Mental Health Awareness Week

This week is Mental Health Awareness Week.  I confess it's taken me all week to work out how I should comment on this - because I felt I should, but actually I'm not sure that there is a huge need for people to become aware of mental health issues - maybe I move in exceptionally sensitive circles, but pretty much everyone I know has had some kind of first hand experience of poor mental health, whether it's themself or a family member.  But then I thought a bit more, and realise that, despite the pages of what on a bad day I would consider self-indulgent rambling present on this blog, I don't talk much about my own mental health to the majority of people.  Most have a vague idea that I have had some struggles with it, some know the origins and a select group of unfortunate people have patiently stuck with me while I dredged the bottom of the barrel for anything that might help me to keep hold of a bit of hope that life might one day be worth living.  

But it's very, very rare that I talk about it in plain terms.  Why?  Is it stigma?  Well no, actually.  Mental health issues are considerably better understood now than even five years ago, and while one of the things I could conceivably be diagnosed with comes with a hefty dose of stigma even among psychology professionals, it isn't what keeps me quiet.  What stops me opening my mouth or putting words on paper or screen in any public sphere, is fear. Fear, mostly, of not being believed.  Of someone saying something that I may perceive as slightly dismissive, which I can then feed to the wolves of self-hatred who use it to torture me with the idea that it's my fault, that I have a choice over the way the chemicals in my brain work, and that I'm making a big deal of something that should never have been viewed as trauma.  Except it isn't my fault, I have no control over the way the receptors in my brain work, and I was a child when I was abused, physically, emotionally and sexually while coping with my mother's all-consuming illness. And I was barely more than a child when I experienced the incredibly traumatic sudden death of someone I loved who had finally given me the nurture and unconditional appreciation I had been searching for the 16 years previous. I hesitate to mention the various more recent triggers for the trauma response that has been ingrained, because really, how many slaps in the face can people believe someone to have had without on some level feeling there must be some exaggeration or at least some behaviour that invites such events?  Of course there are people who have had worse experiences, there is always someone better or worse off than you, but why should we censor ourselves for fear of sounding like one of life's Losers (in a TA sense, not a playground taunt), and feeling that undercurrent of suspicion?  Because it isn't really about stigma, it's about the inability of most people to handle the depth of another's pain, to sit with it and wholeheartedly believe in that person's reality.  Very rarely do those of us in the midst of mental illness expect or even want answers (in fact for myself I have sometimes been truly terrified of finding an answer and being well enough to fulfil my 'potential', but that's probably a whole other blog.).  What I would suspect from my own experience is just that we want to be heard, believed, and validated.  One of the most useful things someone recently said to me, when I related a difficult moment was simply 'shit, that must have hurt.' The same person also named what I'd gone through as a child as abuse, and trauma.  I haven't done that out loud yet, but here it is in writing.  I am saying it, and I believe me - and I would like others to be aware that what you see is not always the truth.    

There are two pictures at the bottom of this post.  There is 4.5 stone, 12 years and a lot of ups and downs in between them.  I'm pretty ill in both, but you probably wouldn't guess it if you talked to me at either of those points, and I certainly wouldn't have told you.  Thing is, shame and trauma and pain grow in the dark and die in the light , but only as long as they are gently and responsibly received by the people you choose to show. So that is what I would like to say about Mental Health Awareness Week - don't just be aware that people might not be ok - hear and believe what they say, and have the courage to sit with it, not try to make it better.  That is the greatest gift you could give me.