Recovery and Mental Illness

Remember you are not define by your mental illness. Your hope becomes your recovery. Your strengths and positive coping strategies empower your destiny to recover.

Recovery is possible if you believe that you are not your diagnosis. The road to recovery is not easy. Hope, strength, support, determination, and education on mental illness can help an individual with a mental illness recover so that they can live a productive and gratifying life in their community. Some individuals with mental illness can work, attend and graduate from college, buy a home, and have families.

Hope equals maintaining a mentally, emotionally, and physically healthy lifestyle!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                                                  Written By: Tracy Goudeau, MS

Remember you are not define by your mental illness. Your hope becomes your recovery. Your strengths and positive coping strategies empower your destiny to recover.

Recovery is possible if you believe that you are not your diagnosis. The road to recovery is not easy. Hope, strength, support, determination, and education on mental illness can help an individual with a mental illness recover so that they can live a productive and gratifying life in their community. Some individuals with mental illness can work, attend and graduate from college, buy a home, and have families.

Hope equals maintaining a mentally, emotionally, and physically healthy lifestyle!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

HELLO, I WOULD LIKE TO START BY SAYING. THE ROAD TO RECOVERY CAN BE HARD TO TRAVEL BUT WITH ENOUGH POSITIVE INFLUENCES ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE. I HAVE BEEN UNDER THE CARE OF THE MENTAL HEALTH ASSOCIATION FOR NOW GOING ON ON 15 YEARS. AND OF COURSE I DID NOT HAVE ANYTHING WRONG WITH ME, IT WAS THE REST OF THE WORLD THAT HAD THE PROBLEMS.

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For the last ten years,  I’ve obsessed over being happy, so much, that I made myself miserable.  My biggest goal in life was to be happy. I, like the rest of society, dove into the happiness obsession. Happiness became a personal conquest since I’ve struggled with depression since childhood. I often wondered what happiness felt like. So, I created an alternate life inside of my mind much like the movie character Precious. But, reality looked much different.

I assigned happiness to my goals; it was the juggernaut that pushed me to acquire degrees, buy a house, and earn more money. The greater the feat, the more potential happiness.

The problem is, the goals never stopped. As long as I had something to pursue, happiness would be waiting. So, I chased after goals like a junkie looking for a hit.  Filling my emotional voids  with distraction after distraction.  I needed my goals list more than I needed human interaction.

Until, one day, everything stopped.  The world I created began to crumble around me. Everything I relied on all those years was killing me. I started seeing things for what they were. That’s when all hell broke loose.

There wasn’t anything on earth that could ease the pain of my new reality, which was just reality itself.  I didn’t recognize myself when I looked in the mirror. I was a big blubbery mess on the verge of dying. I justified the weight gain as “being happy.” Truthfully, I was on a downward spiral, masking my pain with food, work, and school.

On the outside, it appeared I had it together but psychologically I was falling apart. Your entire life doesn’t have to be in disarray for you to be unhappy. One circumstance can cause a multitude of problems, or maybe, it’s something you’re not willing to admit. If not kept in perspective, happiness can become a distraction.

In September 2013, I fell to the lowest point of my life and couldn’t figure out how I got there. Or, how I let it happen. I was on an emotional zip-line into deep depression.

I solved problems for a living.  I’ve taken hundreds of clients from homelessness to permanent stability and addressed their many mental and emotional issues. I listened empathetically as they poured out their hearts in the back seat of our van. Still, my limitations far exceeded the one’s of my clients.  They had me, I had no one. Not only was I dealing with physical heaviness, my conscious began to weigh on me.  How could I map out success for my clients, while my life fell apart?

Tired of faking it, I quit.

Like buying a house, you have to work hard and save. Or, riding a bike and practicing to maintain balance. The same it goes with joy.

Why I believe in practicing joy instead of being happy.

For so long,  I was afraid to admit that I was miserable because believers aren’t supposed to be depressed. Am I happy? The most important and pivotal question I ever asked myself.

I finished graduate school; didn’t make me happy. I quit my job; didn’t make me happy but was necessary. I began my weight loss journey; didn’t make me happy, but I look great. I went natural; didn’t make happy, but I saved a ton of money. I went vegan; didn’t make me happy. I stopped going to church; it did make me happy. However, I struggled with rediscovering my relationship with God.

When you’re trying to be happy, you conscientiously factor happiness into your daily life.  Social media is a prime example; it has birthed the biggest deception on earth.

People are searching for fulfillment through other’s lives or staging photos to seem happier than what they are. Guilty. Every action or outing is a potential opportunity to show the world how “happy” and “amazing” their lives are. Little do we know or care that person is insecure, hates their life, can’t make ends meet, has the worst attitude ever, and no one likes them.

