I was diagnosed bipolar over a decade ago, when a friend’s suicide made me suddenly aware that—instead of mourning the loss of him like everyone else around me—I was jealous that he actually killed himself … and I’d been living in a state of just-under-the-radar suicidal ideation for as far back as I could remember. When fantasizing about when and how to kill yourself is your everyday normal, it doesn’t raise any interior red flags until something jolts you into the objectivity you need to stand outside your head and realize that you have a problem. A very serious problem. So going on nothing more than the foggy, horrifying, embarrassing realization that I had this problem, I wandered into what would prove to be a long, frustrating, flying-blind journey to erase—or learn how to manage—the crashing malfunctions in my poorly wired head.
As with most people living with mental illnesses, I’ve been to hell and back many times trying to figure out the magic cocktail of therapists and therapies and medications I need to achieve some sense of normalcy. And since there’s no basic training on what to look for or how to find a competent, ethical, moral mental-health doctor—especially when you’re yet-undiagnosed mentally ill—I stumbled into some even deeper horrors before I finally found a doctor who knew what she was doing and who had my overall health and best interests at heart.
So here I am with my fancy green-and-white Mental Health Awareness Month graphic and my list of topics to cover, and if you’re interested I hope I can give you something useful and meaningful to know this month whether you’re living with a mental illness, caring for someone with a mental illness, or just looking to understand more about the roller coasters lurching in and out of Mental Illness Land.
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