for the past couple of days ever since I read this over at Finding Your Marbles. I think that Scott articulates very well the way that it can feel to be diagnosed with a mental illness, and I highly recommend reading the post. However, this isn’t the way that I felt the first time that I got an official diagnosis.
Sometimes it feels like I’ve always had emotional issues of one kind or another. I remember feeling sad for reasons that I couldn’t articulate at a very young age, maybe when I was four or five. I don’t even remember the first time that I went to therapy, but I know that it was with my mother and it was probably before I started elementary school. My parents had separated when I was two, and officially divorced when I was four, so it probably had something to do with that. But, for the time being, let’s fast forward a decade or so to high school.
I’m not exactly sure when it started, but at some point during my teenage years I started feeling like I wanted to cry ALL OF THE TIME. To this day, the feeling of being on the verge of tears is the primary physical manifestation of my depression. At this point, there are times when I can’t and don’t actually cry for days at a time when I feel this way; it’s just a physical sensation of needing and wanting to cry. When I get this feeling these days, I think it can go on for a while before I even notice it. There have been other times in my life when it has been unbearable, coming back seemingly out of nowhere, bursting through any feelings of happiness or even normalcy. I guess that I have probably just learned to handle it from having had to live with it for such a long time and I have luckily gotten to a point where I know that I am not going to burst into tears in public (and if I really thought that I was going to, I would probably just stay home).
High school was an incredible struggle for me; it was one of those unbearable times except the bad feeling didn’t have any happiness to come bursting through in the first place. A lot of days, I just didn’t go. I remember times when my mom would drive me to school and I would sit in the car sobbing, begging her to take me home. And a lot of times she would. If this is possible, I think that I literally missed hundreds of days of school. A lot of times, when I had gone to school, I would leave early. Sometimes it was to skip class with the friends that I somehow managed to have, but sometimes I just left by myself. And I will say that for all of the ways that being a grownup is more difficult than being young, I remain eternally grateful for the fact that there is no longer a school security guard chasing me down with his or her walkie talkie if I desperately need to get out of a situation. With freedom has come responsibility, but, by God, I’d take freedom any day over having to return to the feeling of being trapped like that.
It was senior year when I fully broke down and just couldn’t do it anymore. I ended up taking a medical absence in the middle of the year, and when I was determined “better” enough to go back to school for the final quarter I just never did. I was terrified to go back because of what I was imagining the other kids that I went to school with were thinking about me for having been absent for so long in the first place – was it typical teenage self-consciousness? Was it the social phobia that would go undiagnosed for another decade? In any case, and regardless of any mis- or missed diagnoses, I have nothing but good feelings towards the therapist that I had during my adolescent years who is my main inspiration for becoming a therapist now. She gave me nothing but unconditional regard and respect at a time when almost everyone else in my life had no idea what to do with me. I had already been seeing her for several years but I don’t remember her, or any other doctor during that time, naming exactly what it was that was wrong with me. Maybe they had; I had certainly been prescribed antidepressants already by the time that I was 17. And maybe I’m remembering wrong exactly when it was that this occurred. But what I do remember was how it feel to first hear the words “You are clinically depressed”.
The feeling was relief. What getting a diagnosis meant for me was answers. It meant that there was a name for what was wrong with me and naming it somehow made it smaller, less terrifying, easier to understand than what had previously been a gigantic black hole of unexplainable emptiness and sadness. It’s funny to think that getting an official diagnosis of mental illness made me feel less crazy, but that’s exactly what happened.
Other diagnoses haven’t been as easy for me. Bipolar II was certainly not an easy one to hear and social phobia (which I only heard for the first time around a year ago) was more of a “What the hell are you talking about?” moment than anything else before I came to understand it. But, when I was 17, being able to give a name to my overwhelming sadness made the world seem less scary for a minute or two.
When I was first diagnosed with depression, it was a relief. An explanation for the misery I was in and had been in the majority of my life. I had my first suicidal ideations at age 5. Unfortunately I didn’t get any treatment until well into my college career.
Later when received the PTSD diagnosis I was relieved but scared. Depression was one thing. But to receive a second diagnosis was overwhelming.
My final diagnosis was Borderline Personality Disorder. I fought it, long and hard. Despite all that was going on, I couldn’t believe that the core of my personality was fundamentally flawed. But then I cooled down some. And I do accept the diagnosis now. It took me a long time. But with therapy, the borderline symptoms are pretty much under control.
Comment by katm — April 8, 2007 @ 12:35 am
Thanks for commenting, katm. I think that it’s a funny balance between finding relief in having an explanation for what’s been troubling you and then not letting yourself get stuck in believing that you have a fundamental flaw. From the little that I have read on your blog (and plans to read much more), you seem very strong at your core. I wish that they could come up with a better name for so-called “personality disorders” – even if the constellations of symptoms is accurate – for the very reason that you describe.
Comment by iambrave — April 10, 2007 @ 1:21 am