My name is Jennifer and I am a recovered mental illness survivor—

            I have endured severe mental illness for over half my life.  During that time, I suffered from clinical depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and borderline personality disorder.

            Due to the depression, my behaviors ranged from excessive crying to excessive sleeping to suicide attempts.  I felt feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness, and helplessness.  All I thought I wanted to do was die.   But in fact, what I really wanted was help with overcoming my severe sadness.

            During my manic states, I endured impulsive, spontaneous, and irresponsible behaviors.  I felt on top of world.  I felt excessive amounts of energy.  I had racing thoughts.  I had delusions of grandeur.  I’ll be honest.  It felt great to be so high, but it is also very dangerous.  Risky behaviors can lead to much endangerment of self and others.

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Everyone struggles with something in life. Some struggle for brief periods of time and some struggle every day. I belong to the some who struggle every day. Since I was 5 years old I have constantly struggled with mental illness. I have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, ADD, ADHD, PTSD, and attention deficit Disorder. My dad, step mother, and Step Father physically abused me for most of my life because they didn’t understand what I was going through and my Mother was the only person in my life to try to help me through everything I was dealing with. Unfortunately I did not trust anyone around me due to how I was treated at home and because I was constantly bullied at school because I was different. Eventually the abuse I was facing at my step fathers house led to me going into a state of shock and I tried to hurt my mother because I was so out of it and thought she was my step father. I was 15 at this point and was detained. 

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Enough is enough!  The challenge of living with a mental illness has struck me and many members of my family, female and male, and today, I am taking a stand. I will be their voice…for anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and more. I will not walk in shame and defeat for my head is lifted to the sky. I will not let society put us in a category, define us, or mark us as “crazy” or “half cracked”. We have to address mental illness in our global society and aim to defeat it like any other illness of the body. It has no perspective race, gender, or culture and it comes to steal the joy of living on this beautiful earth.

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So, since 2011 my older brother has been having symptoms but has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and ADHD, in my opinion psychosis. I’ve been to mental health court with him, tried several programs and various medications. Me and mother’s last resort is always the hospitalization. He needs therapy, he hasn’t been on meds in 9 months he was fine but not he decided to get back on meds but doesn’t take all of them. He’s an alcoholic, beer consumption everyday! He always blames me and my mother if he can’t find something he lost. He has angry issues, blast loud music and in his car I’m surprised neighbors don’t call the police for noise complaints. It’s exhausting going through this all. I can’t allow my oldest brother who also in a program to come over because my other brother thinks he steals his stuff which isn’t true. I can barely sleep most of the time, I sleep over my bf house just to get a rest, on top of that I’m my mother’s caregiver she has metastatic breast cancer. The stress is unbearable. Idk what to do anymore except deal with it as I been dealing with it sadly.

Hello, my name is Matthew.

I have a serious mental illness and the diagnosis is Bipolar disorder.

We all have our own story. Mine is how I went through school K-12 and always struggled with depression and anxiety but I never got the right treatment until my senior year of high school was falling apart.

I did graduate but it was more than getting to class on time, doing homework and studying for the next test. It was Bipolar 1… a serious and complicated illness. With words going around school that, I was falling apart like a monument that collapsed with no foundation. The foundation was not cemented it was my state of mind. A dark hole that comes quick, I went to Havenwick Mental Hospital.

I was ran a cross-country race, I was always a great runner since 10th grade. “Come on Matt speed up,” I finished with a bad time. Which was not me but my team treated it like it was. I was just dehydrated, which was true, but how about writing how you will run a race and do well in school the next day when you stay up until 3 am? Why, I was manic. Manic is less sleep more energy. (Superman) I felt like trash with a cherry on top.

Going back to 2005 when I was in kindergarten the alphabet was tough for me. The teachers most likely said he is hard on himself or he is slow. Ever since then I was hard on myself, but moving back to my senior year I was falling apart quickly and then started to not be as hard on myself once I received treatment at a mental hospital I felt happy and with peace to be in the same room as other people with mental illness. When I was in Havenwick Mental Hospital, I was thinking of my friends and people at my high school. Not as much as if I miss them, but the fact that the people in hospital with me did not take the small things for granted. Small things are like appreciation for one another.

Back at my high school it was you are a jerk get out of here you are a no buddy. Then I was rethinking my friends and being happy to talk to others that had a great appreciation of one another. Respect for one another. With respect comes a problem to connect about depression, anxiety, coping, medication, and other mental illness in a hospital room. I just think it ironic how the people that don’t realize they have it all but instead that blame other people for their problems. For the people in the hospital, it was just being happy to have shot at recovery. Ever since my recovery, I made a face with puzzle pieces each piece as a word that defines who I am. I made sure that I filled it all the way. To never looked back!

