I have been a consumer of the mental health industry/services since the age of 14 (I am 20 now), when a psychiatrist diagnosed me with what he called “schizophrenia”. I have been administered a variety of psychotropic drugs ever since. The reccommendation I got from all the shrinks I consulted was to never mention anything related to my condition to anyone except for a few selected relatives.

I initially followed their advice, but reverse psychology gradually transformed this prohibition into a great temptation. I now practice the complete opposite conduct. It generates a small amount of gossip around my character, I suspect, and inhibits interactions with a few individuals (their initiative, not mine). But I have not entered public disgrace. I feel quite ok with my level interaction with other humans. Plus, my eccentric manners sometimes elicit attention in such a way that the fact that I take psychotropic medication does not evoke too many surprise.

A funny episode happened when a schoolmate asked me if I ‘was like, “psycho”‘. I said ‘hmm what do you mean… I take anti-psychotics, I dunno if that would mean I’m a “psycho”‘. He got surprised, and asked “but like, when you take it do you get all nuts, see dragons, swords and stuff…”. ‘That’s when I DON’T take it’, I said. Everyone around started laughing, I was a bit embarrassed but laughed too, and my schoolmate apologized saying he “was just asking” and I said it was okay. I don’t think he was wrong, nor the people who laughed at the whole situation. I would probably behave similarly if I hadn’t developed mental ilness.

I have been discriminated at times, other times I even bragged about my condition to a group of LSD (and other drugs) users by saying that they had to pay a lot of dough just to get sensations I can feel for free. In that respect, I was superior.

Overall, I am sort of a licensed lunatic in my school, besides being able to interact meaninfully with people at certain times (i.e, sometimes my opinions are taken for serious, it all depends on the way I display my attitude). I really have a lot more to say about this, but it’s getting a bit too long. I don’t mean to imply that this advice given by most shrinks is unfounded. In certain cases, it might protect the individual from serious cases of profesional or social discrimination.

I just decided to live my life this way. It’s a choice: either hide part of your true self for fear of other people’s irrational judgements (and which might harm you in certain cases) or live more connected to the truth. I chose the latter option.

The only ones I’m not honest with is my family. My parents think depression is a whiner’s disease. They love me but just don’t understand. So I keep away from the topic with them.

Cheers!

The Carnival of Healing is a weekly round-up of blogs across the Internet featuring information about healing, self empowerment, and spirituality. This week at About Holistic Healing I posted Six Steps From Dis-ease To Living Better which is a basic……

I really loved this article.

I recently gave up work due to bipolar and actually popped in to to my old workplace today just to say hi,

I’ve been very fortunate in that my colleagues have in the most part been supportive and I tend to use humour to “help them” deal with my answer to the inevitable “so how are you?”

But I wish I had been able to feel more open about it BEFORE I had my breakdown.

Funnily enough the more I am open with my diagnosis with people the more I have found they open up in turn about their own mental health.

We should all feel able to talk about these things. I hope over the years the stigma lessens.