The Public Should Thank Us: People Living With Mental Illness

Some weeks I walk out of a therapy session feeling split in two. Part of me keeps replaying Colorado and how foolishly I behaved there, how I burned through trust and lost people I cared about. The other part is just angry at everyone. My therapist and I started calling it the classic Susanna dilemma of 2014. The strange thing is that when I stop and notice where I actually am now and how I actually feel, I wouldn't trade any of it. Not if it meant giving up this version of my happiness.

I do most of my best thinking behind the wheel. You know how people say the good ideas arrive in the shower, or in a dream, or with the radio turned up loud on some long stretch of road? For me it's the driving. That's where the writing comes to me, where the advocacy reports I put together for the international organization I work with finally click into place.

Everybody has their 'why me' moment. There are people in our lives who seem to exist only to remind us how hopeless we are, or to point out exactly how we've failed them. Then there are the doctor's appointments, where the tally in the 'problems' column keeps climbing. Friends of mine have gone through treatment and come out with diagnosis after diagnosis, so many I lose count. I know people carrying six or seven separate disorders on paper. At some point you have to ask what any of it really means.

This next thought came to me while I had Mozart playing. People love to say a famous composer was bipolar, and the word falls out of mouths like a tape recorder nobody bothered to switch off. But if you actually dig into the academic work on Mozart, the psychoanalytic readings of his life and letters and the surviving records, you find something more careful: he 'might have been' bipolar, and the historical documents don't really support that diagnosis at all. If you want the dense version, there's the Peter Huguelet 2005 study, though I'd warn you off it. Long, dry, and I made the mistake of reading it at three in the morning.

Most days my mind circles back to my own situation, and if I let it settle into the darker groove it drags my mood down with it. We all feel things. We've all been hurt. For a long time I wanted to insist that my pain outweighed what my friends and family had been through. When I look closely at the last few years, though, I'm not always the one who got hurt worst. Sometimes the people around me carried more.

Mental illness is brutal. Watching a friend detonate a friendship through lying or cheating or whatever else the illness pushes them toward, that's a betrayal that cuts both people, the one who did it and the one it landed on.

Here is what hit me this morning. Society needs people like us, people who never asked for a mental illness, to be the ones who push it forward. We're the ones who might get the rest of the world to treat the mentally ill a little more like neighbors. In my head, that makes us part of history.

Plenty of us are hurting badly. Some have thought about quitting entirely. And still we're strong, which is something I couldn't see in myself until I got through the things that terrified me most. We might not feel ready to live alongside these so called 'mental health problems.' But underneath it, every one of us is willing, every one of us is fighting our own demons in our own way.

-Susan Page

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