Since October 2014 after receiving therapy and meds for one year I decided to join NAMI and become more proactive about ending #stigma about suicide and mental illness, partially at the suggestion of my therapist and partially because  of my own suffering. Maybe stigma is less than it was in the 1960’s and 1970’s but it’s still alive and well. If someone in the family or in the workplace complete suicide no-one wants to talk about it its like that person never existed. I suffered suicide losses both in my family and in the workplace. Due to heredity and both family and marital abuse/neglect I suffer from BPD. Sounds like 5 words to ruin a first date: I have Borderline Personality Disorder. I am still learning how to cope with my intense feelings and how to control some of them. Posting on NAMI and attending meetings has helped me a lot.

I attended the talk by Dr. Stephen Geisler at Zucker Hillside (Queens/Nassau) where he discussed Clozapine treatment for Schizophrenia which I found interesting. I am also reading “On the Road” by  Dr.Oliver Sacks where he tells of living with stigma and of his mistakes but also his ultimate success in his chosen profession. 

            My name is Jennifer and I am a recovered mental illness survivor—

            I have endured severe mental illness for over half my life.  During that time, I suffered from clinical depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and borderline personality disorder.

            Due to the depression, my behaviors ranged from excessive crying to excessive sleeping to suicide attempts.  I felt feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness, and helplessness.  All I thought I wanted to do was die.   But in fact, what I really wanted was help with overcoming my severe sadness.

            During my manic states, I endured impulsive, spontaneous, and irresponsible behaviors.  I felt on top of world.  I felt excessive amounts of energy.  I had racing thoughts.  I had delusions of grandeur.  I’ll be honest.  It felt great to be so high, but it is also very dangerous.  Risky behaviors can lead to much endangerment of self and others.

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I’m the person nobody wants to help. I’m the person who’s problems are too complicated for people to want to deal with and so instead they turn you away. 

My mental illness of depression first showed up when I was 14. Signs of Borderline Personality Disorder were shown a lot earlier than that. Anxiety hit when I was 15. My depression started during the summertime between my freshman and sophomore year of high school. The cops were called to my house because I was suicidal and my parents agreed to get me help. I went once. My sophomore year of high school I started cutting. I started talking to a teacher and the school counselor who got me into counseling. This only helped for a bit until I became suicidal and ended up in the psych ward for the first time. My parents flipped their lid, denying there was anything wrong. I was there a week before being transferred to an adolescent treatment facility where I stayed for two weeks. During this time my parents destroyed the relationship I had with my teacher and school counselor and threatened a law suit. After I got out of that facility, I had a meltdown and was back in four days later for another week. I was discharged and continued outpatient therapy but couldn’t get anywhere because I couldn’t trust anyone. Life went on and I struggled with self harm off an on.

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A chronic void that I feel,
It’s constantly haunting me. 
These demons live inside my head,
And they’re always a step or two ahead.

A chronic void that I feel,
Keep fighting, keep spinning the wheel. 
What’s happening to me? 
I just feel so agonizingly empty.

A chronic void that I feel,
Don’t tell me to try, we had a deal. 
Yearning for breath in my sea of sorrow,
Will I make it to tomorrow?

The blank wall is my source of entertainment, 
You don’t matter to me and neither does our previous arrangement.
Don’t ask for what you don’t wanna hear,
I can’t pour my soul out when you’re near.

You don’t need to tell me,
I know I have no sense of identity. 
I’m a delusional mess, my dear,
I never know when to fight,
Or get on my feet and aim for flight.

Dysphoria is my most trusting companion,
And we share a “hello” every morning.

-Sally Bitar

Who am I? I am a wife, mother, sister, friend, Marine and a proud American. I am loving, kind, compassionate, impulsive, stubborn and often difficult. None of those labels define me. I have Bipolar disorder, PTSD along with Borderline personality disorder and I have a tendency to self-harm. Those do not define me either. I am who I am. I am me. Mental illness is like any other illness in the fact that it affects your way of life. It may not present itself with physical symptoms but that makes it no less real. My story may not start like most. Many may find themselves feeling uneasy or unwilling to continue reading. And yet I ask you to try. Try to make it through to the very end. Hopefully you will learn a little more about mental illness and maybe a little more about me. I’m tired of the stigma often associated with mental illness. In order to properly help those in need we need to rid the world of these obvious stigmas. Some are born with a form of mental illness. Others attain it through life’s experiences. I am not sure I fall into one category over the other. And so begins my journey with mental illness…

 As a little girl I grew up loving Barbie dolls, roller skates and my dog Lacey. We lived in a normal middle class neighborhood. We knew most of our neighbors and considered those next to us as family. Maybe that is why what happened became overlooked and went unnoticed until now. As I mentioned above some might find what I am about to say unnerving but please continue on. As a little girl, with long brown pigtails, meticulously braided by my mother and with big brown eyes my neighbor first molested me. This teenage boy took my innocence at approximately 5 years old. It wasn’t just him though. I had an older male cousin that felt the need to molest me as well.  Both continued to steal a little piece of me for years. Like I said no one knew and I was too scared to tell. Still I consider my childhood a happy one. One full of love, excitement, wonder and joy. I began going to Catholic school as a Kindergartener. I stayed at the same school for 9 years. I am still friends with many of my fellow classmates. They were like family to me.

