About ten years ago I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder Type II, Borderline Personality Disorder, and ADHD. I have, at different points in my young life, been on 24 different types of psychoactive medications and been hospitalized once for 36 hours because of an accidental overdose, of which I remember very little.

To this day I have not discussed this with any family members besides my parents and a handful of friends. I continue to struggle with the shame surrounding this type of mental illness and when I try to talk to people—even people who I know care about me—they don’t know what to do with that information. Unless I tell people, they might never guess.

I’m not attaching my real name to this post because to be honest about these things in a forum where things have a tendency to live forever could possibly hurt my chances of getting future jobs and in general irreparably damage my reputation. Despite what people say about reducing the stigma surrounding mental illness, that stigma is still a reality. Some people I’ve told about my experiences look at me with pity—or fear. I acquire the unknown potential of a wild animal.

What I have is a clearly genetically inherited imbalance that, if my parents had any way of knowing how to help when they knew something was wrong, could have been treated far earlier and far more effectively. I could have been informed about the importance of diet, habit, and medication and taught to manage my medical condition responsibly instead of being left almost entirely to my own devices for a decade, resulting in emotional damage I’m only now beginning to sort out. I was temporarily kicked out of college, I very nearly killed myself, and I very definitely have done a lot of things that have negatively impacted the lives of others.

When I heard about the shooting in Connecticut, one of the first words I saw linked to it was “evil”—as if this perpetrator, and all other perpetrators of acts like this, are simply evil people who have never liked anything and intended their whole lives to grow up and kill people. Gradually, as the public gets over the shock, some of them will move on to “some people are just awful” and “I just can’t understand the world we live in.” I understand the anger over such atrocious acts—I feel it too. I also, though, feel physically ill about the willful ignorance of the fact that the people who do these things are extremely mentally ill. The complete and utter ignorance of what that means is terrifying, because if people don’t understand mental illnesses they’re never going to demand a system through which to meaningfully help people who have them.

I have not been a model patient, but I have played an active role in my own treatment. Despite this, never have I been held accountable for my actions or firmly told that it was my responsibility to rein in my dangerous behavior. I was’t pulled over for driving 45 miles an hour through a busy downtown during a hypomanic episode. Everyone has always allowed me to just do what I wanted to do. There is no language I can use to tell you how not helpful and dangerous that is. For years and years I was a completely irrational mess in a great deal of denial, and there was never anything anyone could or would do to change that.

Then, when I wanted to take responsibility, there was no way I could afford it without my parents paying for it—and even then I spent months on end as an unmedicated, destabilizing Bipolar person waiting for care because none of the doctors I had permission from my health insurance company to see had time for me. Now, as I’m prescribed nearly random medications hoping for something that isn’t violently rejected by my body and that also has the desired corrective effect, I have to wait months between those visits, gritting my teeth and hoping that I can hold it together until things work out.

That’s how the system works for me—and I’m an upper-middle-class, well-educated white person in a state with above-average health care. How is the system working for those who are less privileged?

Gun control is an important issue, but the inaccessibility of mental health care in this country is an atrocity and a major contributor to these mass killings. Much about how we think about mental health and people who are mentally ill is wrong. It’s a frightening world of unknown unknowns, but the answer is not to continue to ignore these things—nor is the answer to just try and ban guns.

What we need is a national dialogue where I’m not afraid that people will figure out who wrote this. What we need is a way to help people when we know that they are living in agony, and to not think so much less of them for that agony. People with mental illnesses are not supernatural beings with no hope of integration. We are people with short-term or long-term chemical imbalances or personal traumas that are naturally occurring parts of life that can be successfully dealt with—but not until we acknowledge that fact and demand real care.

– Jane Doe

Photo by Adib Wahab (Creative Commons)