A Mental Health New Year's Resolution

So many people stay quiet about what they go through with mental illness. The question I keep coming back to is how we get more of them to speak up, and how we chip away at the stigma. I am twenty three. I spent the first two and a half years of college in Colorado before I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. A lot of the friends I made there stopped talking to me after that, and in a strange way I get it, given what I did to stay alive.

To cope with mood swings and the suicidal thoughts I had carried since elementary school, I lied. I built online profiles and invented characters, using them to convince friends and family that I was someone I was not. I know how that sounds. Crazy, even. But I also know plenty of other people have done the same or worse to survive, because society mostly does not know how to sit with someone who is terrified about what is happening in their own head.

The first time I wanted to tell my story, my parents flatly said no, and I am glad they did. Back then I wanted to shout my problems at everyone and basically punch every person in the country for not making room for a disorder I was only beginning to understand myself. I did write a book. I got it published. It did not make much money, which I never expected it to, and looking back I am relieved it flopped, because the book was terrible. It was full of complaints and details that had no business being there if I wanted it to actually speak for other people living through mental illness or standing next to someone who was.

Telling my story has never really frightened me. By the time I was diagnosed I had already made about every mistake a person can make while undiagnosed, so there was nothing left to protect. Hiding the diagnosis would only have gotten me the same reaction people already had when they learned I had been lying uncontrollably, and the lying was never anything but a way to manage the mood changes. My family has not loved me going public. They worry I will get hurt again. What they miss is that keeping it inside hurts more.

My parents once told me I did not have a story worth telling, and that set me on fire. I knew they were wrong. But the books we had all been reading to educate ourselves were written by famous psychologists, actors, diplomats, polished young people and their parents, people who seemed to live on a level we could only picture from a distance. I kept measuring my third-year-college-dropout self against them, and I kept coming up short even though I knew I could reach readers and listeners too.

Everyone has a story, because everyone has fought something. You are not human if you have not. The hard part about telling the story of how mental illness touched your life is that you have to write or speak to an audience, and that is a lot harder than it sounds. I learned it the slow way. At the start my voice landed nowhere. I mailed pieces to local writers and institutions and got back polite notes calling me a kind young woman whose writing was not right for their readers.

That pushed me toward advocacy, though the only times I found the nerve to apply were when my family was on my case or when I had just lost another friend over the illness. Somewhere in there I understood why speaking had never scared me. I was a person like anyone else, and I was watching friends and relatives walk away over a diagnosis I never asked for. The things that drove them off were things I would own completely if I had done them in my right mind. But I did not. My brain was getting sicker as I got older, and those choices came out of that.

Here is how it felt. Imagine waking up naked in the Arctic as the captain of a boat, realizing the other passengers are dead because you fell asleep and hit an iceberg. You know you are about to freeze, and you know you would have lived if someone had shaken you awake, or if you had never dozed off at all.

I understand that many people are stuck in places where they cannot say a word about mental health. Some would be disowned for it. The illness flattens a lot of people, and more of them seem willing to stay flattened than to reach for help. I suspect a huge number want to speak and are too afraid, and I cannot blame them. Still, we all deserve the life we want before we die. We deserve to chase what we are after and to prove that a diagnosis does not cancel out what we can give.

The stigma around mental illness and disability is costing us real lives, lives that could have offered inventive, creative, loving, never-before-heard things to the rest of us, maybe even things the whole species would have needed someday. We will never know, because we keep writing off a group of people who, given room to breathe and speak and look at what living actually offers, would remind the rest of the world how good it can be. When people put the mentally ill down, they drive genuinely extraordinary people into the dark, where they try to stay unseen. We lose the best in them over nothing but a label.

If you are reading this and you feel the world taking the best of you because of that stigma, I want you to become an advocate, or write to a local paper or magazine under a pen name and say what you think. There are millions out there, probably billions, who could use your voice. I found that out for myself. My hope is that in 2015 the voices come out of the woodwork and refuse to hide. Let it be the year we stand together and say this out loud.

Sometimes you have to act for your own sake. You have to take care of yourself even when it means letting down people who love you. I know how awful that sounds. I have lived it, and speaking out turned out to be the thing I had been looking for when I was looking for a way to be happy. - Susan Page