The Definition of “Scundered”.

Sometimes I feel this stuff needs to be said. Well, I do tonight due to a few recent e-mails. You can file this post under, “Things that make you go, “what?” if you like.

This is the title me and my sister Paula came up with today for my imaginary autobiography. She said I should interview her and my siblings about all the hilarious times I’ve been ravingly psychotic and said/believed/saw/heard rather outlandish things. The thought of it causes me to cover my face and wail, “I am so scundered!”

For those who you who don’t speak Northern Irish, “scundered” is the colloquial term for mortal embarrassment.

You might consider me what I like to call a “beard rubber”. Sage, thoughtful, with static electricity crackling between the inquisitive fingers that lovingly caress hairy facial adornments. Glasses perched on the nose, a querying eyebrow raised. I write you missives extoling the virtues of humour, openess and directionless, cathartic ranting. I’m not being “brave” when I discuss my own mental hilarity in this blog, I’m just saying what I see, saying what I feel. I don’t really believe in bravery.

I denied the fact that I had manic depression until really recently. I ignored it, despite glaring evidence that it was there. I refused treatment, medication, counselling, the works.

I truly believe that mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of. I truly believe that having a mental illness does not make you a better or worse person than somebody who does not have a mental illness.

I want to combat the shame and to encourage people with mental illness to come out of the closet (or wherever we’re supposed to live, I don’t know, the belltowers, the asylums, the gutters) and say that it’s alright to have a mental illness. It’s just like having a physical illness.

I believe in this. And yet…

Sometimes I am truly ashamed of myself for having mental illness. Sometimes I truly believe that I am a worse person than others because I have a mental illness.

I don’t like this about myself. But it’s a honey trap, and it beckons coyly to the insecure. And I am insecure; I’m a twenty two year old woman who grew up not knowing if both of her parents would be alive the next morning. I was raised on suicide notes and alcoholism.

I know that I am treated differently because I have a mental illness. Being open about it has caused me problems. I strongly suspect that the existence of this blog will cause me problems in the future. And this makes me want to hide it.

I’ve been treated differently by my employers. I’ve been dismissed from jobs because of it. I’ve had people comment on this blog questioning the very existence of my illness, which would not happen to someone who had a long standing, debilitating physical condition.

There is a pressure, if you’re open about having mental illness, to somehow prove it. I can prove it, my medical records confirm everything that I discuss here. I am on an Enhanced CPA because it is the opinion of various consultant psychiatrists, doctors and nurses, and not me, that manic depression is a severe illness and that I suffer from this severe illness. But that wouldn’t be enough. Because mental illness isn’t really real anyway, psychiatrists are just drug-pushers, “mental illness” is a term applied to a loose category of symptoms, etc, etc. So medical records mean nothing.

You must display it somehow. Wear your badge. Act crazily. Dribble some.

There is the prevailing attitude that people with mental illness just can’t “hack life” and that they are fakers and attention seekers. Those who are off work and on benefits because of mental illness are widely regarded as malingerers and scroungers. “Just get over it and work” is the consensus oft quoted to me. It isn’t that bad. Your mental illness isn’t that bad because you can write a blog. Your mental illness isn’t that bad because you dress yourself. There are stereotypes regarding mental illness that just do not exist, would not be allowed to exist, for most physical illnesses. If you’re mentally ill, you must be:

• Rocking back and forth in a corner with drool emanating cheerfully from your terrified jowls
• Manically laughing as you toss all your clothes out the window
• So depressed that you can’t move a muscle
• A murderer
• Believing that you’re the Queen, or something.

Schizophrenia is generally regarded as the “serious” mental illness. The reason why is because it encompasses what people believe to be mental illness; psychosis and personal neglect. It is also generally (and very wrongly) seen as the “crazy” illness, with people mistakenly believing that it is violent, and it carries its own sets of stigma and social ignorance.

Depression is generally regarded as the non-serious mental illness. The reason why is because it is common. This is laughable since severe depression has a high suicide rate.

Manic depression can sort of fall in between the two. As its name suggests, it has the depression down. It’s not all that similar to schizophrenia, but it’s not completely dissimilar either. For example, my experience of suffering from manic depression has included episodes of psychosis. That covers everything from excessive paranoia (for example, me believing that there were beings in my flat which meant to harm me, thinking I was being followed, having “delusions of reference”) to all-out visual and auditory hallucinations. It has also included periods of catatonic depression, when I have been mute and unmoving, which has led to me neglecting to eat, get washed, dressed and all that jazz. Mental illness can overlap. An example is that, while pursuing my medical records, a psychiatrist first commented, “So, she has schizoaffective disorder?” (which is having both the symptoms of schizophrenia and manic depression). If he’d had a cursory glance and ignored some symptoms, he could easily have asked, “So, she has depression?” And this is why some people are misdiagnosed with schizophrenia or depression when they, in fact, have manic depression.

But schizophrenia, manic depression, depression, anxiety, panic, OCD, BDD, personality disorders, all mental disorders are real.

Although I am not a rocking-back-and-forth kind of girl, I have suffered from severe mental illness. I’ve thrown those clothes out the window. I’ve been so depressed that I couldn’t move or speak for weeks on end. And it’s ongoing. I may not have those symptoms now, but I have done, and most likely will do again. I have other symptoms while, as not as serious, are still difficult to live with.