One of the main inhibitors of living a joyful life is maintaining a false reality. Drawing energy from external forces to fuel your happiness. It’s usually through control or manipulation. Only one type of person does this: a narcissist. Simply said, a liar. I hate to break it to you, but liars don’t get to be happy.

When you practice joy, you live purposefully…mindfully. Coming into a place of acceptance. Valuing those things that are irreplaceable. You simply can’t thrive isolating yourself. Self-reliance is a hoax. We are all interconnected. No one stands alone in the grand scheme of things.

Practicing joy takes day-to-day effort. Making changes when necessary. Seizing opportunities.  Acknowledging that the world can’t do without you. Living a life centered on fulfillment and not validation or attention seeking behavior. Stress will happen. Loss will happen. Problems will arise. But, even as we are presented with setbacks, never let go of gratitude.

Live. Bless. Prosper.

I just want to talk to people about my mental health struggles throughout my life and how I’ve overcome each and everyone of these hurdles and how I could be inspiration to others. Through the power of open and honest communication and never giving up on oneself I’ll be honored to talk about my struggles but also my hope that I can give people that are struggling today day with things that they cannot control in the midst of the coronavirus

In honour of those recovered from eating disorders and those who are still struggling every day. This is my story….a story of choosing life, health and happiness and never giving up. I was always a very shy kid and found it very hard to make friends and socialize with others. This was even more magnified when I entered high-school. I learned very early on in grade nine that there were many cliques and if you didn’t belong to one of these cliques, it would be very hard for you to make friends and feel like you belonged. It was very hard for me to meet people because I was so shy. It caused me so much social anxiety even talking to people that I chose to withdraw and hideaway in my own thoughts. I would even hide in the library at lunch time in order to avoid having to be social.

 I started to become obsessed with “making it” to the “in crowd”.  Since I was so shy, I thought that if only I looked pretty enough or skinny enough, they would accept me into their group. I began spending hours and hours on my appearance and began to restrict my eating. I can remember setting my alarm at 5:30am just to get up and get ready for school in time making sure that my make-up and hair was perfect. I also began to exercise and write down exactly what I was eating every day. I became obsessed with this and began to lose a lot of weight. The popular kids still were oblivious that I even existed. I got frustrated by this thinking that it was because I still wasn’t skinny enough. I began skipping breakfast and lunches and barely eating anything for dinner (hoping my family wouldn’t notice that I was barely eating) I still continued to exercise and would get very upset if everyday life got in the way of my exercise regime.

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Today is my birthday so…. Get happy! Because that’s what this is all about. Happiness.

Where does happiness come from? Not other people. It comes from ourselves. It comes from living for you! “How do I live life for me?”, you may ask. Well, I’ve always lived my life for others- my parents, friends, boyfriends- especially boyfriends. Now I find that what people have told me in the past is true- you have to live for your. To come together as a couple, you need to be an individual first. Strong in your beliefs, morals, values, hobbies and love yourself. At the same time you also have to live for you to establish what you do and don’t like as far as food, experiences, places, hobbies, traits in others, etc.

You draw draw strength from living life for you- it is why and how you control your own

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Many mental illnesses show no symptoms or early onset until young adulthood, more specifically, your 20’s. Lucky for me, these are also my college years. When I was 12 I was hit with my first depressive episode. In high school, when I was 15, I supplemented depression with bulimia. But on the outside, I radiated joy and happiness. I was always positive and bubbly , because everyone loves the free spirit or the ‘wild child’—no one stops to think, ‘maybe she’s getting a little too wild’. But how could they? I never stopped to think it. I never thought that maybe staying up nights on end, feeling like you don’t actually need sleep wasn’t normal. Maybe blowing through my bank account wasn’t just me being ‘bad with money’, but a serious lack of impulse control. When I was 20 years old I had my first, medically acknowledged, hypo-manic episode. A year later I have finally obtained the correct diagnosis.

Hi, my name is Lina, and this is the other half of the story. This year I was finally diagnosed with Bipolar II. My highs don’t reach full mania, but my lows are lower than I can articulate. Yet, it is incredible how one magic word or label can drastically alter your life, and I do mean for the better. There is absolutely no shame in how being on the right treatment plan and medication regimen can stabilize everything. If I had to come up with a word to describe what tending to my mental health has given me it would be LIBERATION. There are no words to describe the process of losing yourself in your own mind, but there ARE words you can use to open doors to your own freedom.
So fight the stigma!

Ask for help, scream it from the rooftops if you must—just keep trying until someone listens, because I promise you that someone will. Mental illness is not a phase, it is often times life-threatening when left untreated. Being bipolar is NOT a weakness in my eyes, it’s a natural difference in brain functioning and learning to manage it has been the ultimate strength-training.