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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When I found out I had a mental illness, it was already so bad. I had tried to commit suicide twice and already got addicted to self harm. I even used prescription drugs to overdose. I got diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety. I was out on this medication that made me hallucinate and my doctor would not take me off of it. I switched doctor’s and now I am on my 5th medication and I have to take a sleep medication, also.

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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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*TRIGGER WARNING*

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*TW: mentions self harm, suicide, and abuse*

When I was in 4th grade, I had my first panic attack. I remember watching the video to “The Black Parade” by My Chemical Romance and soon thereafter I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was going to die. In the car on the way to my friends sister’s volleyball game, all I could do was sit there and shake. I soon broke down crying and couldn’t breathe and the parents dropped me off right away. I burst through the front door of my house and fell to my knees gasping for air but nothing was happening- I was about to die. My dad came rushing into the room and had never seen me act this way. Another time, I was on a ski trip about a month after and while I was driving I felt an intense pain in my chest,like my heart was physically snapping in two. All I remember was drinking orange juice and the next thing I knew my parents had to pull the car over. I know this isn’t true, but overtime the setting was on the side of a mountain, even though we were in the city. We finished the drive and the rest of the trip was normal until that night I was having this same problem. My heart was pounding out of my chest like I had just ran 5 miles even though I hadn’t even left the house in over 3 hours. My whole entire family started freaking out. I was sent to the emergency room where I stayed for a few hours and after my labs came back, the doctors told me everything was fine. After that day I dealt with panic attacks sometimes twice a week with that impact. 

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Hello.  We all can live a great, purposeful life managing Bipolar Condition or any mental health situations. 

The social stigma of mental illness used to bother me to no end…and contribute to my problems!  I’m over that now, but I prefer to call it Bipolar Condition vs. “Disorder”.  I also prefer to discuss Mental Health vs. “Illness”.

My story in general: 

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I am currently 7 weeks pregant and bipolar. I am a mother of 1 daughter and a wife to my husband who we have been together for 7 years. I am a  POC and identified as queer. I am also a survivor of domestic violence, child abuse and self harm. I am currently a photographer who uses this as a platform to Express my humanitarian efforts with self love, mental health and civil rights. I want to be a self advocator of mental health for not only myself but for my loves ones and for my community.  I am currently working a photography project that will highlight the ups and downs of being pregant and dealing with a mental illness. I want to show others that we are human beings and have wishes and needs just like everyone else but our brains are wired differently. I plan to become a photography teacher to teach 6th grade through 12th grade and also be one of the main pioneers to make it a priority in fashion and beauty advertisements to eliminate photoshop and to have an inclusive clientele as models that reflect the real world. 

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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I was recently at a dinner with two friends, when we began discussing mental illness and mental health treatment.

All three of us have openly had periods of struggle with both depression and anxiety, but we all had very different takes on treatment, particularly in regards to antidepressants.

“I wouldn’t go on them,” said the first friend.

“I would go on them, but just until I feel better,” said the second.

My take was the opposite: I have been taking antidepressants on and off my entire life, and since deciding to take them consistently nearly three years ago, my life has turned around. I plan to be on them forever.

Conversations like this are not uncommon. When it comes to mental health issues, opinions are often polarized and strongly held.

I understand that antidepressants are not for everyone; many people are fortunate in not suffering from mental illness, and even many of those who do would prefer to have medication be their last resort.

For me, medication is a part of a more comprehensive treatment plan to avoid falling back into the throes of the major depression that I know always lingers beneath the surface of my delicately balanced equilibrium.

I remember what it feels like to be unwell.

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(tw/cw: self harm, suicide, drug use, sexual abuse, rape, blood mention)

My name is Goe, which is pronounced like the name Joe, and I will be 24 in thirteen days. 

I was sitting in one of my regular 12 step meetings last night, looking down at my arm. On my left arm, among many thin white scars are two pepperoni sized skin grafts. About ten years ago, I was sitting in my bedroom, high on painkillers that I had taken from my grandmother’s safe down the hall, burning my arm with an open flame. I did not feel anything, physically and emotionally. I had just recently started using drugs, but I had a relationship with self harm that was already two years old. I was woken up very early in the morning by several firemen who carried me to the ambulance outside in the driveway, and I was checked into the children’s psychiatric ward on the top floor of the Children’s Hospital a couple of cities away. I was hyperventilating in the intake room, scared out of my mind of what was going to happen to me. There at the hospital, the doctor’s surgically placed skin grafts from my thigh onto the self inflicted third degree burns on my arm. Upon release from the hospital about two weeks later, I did not stop self harming or my drug use. Although I was angry at my grandparents, the nurses, the doctors, and the rest of the world, I will always remember my counselor at the outpatient facility I attended after my hospitalization. He told me that he could see me, one day, driving a convertible down the freeway, happy, with my hair blowing in the wind. I thought that was so beautiful, and it gave me the tiniest little moment of hope that I could live in a reality other than the one I was in.

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