I have been struggling with mental illness from a young age. I have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, adhd, ocd, borderline personality disorder, anxiety, psychogenic seizures, and a learning disability. I also am I recovering addict. I would like to spread my story to those in need to show them that the darkness does fade as long as you have the strength to flip the light. The goal is to inspire everyone but if that is not possible I aim to touch at least one person.

Mental illness runs in my family four generations.I hear voices and see things that are not there which is caused by my schizophrenia.  I have bipolar disorder because sometimes I am depressed and sometimes I am manic. I have PTSD because my biological father was not in my life and my mom could not take care of my mental illness due to her illness. I have borderline personality disorder because every time I get close to someone they leave or hurt me. I have obsessive compulsive disorder because I want everything to be perfect. I am a psychopath because I like to plan for the future. I do burn bridges because I am protecting my innocence and soul. Because of this stuff I am a terrible mom. Yet music, history and my family and animals help me. So hopefully that will help. A friend is someone that knows all about you, yet loves you just the same. My religion also helps me. I have zillions of blessings everyday.

I have overcame so much in my life, childhood trauma and abuse,foster care, drug addiction, homelessness, incarceration, and mental illness. In 2016 I sought treatment for bipolar disorder, I also decided to pursue my undergraduate degree in psychology on a pursuit to become an Licensed Professional Counselor, I want to provide affordable treatment to those that need it most in our society. I am now in graduate school studying mental health counseling. I could not have done this without my medications, they saved my life and changed me for the better. 

I self-harmed for many years and attempted suicide at 19.

I have a daughter with Borderline Personality Disorder and a son with Bipolar Disorder.

I’ve been living with Chronic Migraine Disorder for almost 3 years.

I was also diagnosed with depressive disorder as a complication of chronic illness in April 2015.

Sure, it’s logical that someone living with daily pain would be depressed at times…or often. How could one living with that NOT get depressed? I’ve lost friends, lost being able to spend much time with family, lost ground in classes, lost the ability to do simple things without paying with pain…lost so much.
The past few months, though, have been particularly rough. It’s been a real struggle to care about much of anything, to want to get out of bed and fight through another day, to just keep going and hang in there.

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I knew when I adopted my daughter that both her parents had mental illness in the form of Bi-polar and Borderline Personality Disorder. Like many  adoptive parents I thought love would be all she needed.

In looking back I think the first signs appeared when she was 6 years old. She cried so much, more than what I thought was normal. Her pediatrician thought she had depression so we started therapy with a highly recommended children’s program.

Over the years my daughter’s depression turned to self harm, self medication, irrational behavior and risky behavior resulting in out patient and in patient treatments at specialty clinics and hospital, bio-feed back, medication, psychiatric stays, an abortion, rape and other sexual assaults (by the way my daughter also has cerebral palsy and uses a cane, walker or wheelchair for mobility) and a a number of abuses from boyfriends, sex partners and her own adoptive father who has since walked out of her life now that she’s no longer cute or compliant.

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For the last seven years I have struggled with my mental health with triple diagnoses of Borderline Personality Disorder and Bipolar disorder (with substance abuse) and until up to a year ago was leading myself on a trail of self destruction.  The psychosis, whether drug based or not, led to my mental unraveling and lost me jobs and housing and nearly all hope. 

People within the UK will know how inadequate the mental health services can be - how they can save you or wreck you and I had a bit of both.

From inpatient stays to home treatment to community mental health teams to drug and alcohol teams to therapy - I have slowly gone through them all. 

In through my experience I decided to train as a mental health nurse and gain something positive out of my illness to help and support others in bridging the gap between the mental health services and their clients. It has been painful, feeling like you should take a side between the two whilst desperately trying to connect them both. 

I see the suffering that I once suffered, I see the terror on the faces of clients that I remember and I’ve regularly been told to leave the patient at home and come in as the future professional. I tried this and relapsed because I failed to separate them and got better when I realized that I shouldn’t have to. The client and the nurse comes hand in hand with me and sets me apart from other staff but gives me more insight with who truly matters - my patients. Which is why I will always support any movement in the NHS towards Peer Support as a recognized profession.

I was recently diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, which is on top of my other diagnoses of bipolar II disorder, ADHD and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. BPD affects four areas of my life:

1.  Emotional Dysregulation:

BPD is very exhausting and confusing to live with.  I’m never sure whether to trust my emotions, if they’re justified or if I’m just overreacting.  My moods are mostly always triggered by something in my environment, but if something good happens five minutes later I’ll immediately feel euphoric. Every emotion I feel is amplified; they can change at the drop of a hat and can last only minutes or hours. When I am in a severe crisis where I am experiencing intense emotions, I will sometimes dissociate to deal with it. It will feel as if the situation isn’t actually real and that I’m watching myself from outside of my body.

I have had difficult controlling my anger and have often succumbed to attacks of extreme rage - throwing things, screaming, crying, etc. It is usually very inappropriate for the situation and I can be very sarcastic and bitter.  It is during these episodes of rage that I am most likely to intentionally hurt myself. I am much more in control of this symptom now with the help of medication, but I still have my moments. I also usually feel very internally restless, like something is missing. I get bored extremely easily and sometimes feel like a hollow shell. I never have a sense of fulfillment.

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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.

Hello, my name is Leslie, and my husband has bipolar II disorder/borderline personality disorder. To the outside world, we are a typical family with ups and downs, behind closed doors, we are much more complicated and often tormented by this illness. My husband and I have been together for the better part of almost 19 years. I had a two year old son from my first marriage, and he had a three year old son (who we didn’t know was his until 1999). We married in 1998, had our first son together in 1999, and our second son in 2000. We were a young blended family on a roller coaster of major mood swings, fighting and confusion. I couldn’t understand why Jason would be laughing and relaxed one minute and without warning or explanation he would get irritated and lash out.

For years we fought and argued about his behaviors and what I perceived as a simple lack of self control. His drinking was much more prevalent and I had become very depressed, hopeless, and quite frankly I’d become a class A bitch. Oddly enough, neither of us wanted to give up, we always managed to find enough joy with each other and love for each other that we stayed together and kept trying despite all of pain, but we were continuing to cause severe damage to each other.

In 2004, I learned he’d been self medicating with drugs. This had been happening for a couple of years and I immediately grabbed hold of that as being the root cause of all of our problems. Not knowing where to turn, I reached out to his parents. Jason was lost and suicidal, I was angry and full of hurt and confusion. We went to see a dr and he evaluated Jason. He determined that Jason was not severe enough to be admitted to suicide watch but mentioned the possibility that Jason had bipolar disorder. Not knowing much about the illness, I began to research it and the symptoms fit Jason’s behavior to the letter, but neither of us knew what to do about it.

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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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