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Everyone struggles with something in life. Some struggle for brief periods of time and some struggle every day. I belong to the some who struggle every day. Since I was 5 years old I have constantly struggled with mental illness. I have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, ADD, ADHD, PTSD, and attention deficit Disorder. My dad, step mother, and Step Father physically abused me for most of my life because they didn’t understand what I was going through and my Mother was the only person in my life to try to help me through everything I was dealing with. Unfortunately I did not trust anyone around me due to how I was treated at home and because I was constantly bullied at school because I was different. Eventually the abuse I was facing at my step fathers house led to me going into a state of shock and I tried to hurt my mother because I was so out of it and thought she was my step father. I was 15 at this point and was detained. 

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Hi I’m Traci.I’m a 39 year old women with mental illnesses. I have been struggling since age 11 and 12.  I thought I was weird, or “crazy”. Each Dr giving me a new diagnosis. 

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**Trigger Warning**

My story is not that dissimilar to others that have been shared on this site. My mental illness is complex. Some say I have Borderline Personality Disorder – others think it is Bipolar II with Depression. It really matters very little which it is or even if it is both. The diagnosis changes little about how I experience my mental illness on a daily basis and how it affects my ability to get through each day.

Everyday, my mental illness challenges me. It tries to keep me in bed. I curse the moment each day I wake up alive. The notion of getting out of bed each day is exhausting before I have even moved a muscle and the thought of having to deal with other people in the world makes me anxious. It tries to make me late for appointments. I know I should go to group and go to see my therapist, but my brain is determined to convince itself that those appointments are useless anyway as there is no fixing me. It tries to make me not eat. After all, what is the point of eating when I am not hungry anyways. It tries to make me not take my medications. Because it isn’t really helping me anyways, right? It tries to make me hurt myself. If I can hurt on the outside, then I will hurt less on the inside. Too often it tries to kill me. Because I am absolutely certain the world would be better off without me here.

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I was first diagnosed with major depressive disorder when I was 13 years old. By the time I reached 16, a few more labels were added to the MMD. These included borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, post traumatic stress disorder and OCD. Fun stuff. Medication was the only treatment available at that time. My parents decided the best place for me to be was hospitalized in the mental health unit of a large teaching hospital. I felt and thought the reason for such a drastic change in my life was for their convenience, not what was best for me.

Little background, my father, a surgeon, was diagnosed with severe bipolar disorder, treatment was medication. When the medication no longer controlled the symptoms, he would stop working and sit staring blankly at the television for about 3 months. At some point, my mother would notice and send him out of town for a series of ECT. He would return from his “vacation” zombie like but after a few weeks or so, would return to his baseline personality. He always had a flat affect most of the time.

So, apparently I inherited the gene or genes for mental illness of one name or another.

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I have been diagnosed with a long list of mental illnesses. I suffer from severe depression and anxiety, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD), and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Out of all of them, BPD affects my life the most. I have had BPD my whole life. From pre-school to elementary, I would cry the night before, the morning of, and during school because I wanted to be with my mother. One of the symptoms of BPD is fear of abandonment/paranoia of being abandoned. I did not want to be separated from my mother because I was afraid of being left behind.

Other symptoms of BPD are: feelings of extreme anger for no reason, a pattern of unstable relationships, disassociation, mood swings, depression, anxiety, impulsive dangerous behavior, feelings of emptiness, distorted and unstable self-image, and self-harm/suicidal ideations.

BPD also affects the way one thinks. They see things only as black or white - there is no gray area. In addition, people with BPD put someone they just met on a pedestal, then immediately drops them if the person says/does something they do not like/approve of. It can be the smallest thing and most times, the person has no idea that they did anything offensive. Having BPD distorts the mind, leaving the person unable to think clearly and logically.

I have burned so many bridges because of my fits of rage, my inability to handle stressful situations, and my attachment issues (fear of abandonment).
I have been in and out of the psychiatric ward at the hospital because of BPD. Every time I am released from the psychiatric ward I am hopeful and optimistic, praying that this will be the last time I will be in the psychiatric ward. Except, I always end up going back. I feel so frustrated because I am taking ten steps backwards from recovery.

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