Hello, I have always thought that sharing my story with the mental health community is important to bring hope to others that are just like me.

I’m a 37 year old divorced mother of two boys. I have been in therapy of some kind or another since I was 7 years old. Mental illness runs in my family as well as substance abuse addiction. I believe I was born with my many disorders that progressed and worsened as I got older, abused illegal drugs, prescribed medication and had my children. In my early childhood I showed all the many signs of OCD. I also grew up in an extremely chaotic family where my mother suffered terribly with her own mental illness that was never acknowledged or treated and an emotionally absent father. My two older siblings coped with this by using and abusing drugs and my older sister was put into rehab when I was seven. My older brother simply moved away and is still an addict today covering up his own mental health issues. My younger sister was extremely emotionally disturbed and would act out violently towards my parents but especially towards me. She would later become a drug addict for many years and thankfully entered recovery 4 ½ years ago.

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I’m MERLIN.I have been dealing with mental health issues for many years, more than 25+ .I have taken all different kinds of of meds and have tried to stop taking meds more than 8 times and have ended up in the hospital.a mental health hospital can be a scary place but the people are trained and are there to assist you with your recovery.Since dealing with mental health issues over 25+ years I have decided to turn the tables on MENTAL HEALTH and train to be a PEER SUPPORT ADVOCATE.i want to help other people dealing with mental health issues and let them know that there is light at the end of the road and what they are going through is only temporary.i want to share my faith and help educate,inpire,coach and be an example to others.medication and counseling 

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Navigating a world that often feels cold, insensitive, and unaccepting of mental illness is lifelong work, a healing journey with ups and downs that has no end. As a highly sensitive person who has lived with anxiety/depression/OCD/ADHD since childhood, struggled with self-harm, substance abuse, and eating disorders, and is a rape and domestic abuse survivor, I have sought out many forms of therapy over my lifetime, both traditional and alternative.

One concept that I became familiar with in Dialectal Behavioral Therapy (DBT) is having a toolbox. Every individual’s toolbox looks different and will evolve over time. It is essentially a list of our skills and techniques for emotional regulation, distress tolerance, mindfulness, and interpersonal effectiveness. I would like to share some of my go-to tools for self-soothing and traversing times of heightened anxiety/the unknown: 

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TO ANYONE WITH ANY MENTAL ILLNESS OF ANY AGE:

(you don’t have to be in middle school)

Middle School’s known to be some of the hardest years of our lives, between hormones and homework it’s tough enough to make it through without mental health and the stigma it so often carries. As it’s impossible to make it through a class without someone making a joke about a mental illness either a friend of mine or I have, I’ve come to a certain conclusion. Teenagers will be teenagers, it shouldn’t be that way, it shouldn’t be an excuse to kidding about things that people truly struggle with on a daily basis, but it is. Sometimes things in life are just stupid, but we can’t let that get to us.

I’m a 13 (almost 14) year old in the ignorant year of 8th grade, towards the end of last year a few things in life went really, really wrong, and it resulted in a series of unfortunate events (no pun intended). Basically, by the time 8th grade started, I had not only experienced my fair share of panic attacks, gone to a therapist several times, but I had also been diagnosed with depression and an anxiety disorder. I had basically hidden from my entire grade during the summer, so as school started up again and I was struck by a mass of indirect insults towards my mental illnesses, let’s just say there was a lot of tears at the beginning of the year.

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Mental health coverage should be a top priority.  Anybody disagreeing lives in their own bubble.  And that bubble can burst anytime with  family strife/hospitalizations/unrealized dreams/wasted and lost lives, etc.  The monster of mental illness is not limited to the poor and homeless.  It can cause strife and disaster for people in all walks of life.  We need more research for better medications and better treatment and parity coverage with insurance.  Most families know someone in their own family or friends/co-workers/neighbors who suffer from mental illness.  It is vastly widespread  and affects everyone.  The affluent catering to insurance and wall street profits is doing immense irreparable disaster to our population. 

