The Reality: Living With Mental Illness Sucks!

When I was first diagnosed bipolar, I felt such a sense of relief to know what was wrong with me.There was a name to it and I could recover and get better. Even with the occasional relapse,I know that I will improve. I have found that a have more patience when well, that I can understand others from a different perspective. The disease sucks at times, but there is a lot more to be learned as I live each day.

Hi Natalie,
I am very impressed with the content of your blogs. I am writing about blame, shame, stigma, discrimination and am trying to get people to join me in an effort to lessen the stigma.
May I use your blog entry posted on April2,2012 'Mental Illness, Stereotypes and Stigma?" Of course I will introduce you and say that I found this on your blog.
I would also like to invite you to write a blog for my website ... see the website above.
I often wonder whether a few of us could get together and during a certain week, get every single person we can, to write letters to people that count in their own country. This could be a world-wide thing. Interested? I live in Israel, tutor English and am a blogging grandmother of five. My son suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and the book I wrote about him; "David's STory" by Jill Sadowsky, is on Amazon's Kindle Store - if you have the time and the inclination.
Take care,
Jill

Hi Natalie,
I enjoy reading your posts, they are well written and make a point.
I am a brain injury survivor, hospitalized with a viral infection when I was younger I now live with a learning disability and other challenges. I too feel that what I went through and still go through sucks, but I do see the positive side to things.
It is nice to hear from people (like you) that have similar feelings, that I'm not alone.
Thanks.
~Mark

I AM HAVINGA HARD TIME RECOVERING FROM DEPRESSION AND ANXIETY. WORRY AND FEAR SEEM TO TAKE OVER ON ME. I AM ON CELEXA AND XANAX - 1 1/2 EVERY SIX HOURS. HELPS SOME BUT STILL VERY SAD OFTEN. ANY ADVICE WOULD BE APPRECIATED. THANKS!!

I can't find any positives with this skitzofrenia... I wish it was just anxiety and depression but skitzos have all of that plus psychosis ... Went to high school and was really popular college took me seven years but I got a degree in what? Film good luck with that in New Hampshire the lamest state in the nation so many creeps ... It doesn't help that the tv sucks and the music and teenagers went Berzelius . All I want to do is drink but guess what my bank account says? 0.00 and no cash either
I'm sitting alone all day in my apt. Nobody wants to talk to me. Not even my family except my divorced dad "sz is the sane response to an insane world" one of the vonneguts

Going through depression myself. Have a daughter who has layers of mental illness that haven't been diagnosed yet. We have been living this for nineteen years. I chose to stay at home and now have a rewarding job in education that pays little. I am dependent on my husband who works to support us. I am emotionally spent, my two other children have had to deal with her constant tantrums and self absorbed world. I do not see any light because she won't take the meds her psychiatrist prescribes. She lies, she can't work or go to school and she loves to start an argument. Her life is hell and therefore mine is. As a Catholic I am supposed to seek hope in every situation. I am supposed to find a way to embrace this situation? There is none. I'm stuck in this hell until the next life. I will get out of this depression that is a result of her verbal abuse when I was stuck in the car with her for two hours. I can never have a relationship with my own daughter whom I have fought for, and loved. Mental illness is maybe the worst diagnosis of any, let alone the stigma. The patient themselves are their own worst enemies, the medical field has no answers and the families are taken advantage of by the psychology field which has many quacks. You can be at such a vulnerable point and their egos cannot admit that they don't have the answers so they bring you down more when you are at your lowest. I will get my energy back and look for a silver lining again, but I am spent and know that the end will only be when I die.

Hi Susan and everybody,
I kind of agree with your daughter on not taking her medication. Maybe the problem is we need to change our views on mental illnesses. They can be linked to something physical.
Mitochondria. Many mitochondrial disease patients are diagnosed with depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia.
I've found treatments can sometimes be worse than the problem. Pretty much all psychotropic medication is addictive/create chemical dependencies (in as they call what normal people call addiction in the psychiatric world)... and are all mitochondria toxic to some extent and very harmful to autonomic nervous system controled in the lower brainstem where the serotonin pathway beggins. Psychotropic medication is easy to start and hell to quit. Been there done that. Two years clean.
And heaven forbid if your daughter has ever been prescribed Paxil. The possible side effect of homocidal ideation makes it Dangerous to society. I personally think it should be slowly taken off the market. Do psychiatrists and general physicians know about it and tell patients about that side effect?
Please look up side effects of any medication you have been prescribed on ＜a href="drugs.com" title="drugs.com"＞drugs.com ＜/a＞ and please Google search "mitochondria toxic medication" it ain't just psychotropic medication.
Mitochondria toxic psychotropic medication such as antidepressants and mood stabilizers, medication for anxiety, and antipsychotics and cause autonomic dysfunction or in other words dysautonomia and damage the autonomic nervous systems such as the sympathetic nervous system which controls the "fight or flight" response making it go haywire" like in psychosis and parasympathetic nervous system known for controling relaxed states in people/patients with mitochondrial diseases such as MELAS syndrome and Leighs Disease which are from any number of mtDNA mutations or deletions. For a proper diagnosis please contact a geneticist who has real experience with Mito and don't trust doctors who "know mito" it's way to complex a disease. I'm so sick and tired of sacrificing my mental and physical health for doctors who "know mito. " Mito is short for Mitochondrial disease. I know the name doesn't make sense. It's kind of a misnomer. Everyone has and need around 37 trillion functional mitochondria in their body and we need healthy happy mitochondria they control production of ATP. Adenosine Triphosphate). Depression, Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia all are commonly diagnosed in Mito patients. Mitochondrial toxicity testing is not a requirement by the FDA. But it desperately needs to be.
Mito is not a waste basket diagnosis. It's real and a killing disease. The number of Infant deaths from Mito are up to about the same as the same number of infant deaths as child cancer. I know about being stigmatized for not only mental illness, but for Mito, and Hearing Impairment, diabetes. Yet, i'm not stigmatized for my low T4 hypothyroid. Something that should be checked out even before psychotropic medication are prescribed. Hypothyroid and depression have almost the same symptoms. And are almost
If you don't believe me, i dare you to research the connection between mental illness and mitochondrial disease for yourself.
You can start by checking out the
mitoaction.org
And the umdf.org websites.
Sincerely,
Jeff