I’m not a stereotype. I come across, I know, as mostly rational and of sound mind. I put effort into my writing here to convey that. I know some of you think I’m funny and talented, and that is lovely, believe me. It might be difficult, in this 15-30 minute window that you see here, to believe that I have mental illness. But I do have a mental illness. And it affects me every single day. It is not a “weakness” on my behalf. I struggle to control the symptoms I suffer from. My moods, they pretty much dictate everything. It’s not “allowing” it too; it’s just how it goes. The fruits of my labour that you so sweetly consume are heavily medicated, very-much-a-reserved-lifestyle, balancing act, half-hour of feeling somewhat capable, living with manic depression. And there is a wiiiide spectrum of how severe the illness actually is. The fact that I get up in the morning does not dismiss my past experiences and does not dictate my future ones. At the end of the day, I still plough on in search of “normality”, and I take a handful of medication just in order to conduct rational conversations and to not slip into psychotic behaviour. I have epically shit memory because of it, to the point where I really don’t recall most of my life.

I’m hammering the point home here, but it is true.

This opposition, this feeling that you’re somehow not really ill because you’re taught that really ill looks different adds to a sense of shame. The feeling of being attacked and tarred as a workshy scrounger, when you have worked, struggled to work then been told medically that you cannot and shouldn’t work for the time being, adds to a sense of shame. The having to painstakingly prove that you’re ill adds to a sense of shame. Taking medication just to function adds to a sense of shame. Of being afraid of things that wouldn’t faze most people. Of pulling your hair out in frustration because you just can’t communicate. You can’t tell anybody what going on in your head because it makes you so ashamed that you just don’t work properly. A sense of weakness. A sense of “what if they’re right about me? What if I am just a weak person?” I mean, surely a strong person wouldn’t become so depressed for no reason? Surely a strong person wouldn’t sometimes be so paranoid that they can’t leave their flat? Sometimes so paranoid that they can’t stay in their flat? Surely a strong person wouldn’t have these mood swings, wouldn’t have them affect their life so much?

I do get ashamed. Sometimes, I want to delete this blog so that I can erase all evidence that I have manic depression. It is something I seriously consider often, and something I probably would have done in the throes of shame if I did not have so many comments saying that this blog helps people. I fantasise about flinging my medication in the Thames, of scratching out the dates for my CPN appointments forever, of walking into fantastic jobs and performing really brilliantly and not being affected by mental illness. Of completely negating its existence.

I periodically private posts in fits of shame. I privated a lot of posts about Body Dysmorphic Disorder because I felt ashamed that what I considered revolting vanity affected me so; even when Rob, who knows me better than anyone, understands that it’s not vanity, it is something real that I often cannot cope with. Sometimes I cry with shame. I cry because sometimes I feel that mental illness rawly exposes my incapability and faults. I cry because I got psychotic, I tried to kill myself, because I did go manic, not once, not twice, but dozens of times, that I have said, seen and believed things that people knew were not true but I did not know, that I get mixed episodes that I can’t fathom nor heal, that I have losts jobs and homes because of this illness, lost friendships, that I do get depressed and hypomanic, and there is no reason why, that every day there is a point when I want to scream because I hate the taste of the medications, I hate when I am depressed but my thoughts race, I hate how it affects the people I love, I hate that I am not consistent and I bitterly hate that, for everything I denied, for everything I tried to do and hide, for everything I avoided, the end result is that I still have manic depression and no amount of willpower or wishing makes it go away. I cry because I am afraid of the future, of those black tunnels of insanity opening up again, of being lost in them.

Sometimes I want to contritely concede to those who e-mail me saying that mental illness isn’t real. That if I were a better person I would not be ill. That if I was stronger I wouldn’t need to take medication or have treatment. That of course I can work, I mean, I write a blog, don’t I? Surely people with illnesses don’t write blogs? How could they, how could life go on around it? And all those failures, all those times of being fired, of being hospitalised, of being pleaded with and begged to get help were just weaknesses that I can imagine away. Sometimes I believe that.

What I would rather believe is that getting help for my illness and that acknowledging that, yep, it’s there, and yep, it’s a part of me, of facing up to its realities, however grim and frustrating is the strong thing I do, not the weak thing. What I would rather believe is that I am strong for confronting the uncomfortable, humilating and scundering truths of my behaviour, past and present. That understanding, if not quite embracing, my illness (I will never be one of those people who wear the, “I don’t suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!” t-shirts), attending the appointments, trying to get well and attempting, in some way, to encourage a glimmer of empathy and enlightenment in whomever stumbles across this blog, is a Good Thing. Accepting that I have completely fucked up things when I’ve been really manic or depressed. And that I fucked things up mostly because I had no idea I was manic, had no idea that my behaviour and moods were anything out of the ordinary.

That is what I would rather believe about myself. What I would rather believe is the old maxim; it is just rotten luck that I was born with manic depression. What I would rather believe, all the time, is what, in my sound mind, I do believe. That it’s alright to have mental illness. Really, it is. And that we are bullshitting ourselves if we think that willpower alone will make it go away forever.

I don’t want you to ever think of me as a victim, because I don’t think of myself as one, and I very much hope that I don’t convey the impression that I believe I am. I may bang on about how severe my illness is, but it’s to prove the point that it has been but I am still here to tell you about it. Believe me, I am very aware indeed that I could have it much worse. I don’t want you to think of yourself as a victim, either. Nothing good comes of thinking that way. So sneak your fingers through mine, even if like me you sometimes feel ashamed and contrite, and tell those who don’t believe that mental illness is real to piss off.

Life does go on around mental illness.