling. I could seem like I was having the best time in the world on the outside while wanting to curl up in a ball and never see the light again on the inside.

When I was thirteen I started to have full-fledged anxiety attacks; the difficulty breathing, the crying, the rocking, the shaking, the tunnelling pit of emotional turmoil making my thoughts so wild they actually scared me. One of the worst I ever had was on the day of the village markets where I lived. It was so busy that I couldn’t find any of my friends or family and something about the situation made me feel awful. I walked back to my house — just barely keeping a grip on myself — and realised that I didn’t actually have a key on my to get inside. So I went through the side gate, around the back of my house, sat on a rock and cried for half an hour, so hard I couldn’t breathe and my throat was dry.

The whole time thinking “but why am I even crying?”

It as around this time that I started to realise my complete unwillingness to continue existing. It was a strange phenomenon I felt, somewhere in between ‘I don’t want to live anymore’ and ‘I am scared of death’.

At that point, I guess I just wanted to not exist.

That feeling lasted for four years. Four years of crying in the mirror, having strange phobias to common things (like the wind) that made me panic, telling my mum that I wanted to kill myself, that I didn’t feel ‘right’ or ‘normal’

I also started to hurt myself as a way to exert some sort of energy that would build up inside of me. Stress, anger, fear, sadness, a mixture of all emotions one could feel. All let out through one-millisecond relief of pain and it’s oncoming clarity.

I let mine out through hitting myself. A form of self-harm I never even knew existed. The idea of cutting had been so strangely “romanticised” bu the media that the idea of other forms of harm had never occurred to me.

I would hit my head, though, against my hairbrush, the wall, my phone, my clenched fist. So much that I had throbbing lumps on my head for days.

After the initial two years of feeling the way I did, I began wishing that something was wrong with me.

My rationale was that if I had some sort of disease or illness, then I could be diagnosed and that if I could be diagnosed then I could be fixed. I would think I could simply be fixed in the way you would a broken clock — take the batteries out and replace them, then it’d tick again.

Then — in a way finally — this strange wish of mine was granted.

We were required to do a compulsory survey at my school which would look at the mental health of me and my peers. We were told that it was anonymous and nobody would see your results but the scientists that studied them.

Except the school failed to mention that if you showed any sign of mental illness, then these results would be sent directly to your parents.

So that was how I found myself taking the letter out of my mum’s bag after she had sent an ominous “we should talk” message, and finding out that these psychological scientists had gone ahead and put me in a category that said I showed signs of anxiety, depression, self-harm and sucicidal thoughts.

And my parents finally decided they should do something about my mood swings, terrifying thoughts, self-harm and regular panic attacks. That’s something I find it difficult to forgive them for — though deep down I know it’s not their fault — no matter how many times I said that something was not right with me, they needed to wait for the results of a test to actually believe I wasn’t okay.

I was booked in with a doctor, and then a psychologist. And on the third meeting with my therapist, I realised how little I was going to get from these sessions. Because I basically told the lady exactly what she wanted to hear. We came up with different measures and mechanisms I could use to try and combat these thoughts I was having, and whether they were working or not, I told her that they helped.

After that, I didn’t even feel better after the appointments like I had before. I left a session and became even more depressed than I previously was. When I told my doctor about this, she said it was because I just didn’t suit the psychologist — or the psychologist didn’t suit me. She tried to reassure me that it was completely normal to need a few different therapists to find the one that helped. Not that I believed her, I didn’t want to stop with my first psychologist because I didn’t want her to be offended — a ridiculous connotation.

About a year and a half after these sessions finished, I decided to try again. I went back to my doctor, I went to a new psychologist, and she actually seemed to help. At this time I also dealing with my anxiety in a form I hadn’t before. While entering the main exam period of my secondary school experience, I was trying to deal with my fear of failure.

My anxiety reared its head at this, making me constantly have my head in a textbook, writing notes, trying to cram and study from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to sleep. My sleep patterns went out of the window and suddenly I was studying until 3 am and waking up at 6:30 for school. Running on three and a half hours is not the way to live life.

I would find it difficult to stop what I was doing, the constant thought of “but what if” plaguing my mind. Under my psychologist’s instruction, I started investing in all forms of organisation I could. I had so many diaries, study plans, weekly planners and notebooks it was unbelievable. I aimed to map out what I wanted to do in time slots so I wouldn’t be studying for 13 hours a day. I was also prescribed an antidepressant.

I recently started university, moved away from home and am now studying a Medical Science degree. It was just before this that I realised for myself how far I had come. While I would once hit myself daily, I couldn’t remember the last time I had. My head felt more clear and calmer. For a while I didn’t know what to attribute it to either, seeing as it came so far after my appointments had ended. Although the medication helped, I want to finally give myself more credit.

I began journaling and writing more while trying to deal with my feelings. Creating mood logs helped me determine what might have affected me, if anything. Stating what I am grateful for to eliminate those things I don’t want. Physically putting pen to paper to pour whatever my brain is thinking onto a page, cleansing myself this way. My ability to put down textbook or my notes and just accept that the “what if”’s can be dealt with later, that there is always a second route. To accept that what I can do is my best and learning to be happy with that. I am not quite there yet, but knowing that I know truly believe this, I know that for once I can live for me and not just for other people.