*TRIGGER WARNING*

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Stronger Than Before

This morning I got fired from my job. I had the feeling they were going to try to fire me after a incident that happened last week. There is so much that I happened, but I don’t want to make this letter long. Just because people work in a mental health agency, do not mean every one knows how to handle a person with mental illness. I am a peer support specialist and that was my job title at a mental health agency. I had some good people that I worked with that really care about the clients, and also was a great support to me. Then there was others 😕 Stigma can be anywhere, but it is up to us to use our voices to help shatter that stigma. Through all that I have been through that I felt like I was crushed, misunderstood, lied on, and thrown away, I was not alone all the time. God was with me, and he saw everything. The strength that I feel right now I just cannot explain. All I know it is no body but God! Hold your head us and know that you can make it through the storm with God👼🙌👍

There’s so much that I could truly say, but would it make sense whenever I said it, probably not. But it’s always worth a shot right. Truth is, even whenever it seems like its not the right thing to do, don’t be afraid to take a chance. That’s what I live by. What doesn’t kill you… Makes you stronger.

My name is Zachary Mallory. I am a Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Advocate from Kansas City, Missouri. Born and raised. I have never been the type of person to open up and talk about myself, but I feel like it’s truly that time to do so.

Growing up, I guess you could say I had a normal childhood, but what’s Normal anyways? Throughout school, it was like a putrid hell for me. I never knew what to expect whenever I was walking down the hallways. Was I going to make it to class on time, or am I going to get thrown down the stairs, yet again. It was like a reoccurring nightmare that just wouldn’t go away, no matter what I tried.

Coming home to my parents was my biggest challenge. Not because they didn’t accept me, but because I didn’t know how to tell them what was wrong with me and it depressed me even more because I was basically living a lie. I knew that I had to tell someone, but how. I came home after school one day, and it was after being pushed off the bus and having the bus doors closed right in my face. The bus was leaving and I was late getting there because I got held up in the hallway by a high school jock and was forced to do something that I never imagined in life I would ever do. I won’t go into detail about what happened, just know it was very much embarrassing, in the school hallway of all places.

He threatened me and told me that if I didn’t do it, he was going to run around to everyone and tell them that I am a “queer”.

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  This message is especially addressed to anyone here or anyone you may know that is or may be contemplating self harm/suicide.

  Being a survivor of suicide of my wife’s suicide, I just want to point out how my children and I and our entire family have been affected by her decision. A decision that I am beginning to understand she felt she was compelled to make.

(1) Pain! This is listed first because it is so overwhelming! The hurt is immense and you realize that life is never going to be the same without this person that meant so much to you.

(2) Guilt! What did I do wrong? Did I cause this? Did she not know how much she meant to me? What if I had listened more? Did I say something to trigger her to carry out this act of desperation and take a permanent action to resolve a temporary situation? The biggest questions I became obsessed with are the “whys?” The worst is these answers never came or will come. There were over 10 suicide letters my wife left behind to my children and I and they all just led to more questions?

(3) Depression! Another big gun because the emotions listed above lead us to feelings of powerlessness, hopelessness, and feeling helpless and isolated. Much like my wife must have been feeling when she not only ended her life, but like an eraser over a dry erase board, erased years of the family we worked so hard to build and grew accustomed to. She broke not only all our hearts but our family circle leaving us yearning for her love. Her presence and smile, personality, and spirit that only she carried and can fill.   This has lead me further into major depression disorder. Prior to her death, I was already in this state after losing my career which I truly loved due to losing my health to chronic illnesses. Her death and in the manor it was carried out, lead to PTSD and panic attacks. But my faith in God, treatment, therapy, medication, family and NAMI, are all helping me to cope.

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He looked at me and said you look normal;

I said you don’t see what’s going on inside, in my body and mind.

I have learned over the years of recovery, to deal with and manage my mental illness, BPD/PTSD/OCD, but I had to lose everything before they notice and over time I was diagnosed.

However, over the past few years I also have acquired a stomach conduction, and live with with Reflux and pain everyday which I manage with medication as well.

I have been through counseling, all therapies, hospitals and treatment centers,

My world didn’t open until I did, setting in a meeting, thinking “what the hell am I doing here” I am not like these people, “they are not normal” I was being prejudice, not exactly knowing what I was talking about, being judgemental.

My friend said,” just listen”, don’t look for the differences, look for the similarities, just listen.

So, I did and it was like listening to someone telling me my story, but it was theirs.

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