My name is Amy and I have bipolar 1 disorder. Both my parents had mental health issues: Dad bipolar 1 and Mom borderline personality disorder so i am genetically predisposed to my condition.

I have had episodes of severe to mild mania followed by depression of equal intensity. Though I am relatively stable on my meds it is still a struggle, sometimes daily.

I’m embarrassed to say that I often tell people I have an anxiety disorder vs. bipolar to account for times when I can’t sleep or when I have a panic attack. Particularly for upper management where I work. I find that people can relate better to that vs. bipolar which brings about images of serial killers and perpetrators of mass shootings. It’s just that bipolar is not well understood and I have lost my marriage, some friends and family. Some people are visibly afraid of me because they think I’m unstable or judge me for times it was hard to parent my kids.

Having said that, I have come a long way in my recovery. I have a great job with a flexible schedule. I’m compliant with my meds, have a superb psychiatric and a solid bond with my therapist. Wonderful friends and family support too. I’m also doing my best to repair my relationship with my kids.

In fact, I am a NAMI Certified Support Group Leader and I can tell you that people with mental illness can get better and manage their disorder. We have good days and bad days but keep hope alive and don’t isolate. NAMI has fantastic resources to help you along. I use them all the time, follow NAMI on Facebook and donate when I can.

Have faith and remember you are not alone.

Amy

I’ve struggled with my mental health all my life. Feelings of anxiety, depression and isolation were interwoven with my life experience for as long as I can remember.  But something else was going on in my mind and relationships that was not explained by just these issues, and I often experienced myself as different from others and quite lonely as a result of that pervasive feeling.

My history of abandonment (my mother left me when I was 11) ripped through friendships and relationships in a predictable pattern, yet I only realized that looking back. Within me there was so much need, and that scared people away. When I felt a friend had failed me I was not able to let it go. People went from being supportive to very cruel so quickly in my head, and I went through incidents over and over again in my mind, trying to find a measure of peace and understanding in them. My strong, overwhelming emotions seemed understandable in these situations given the betrayal I felt. Now I know there were times when my needs and my anger were too great, producing the abandonment that so terrified me. Even therapists, I thought, let me down over the years when I bumped up against the limits of their understanding and compassion.

At age 50, I started therapy for the dozenth time in my life. The main catalyst for this was struggles in parenting my son. The clinician soon zeroed in on my black and white thinking, fear of abandonment, strong emotions, poor relationships and the impulsivity that marked my teenage years and young adulthood. She suggested several books about Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). While it was very difficult to think of myself as having BPD, it was an awakening to read these books and for the first time view my history, thinking and behavior as meaningful patterns within the framework of BPD.

I found a DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy) group and a therapist trained in DBT, as I learned this was a very useful approach to working with Borderline behaviors. I again made the commitment to seeing someone who could prescribe medications for me that would help ease my agitation/strong negative emotions, continual review of negative experiences, interpersonal conflicts and difficulty seeing the grey areas. Therapy and medication together also helped me to address the ever-present anxiety that came from trying to manage my strong emotions and ongoing experiences of disappointment and isolation.

DBT and medication allow me greater peace inside my mind and better interactions in the world. I still get tangled in interpersonal difficulties and my own heaviness of thinking. Sometimes I get tired of practicing my DBT skills, sometimes I tire of the side effects of my medications. But I know I need them to live a less tortured life - one that includes even a little bit of joy and better relationships. The progress has been slow yet profound. 

One of the hardest things about having BPD is not being able to tell people. The label itself holds so much stigma and I have not been willing to deal with that except for people closest to me or unless my story could be useful to someone else and therefore worth the risk. I wish narratives about BPD were as common as those about anxiety and depression and bipolar disorder. Perhaps in the future, if those of us with BPD speak out about our illness, experiences, and healing process, that will begin to happen. Perhaps our voices together will in time reduce the stigma and increase understanding. 

It’s mental health awareness month. My mental health is something that looking back on my life is something I have always struggled with it my whole life, I was just not aware of depression being a illness. My official diagnose is borderline personality disorder, major depressive disorder, Generalized anxiety disorder, I’m suicidal and I also have been a cutter. Then dealing with losing my mom when I was just five days away from turning 17 and then losing my Dad at 19 has played apart in my depression too. 
But even before losing my parents I was depressed, it has been a struggle everyday for me, I have been dealing with thoughts of wanting to killing myself and sometimes thinking I was never good enough, that I was just a waste of life and it went on for what seems like forever. It seems I have always been thinking how my life is horrible and thinking I wish I could die.

I feel that my feelings started to get more intense when I was in high school. I would always look at other people at school and think how can they be so happy, and why do I feel so sad all the time. But I was afraid to tell anyone how I was feeling because I did not want people to think I was weird or crazy. So sometimes I would cover up how I was really feeling by trying to be one else, I would say things that were not true to make people think I was normal, because in my head I thought I was a freak, and because I was so depressed and I didn’t want anyone to know that I was thinking about killing myself everyday or how at night I would cry myself to sleep because I was so depressed and scared to tell anyone. Like most teenagers I just wanted to fit in and I thought if anyone really knew how I felt I would be ostracized. So all the feelings I had, I kept to myself and I would make up stories to tell other people because sometimes I had wished that maybe if I say something enough times even if it was not true, it would come true and my depression and my suicidal thoughts would go away. In high school I also began cutting. It was a way for me to control how I was feel, when I felt everything else was out of control. Even though I knew it was wrong, it was a release. But today I can say I happily don’t cut anymore.

