IT'S NOT WEAK TO SPEAK | MENTAL HEALTH AWARENESS WEEK | BLOGMAS DAY 6

Hi there!

Welcome to blogmas day 6, but today I'm kinda going to be breaking up the Christmas trend and make room for something else. This week, is Mental Health Awareness Week, and as I myself suffer from a so called 'mental illness', and I know people who do, I wanted to say something about it.

I'm telling you now, this is going to be a pretty long post, but I would very much appreciate it if you'd read it, because this topic is so important to me.

To the world I want to say is that mental health is important, but not necessary. People with mental illnesses are not incapable of having a good life. It's a luxury. An extra. And I find it ridiculous that people who do not have that extra are being labeled most of the time as 'crazy'. It is ridiculous that they feel too afraid or embarrassed to talk about it and ask for help. Mental health is a serious issue in today's world, and I don't understand why we put it aside as 'their problem', 'the crazies' or 'not as important as other things'. I think we all have to come to the conclusion that people with mental illnesses aren't crazy. Their brain doesn't work the same way as ours, but so what? It shouldn't be a reason for us to label them as 'incapable'. Funny thing is that we all at a certain point in our lives, will be dealing with mental disorders. You might think, nah, I'm not crazy. But the most common mental disorder is depression. Right now, depression affects about 400 million people around the world. 400 million. That is (400.000.000 : 9.000.000.000 x 100% = ) 4.45% of the world population. And several studies suggest that that number is not going to stop growing. Dementia is also a mental disorder, as well as PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) and anxiety.
Now I'm not an expert on mental illnesses, although I would like to be, so I'm not going to pretend I am. But the things I do know, are mainly on depression and anxiety. Why, you may ask? Because I've suffered from both. And, from my experience, a mental disorder rules your life. It makes decisions for you, it decides wether or not you eat dinner tonight, it can even decide wether or not you make friends and maintain relationships.

Firstly, depression. Like many mental disorders, depression comes in many forms and sizes. It can start for no apparent reason, or for a reason that is perfectly clear. To me, I couldn't exactly explain why I was feeling so down, I could just say that I was. I could. But I didn't. And that is another thing that annoys me about people that judge. They judge like it's our fault that we're feeling this way. 'Just come forward'. 'Just talk about it'. 'It's his own fault, why didn't he talk to us?' I'm not going to give you a lecture about how you should go up to people of whom you think they might be depressed and try to talk to them and get them help etcetera etcetera, because I don't think you should. They are the ones that should seek help and talk to you, but I also want to make you understand that it's not that easy. In fact, it's extremely hard to have courage and actually take that step to talk to someone close to you and ask for help. Because many people think that they will be judged - as always - and are too afraid because they think they will be humiliated even more than they already feel. Or at least I did. I found it impossible to go up to my best friend and say: 'Hey, I need help.' I know now, that if I had, she would have helped me and I would have gotten better before things went further down the drain. I had written hundreds of notes on which I explained how I felt and on which I asked for help, but all of them went straight in the fire, instead of to someone else. I knew exactly what I wanted to say, but when push came to shove, it was impossible. Even when my best friend found out because she had seen my scars when I wasn't paying attention to my sleeve, I found it so hard to talk about it. And even now, as I'm typing this, I'm struggling to withhold myself from pressing the 'backspace' button until I'm once again staring at a white page. It's just carved into me so deep - literally - and writing about it seems wrong, although I do really want to let you know about this because it's so damn important. See, even now, two years later - and I'm doing absolutely fine - I'm still struggling with the aftermath of depression.

Though explaining depression is terribly hard and very near impossible, I have one explanation that I always use and it seems to give people a slight idea of what I went through. Depression is like this little black blob on your shoulder that whispers bad things about you in your ear. Things like 'you're stupid' and 'you can't do anything right'. If you listen to it, and grow to believe it, it grows and grows and it's weight will start bothering you. At one point, it'll be weighing you down and every step you take, you drag it alongside you, and it gets stronger and more powerful and more convincing and it just keeps growing. It keeps growing until at some point it fills your entire sight. You are blinded by your own little devil. It kind of forms a bubble around you that separates you from the outside and changes everything that happens outside into something bad. It's like a filter that bends reality. It's difficult to explain and actually find the right words, but I hope I did a fairly good job and that you kind of have a faint idea now.