It took months maybe a year or two to feel very comfortable about being aware of mental illness. That’s what brought me to type this letter. Everyone has chances to somehow come out of your mental health problems. If not come out to feel somewhat relieved.

The treatment was more about faith than anything else faith that you have a shot to change for the better. Support groups are in many hospitals in the Metro Detroit Area. Just look on the web or a person that may know about mental health in general. If our problems were meant to be solved by ourselves we would not be speaking the same languages. Look what humans have done for thousands and thousands of years. Whether it was the next Empire or helping your neighbor down the street we have done it all. That’s what support is, its self help. What’s wrong with help, nothing. I have help. Great! “A man that faces his problems can teach someone else how to fight their problems, but not someone that runs away.”

Failure is just part of life, it’s learning from someone or your own past mistakes. A quote from Henry Ford the man that started the assembly line a line full of other people that work on different parts that help each other to achieve a goal that it’s hard but they made it look easy. “Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”- Henry Ford to this day still makes a tremendous impact on the auto industry and assembly lines in general. He also made a lot of mistakes in the process but learned from one another. He made jobs for people with severe mental illnesses. (Production line) Hope this letter helps someone in need of hope in their lives.

In 2004 my life changed. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I was twenty years old at the time, and I was a good student. I began feeling depressed and having memory issues. My grades began to slip. I knew something was wrong. I did a little research, and I concluded that I must have bipolar disorder. Mental illness runs in my family so I wasn’t scared to go to the mental health facility to seek help. Sure enough, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. It has been a difficult twelve years. I have had many jobs. I have acted erratic and gone years without working due to depression. I’m thirty-two now, and I am on a cocktail of medication that is beginning to work. Hopefully, I’ll be working soon. Remember to never give up hope.

I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder when I was near the age of four. At that time, I was one of the few children with such a severe case. My psychiatrist for almost a year went back and fourth diagnosing me from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. I was destined to be bipolar, my moms side of her family has mental problems. I was unfortunately the only sister who ended up with this mental illness. But what really pushed it over the already mentally breaking point? When I lived with my parents from up until I was shy of 4, was the abuse and neglect. My mom would drink and abuse. Get mad over nothing and abuse. I guarantee you, we had no such thing as food. And if there was any, it was beyond expired. I remember running to my neighbors houses, just to get away. Now, I was young when I left to live with my grandparents, but I just can’t forgive or forget things. My mom came home from a bar, married to another guy while married to my dad. So my mom left, my dad decided to truck drive, and my grandparents raised my sisters and I. Yes, to this day, we live with my grandparents. I honestly, have never met such a strong woman like my grandma. My grandma is my mom. My grandma was the one who sat there while I abused her, yelled at her, spit at her… She never gave up. She was the one who sat through psychiatrist appointments and made me talk, helped me get medication, helped me slowly get better. I used to bang my head on walls and floors. Why? I didn’t feel pain. But, I didn’t want to live. I was almost hospitalized twice, have taken and experimented with tons of medication to get me better, suffered through liver damage, plus the countless blood tests. I still to this day, almost 19 years old, suffer the state of life and mind. I will forever see a psychiatrist. I will forever take medication. Just please remember. That you aren’t alone. You are worth life. I know how it feels to fight demons that are beyond your mental capacity. I know how alone you feel. I understand the tears of not understanding half the things you do. I understand what anxiety and depression is. If I get too stressed, I have a panic attack on top of a bipolar episode. Trust me, I understand. You are beautiful, never forget that.

I was diagnosed with Manic Depression and Borderline Schizophrenia in 2011, and ever since then I have been advocating for mental illness. I was bullied in school because I was “different” from everyone else and I was always the quiet one who would sit by themselves at lunch and on the playgrounds, being pushed off the monkey bars and swinging by myself.

After years of being on medications, I finally was stabilized enough to carry on throughout whatever life throws at me without medication. With everything that has been said about mental health and the stigma that surrounds mental health. There is always hope and I am truly grateful that I am alive today. Unfortunately, I didn’t cope in healthy ways. I would always mix prescription medications and over the counter medications to hopefully make the pain go away, unfortunately, due to those actions, I almost died, many times. Looking back at everything, it was truly the darkest times of my life. It carried on for two consecutive years and I have scars to prove it. 

Always remember, even whenever it may seem like it’ll never go away, with all the pain that you go through in life, there is always a better and brighter side to life. I am truly honored and glad to still be alive, and advocating for those, such as myself who have had their voices taken away and untold stories being held it tearing you apart, because you are afraid to say anything because of how some people will treat you and shut you out like an outsider. Always remember that no matter what people say, You are beautiful and you are YOU. It’s okay to be YOU!

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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