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My name is Cindie Apruzzese and I suffer from Borderline Personality Disorder, Impulse Control Disorder and Autism. It’s been rough through the years getting to where I am today. I’ve come a long way from what I used to be like. I am currently on medication and I go to psychotherapy once a week. Therapy and the meds have helped me to be able to function. I enjoy the NAMI outings, walks, and Network parties. I go to a center here in Waterbury, CT. They have helped me greatly. They helped me to learn how to type, computers, etc. 

I have bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, and anxiety. I have struggled with mental health illness since I was a child and because I was misdiagnosed with depression at the age of eleven, have suffered for quite some time.  I also struggled with alcoholism for a few years, having inherited it from my Dad.

I’ve been on many medications, seen several therapists and psychiatrists, made numerous suicide attempts, and self-harmed. I felt broken. I wasn’t thriving and I didn’t expect to survive. Then there was a miracle. I conceived my daughter. She was born in December of 2008.

I needed to at least live for her sake at that point, but I was still barely surviving. It was the spring of 2015 when I decided to quit alcohol and to go into the hospital because I was severely depressed and suicidal. The doctor changed my medications and a few days before my discharge date the doctor made me realize that I was still in a deep depression. I still needed help. I decided to do ECT.

It was a major decision but it changed my life. The combination of ECT, medications, and therapy have helped me onto my road of recovery. I’m not 100% and I still have my episodes. However, have my treatment team, my friends, and my family to guide me and help me. I’m not alone.

I have borderline personality disorder. I was diagnosed a little over two months ago. I have started very strong medication that keep me in check and I think I am responding well. I would be in therapy regularly if I could afford it.

Today I watched the Netflix series about Elisa Lam’s death. She was ruled as having drowned accidentally in a water tank and her bipolar condition was cited as a factor. She was on the same medication, lamotragine, that I rely heavily on. Seeing that really hit me hard and I don’t know why its affecting me so much to know that someone who died and was bipolar was taking the same medication. 

I think in a way it just makes it all so real. Everything that I fear could potentially happen to me if it happened to her. That terrifies me. It’s like a sentence that everyone with a serious mental illness is doomed to have a stigma over their head for eternity. It seems like everyone who has bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder must be assigned a permanent caution sign flashing over them for the rest of their lives. I don’t want to live like that. I don’t want my family to walk on eggshells around me, or to think every time I feel emotion I am having an episode. 

Besides my immediate family and close friends, I have been keeping my borderline personality disorder diagnosis a secret. I haven’t reported it to any employer, for fear I would be classified as crazy or disabled. My mind feels very twisted right now.

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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Borderline personality disorder.

Hello there, my name is Leah Groom and I’d like to share my story with you today.

When I was 18 I was diagnosed with Borderline personality disorder which hit me like a ton of bricks, why is this happening? Why me? What did I ever do wrong?  All sorts of questions were running through my head I was terrified and felt isolated from the rest of the world feeling like nobody would ever understand me, I shut my family out and let myself coil in self despair. Getting a diagnosis is hard but it’s also a huge relief although I felt all these extremely negative feelings I also felt like I finally had an answer.

 For many years I felt as though something was wrong, before I had my diagnosis I was a wreck. I couldn’t cope with my emotions I had this unexplainable anger inside I couldn’t understand why I felt so paranoid and hated I never wanted to be alone I clung to a very unhealthy relationship if we ever broke up I’d cry and feel suicidal and beg for him to come back I refused to sleep alone and slept with my mother if he wasn’t there, I left my work, I left education, I self harmed, I was always anxious, If I tried to sleep in my own room by myself I’d hear voices which terrified me, I never felt so alone. Desperate and fragile I reached out for help and that’s when they diagnosed me. At first I couldn’t believe what I was hearing at first to me it felt as though I was being degraded “Not so bad personality disorder” is what I referred it to. Until I actually searched up the meaning, the word borderline is used because people with this illness border between “Psychosis and neurosis”. For me this explained a lot and made me feel that there really WAS something wrong and the term “Borderline” wasn’t used to belittle my illness. As messed up and alone as I felt, worrying that the world and others around me would judge me, petrified of the stigma I reached out…

And things slowly started to change….

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Hi my name is Kimberlee I am 36 years old.  My first nervous break down was at 15 and have been on disability since I turned 18.

I have panic attacks, I’m OCD, ADHD, Borderline personality disorder and manic depression. 

I’ve got a grip on things more some days then others. I take medication to help balance my chemicals and without them I would be in a bit of crazy unpredictable state of mind. 

I love NAMI and all they do to help bring awareness to mental health issues. 

After years of experiencing instability in my mood and self-image, I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), and Attention Deficient Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) at the age of 21. And since BPD is a misunderstood disorder, I’m going to start off by giving NAMI’s definition of BPD.

“Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a serious mental disorder marked by a pattern of ongoing instability in moods, behavior, self-image, and functioning. These experiences often result in impulsive actions and unstable relationships. A person with BPD may experience intense episodes of anger, depression, and anxiety that may last from only a few hours to a few days.

Some people with BPD also have high rates of co-occurring mental disorders, such as mood disorders, anxiety disorders, and eating disorders, along with substance abuse, self-harm, suicidal thinking and behaviors, and suicide.

While mental health experts now generally agree that the label ‘borderline personality disorder’ is very misleading, a more accurate term does not exist yet.”

Receiving these diagnoses caused me to feel a million different emotions at once. On one hand, I was relieved that I was not making it all up and that I was not alone. But on the other hand, I was terrified as to what these diagnoses meant for me and my life. I thought that if I researched and found out everything I could about my diagnoses that I could somehow beat them. I was wrong.

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