Then, anxiety. The phenomenon anxiety and panic attacks is fairly new to me. About eight months ago, I had a massive panic attack, which got even worse because it was the first time and I had no idea what the heck was going on. Crying, troubled breathing, screaming, slamming doors, every negative emotion possible was all mixed into one big package and just ripped my mind out of my head. I couldn't think clearly, my whole head was filled with this one big problem that I had. I didn't calm down until my dad had found a solution to the Massive Problem - which was more of a postponement to be honest. After that day, MP's kept coming, and when it had come to the point where I had panic attacks on a weekly basis, my parents decided to take me to see a psychologist. There has never been an official diagnosis, and my mum refuses to call my psychologist a psychologist - she calls her my 'coach' - but even without official papers, we're pretty certain that I have anxiety. The panic attack part seems too obvious too adress. Ever since that day, I've been going to see my psychologist every two weeks, and she has helped me a lot. She gives me breathing exercises, we make escape plans, and we try to get to the core of the panic attacks to eventually prevent them from happening. And in those six months that I've been going, I have made a lot of progress. I now know what to do when I feel a panic attack coming on, and the frequency of the PA's as gone down to one per month, if I'm lucky one per two months. The last mini PA I've had was three weeks ago. And that makes me incredibly happy. Because I now realise that talking to someone and asking for help is the best thing you can do for yourself when your struggling with either your emotions or something else.

And to the people out there who suffer from a mental illness, I would like to say exactly what is in the title of this blogpost. It's not weak to speak. You're not doing yourself or anyone else a favour when you keep quiet about what's bothering you. You're not helping yourself make it better in doing so. You have to talk to somebody. Let them know. There's nothing wrong with being mentally ill, even though so many people act like there is. And, above all, it's not your fault that your brain doesn't work exactly the way it should, and it doesn't make you any less human or worthy or capable. If anything, it makes you special. Would you be the person you are today without your mental illness? No. So wether that's positive or negative, it's a part of you, and it will be for a long time, so the best thing you can do is embrace it, talk about it, and find ways to make it better. Or more bearable, or whatever phrase you want to use there. If you suffer from an illness of which there is a way out, like depression, seek help. If you suffer from an illness of which there isn't exactly a way out, like paranoid schizofrenia, seek help. I didn't go to anyone to talk when I was depressed because I personally thought that I was exaggerating and it wasn't at all that bad and that there's people who have it worse and they'll not take me seriously blah blah blah. The huge black depression blob was keeping me from seeking help to get exactly that blob away. And that's a weird vicious circle. A disastrous one. I thought that even my friends would think I was exaggerating and just put me aside as a drama queen and an attention seeker. The opposite was true. When they saw my scars, they were extremely worried about me, tried to get me to get help, but I didn't need help anymore, because just that, the fact that my friends reacted totally different than I had expected, gave me enough courage to think that maybe life isn't so bad after all, and start the long difficult climb out of that absorbing black hole that I'd fallen into. It gave me insight to a possibility. One I had never even thought of before that moment. The possibility that this little black depression blob was wrong. About me. About my feelings. About my being stupid. About everything. And that possibility gave me the courage to prick through the massive I-make-everything-your-fault-filter-bubble that the blob had formed around me. And that, ladies and gentlemen, very possibly saved my life.

So talk.

To your mum, your dad, your best friend, your GP or psychologist - anything you say to them is confidential, so they can't say anything to anyone -, your boyfriend or girlfriend or even to a total stranger. Practise on your teddybear, for all I care. But get it out there. Don't keep it cropped inside. I know that's the easiest thing to do and that speaking up is so, so difficult, but believe me, it's not impossible. And it will pay off.

There's one last thing I want to say before I'm going to leave you to it, and that is that this is the first time I have said anything like this to another person than my best friend. I have never spoken about my depression as open as this before, and I'm quite scared. So please, if you have an opinion, feel free to post it in the comment section below, but don't do it in a way that you become that little black depression blob on my shoulder. If our opinions differ, I can have a discussion with you, but not if you start making wild accusations on me or anyone else. I would very much appreciate it if we could keep it mature.

Thank you for reading this.

Love,
Rosaly