For those of you who have been regular readers of my blog, you will be aware that I have spoken around the country regarding mental illness and how those struggling with it are treated.
For those of you who are new here, go and read my first post. The summation of which is I use to be very mentally unwell. Now I am not.
Well, in all fairness my life has been a little more complicated than that. But the reality is that I once was a patient in psych wards and now I am a well functioning, healthy member of society.
As Sheldon Cooper from Big Bang Theory puts it "I am not crazy, my mother had me tested!"
Because of my history with mental illness I am a little bit worried any time I have a really down day ("Am I getting depressed?") or when I realise that one of my memories might not be 'real'.
That's right, you read that correctly.
Sometimes my mind likes to play tricks on me. Or at least it use to. When this use to happen it would invent scenarios and people and places in a way that was basically as real to me as reality.
What this means is I have memories of things that never happened but, and this is key, affect me the same way and amount that my 'real' memories do.
Along with this little Matrix-esque mind bender for you, the medication I use to have to take by the bucket load means that my understanding of events in my past can be a little skewed. So events that I thought happened right after the other might be years apart, or happened the other way round. There are also huge chunks of my memory that are just not there. I read through my journals now (which I have kept since I was twelve) and don't recognise events or people that I apparently was hugely impacted by.
What this means for me is that my life history can be a huge tangle of crap covered, arsenic laced, memory string. I find a loose end, give it a tug, and the whole thing can unravel pretty quickly (I regularly thank God that I had the foresight to keep a journal. It has really helped me piece things together).
What this means for people close to me is that this process of discovering the truth of things that happened can be a very painful process. I can remember horrible things done to me that people claim never happened. How can I prove that it did if the other people involved say it didn't happen? Are they telling the truth or covering the ass?
It also means that those more horrible memories that have had a hugely traumatic impact on my life may not actually be true. And that is a very hard pill to swallow. Some of these memories have shaped my reactions to and relationships with people. Some of these memories have taken me to counsellors and psychologists. Some of them have shaped who I am, for better or worse.
And yet they may have never happened.
Despite what this means for me, for the people I love who are impacted by these memories, it can mean the destruction of our relationship. They (understandably) don't want to trawl through dark memories that they do not view as relevant. Whereas I NEED to trawl through them to determine what is relevant.
Some people refuse to walk this road with me, and I really can't blame them.
What I really want to educate people about, especially those who know and/or care for people with mental illness, is that the things that happen in our minds are as important/impacting to our lives as anything that happens outside of our head; perhaps even more so in some respects. These things can't be refuted or proven, but they shape the way we live, think, love, and fear. And this doesn't stop if the illness goes away.
Take for an example someone who was abused as a kid. This memory will shape them throughout their lives. Perhaps they will overcome and be a survivor who takes control of their lives. Or perhaps they will spiral into the role of the victim and live a life of pain and destruction. Either way, the event shaped them.
Now, imagine that the event of sexual abuse had been hallucinated. Does this make it any less real to the person? If it is a vivid hallucination, there is often no way to tell between the image and reality. They look the same, and feel the same. And they have the same affect on their life.
But mental health patients don't often receive counselling or ongoing support for things that others believe they hallucinated. This means that these significant events in a persons life may never get addressed. They will not receive specialized help for this issue. Basically, a person who has been impacted by child abuse (even though imagined) will remain untreated for this.
I know this is hard to comprehend. It is hard to explain. It is hard to make people understand how real these hallucinations can be, or how devastating medication can be on the memory of a person.
But what needs to be known by people who may (God willing) never experience this mental mind-screw, is that these memories need to be acknowledged and addressed. People with mental health issues need to be talked to, listened to, and really heard. If they are taken seriously as people who have pain that needs to be acknowledged then maybe we will all be one step closer to not ostracizing and ignoring the weakest of our society.
So get out there and start listening people!
