Mental Health: It's All About Perspectives

I was working through my inbox the other day, answering notes from people at different organizations, writing out my take on a new medication here, a new app there. One of them lets college students track their mood from day to day right on a phone or tablet. Somewhere in the middle of typing a reply, a memory stopped me. Back before anyone put a name to what was happening in my head, I told myself I would never be cruel to someone with a mental health condition. And yet I still thought of those people as strange. If I'd passed someone clearly unwell on the sidewalk, I would not have stopped to help. I'd have been too afraid they might turn on me.

So there was kindness in me, somewhere underneath. I won't pretend otherwise. But if I'd known a person was mentally ill, I would have kept walking. Even a friend. If a friend had told me she had bipolar disorder or anything like it, my mind would have gone straight to 'what if,' to 'maybe there's a whole other version of her I haven't met.'

When the shooting happened in Aurora, Colorado, the reports said the gunman was probably bipolar. Later, when word spread that there was a shooter near my own college in Colorado, I didn't hesitate. I decided he must be bipolar too, out to kill as many people as he could. The picture in my head came from movies: Jack Nicholson in The Shining, Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Two conditions scared me above all others. Bipolar was one. Schizophrenia was the other.

The day a doctor told me I had bipolar disorder, I went down. I remember sliding to the floor while this young physician delivered the news. There was a silence. Then he walked out with a 'good luck, I hope you feel better.' That was it.

What I've learned since is this: once you stop fighting the illness every hour of every day, life turns out to be pretty good. That hit me only yesterday. If someone handed me my old life back, I'd be kidding myself to take it. I'd probably end up on the street, because I'd still be dodging the problems I knew needed attention. Looked at a certain way, all of it was supposed to happen. The life I have now is the one I actually wanted.

The only thing I ever really hoped to feel was that I counted for something here. My brain ran so hot that I never got the chance to know myself all the way through. I caught glimpses of who I was, nothing more. The day I swallowed my first dose of medication felt, at the time, like the worst day of my life. I thought I was watching my world shatter into a million pieces.

And here's what matters most about it. The private hell I'd lived in for most of my life was me walking in the shoes of exactly those people I'd been afraid of on the streets, the ones who couldn't get treatment or wouldn't take it.

When I think about saying something now, anything, about a mental health condition, my rule is simple: think before you speak. People living with these conditions, like plenty of other groups, get a steady stream of images that paint them wrong. Hardly anyone bothers to show mental illness as it really is. It isn't a single bad afternoon. For most of us it's a daily fight.

I carry a diagnosis I once filed under 'the thing mass shooters have.' From the inside I can see how hard it is to blend in, how hard it is to simply be yourself, and harder still to get through a life shaped by mental illness, whether a doctor has named it yet or not. Not knowing may feel easier for a while. But reading up, learning what these conditions actually are, could save a life. It might also stretch your heart wider than it already is.

- Susan Page