Mental illness. This is a term that has been bothering me more and more lately. Mental illness; as if whatever’s going on in your head is some sort of a disease, something that’s profoundly wrong with you.
I don’t buy it.
Because as far as I can tell, mental health issues are rooted in trauma. Something bad happened, and now the brain and the body are struggling to cope. Feelings that need to be expressed and heard may be stuffed down, suppressed with whatever the trauma victim chooses to manage them with – for me that was food, which leaves me with a 30 year history of binge eating and weight issues. I’m not too bothered about that, to be honest – when you think I could have been using drugs, alcohol, sex or any number of more harmful things to cope instead.
But the trauma is real. It’s there, and it’s not going anywhere until the victim gets proper support and help to process and release it. And that can be a messy process, I can tell you!
Nobody ever really worried too much about my mental health too much, until I was suddenly sectioned in October last year. I had a prolonged anxiety attack, triggered by opening up to a close family member about my trauma, which resulted in me not sleeping for around 5 days. By that time I was delusional and needed to be hospitalised and forced to sleep. It was a shock for everybody, including me. I was in hospital for 10 days.
The thing is, I was and am closer to the end of a process than I am to the beginning of one; I have suffered from anxiety and depression since I was a child. None of this is new to me, I’ve been coping with panic attacks, low mood, debilitating fatigue, and self-loathing for as long as I can remember. Those feelings were always there beneath the surface. Just because I was able to hide them well enough to hold down decent jobs, find a nice man to marry and have three kids, doesn’t mean they ever went away, it just means that I’m a much more talented actress than I have always assumed. The only thing different about last October was that I became unwilling to hide it any more.
I made a decision in August 2016 that I was going to deal with my shit. My physical health was all over the place, I was subclinical hypothyroid, not sleeping well, couldn’t seem to eat anything without it making me ill, and to say my mood was up and down would be the understatement of the century. I was sick and tired of how miserable and disconnected I felt, and just wanted to live a happy life. I decided to embark on serious therapy for the first time in my life, and actually give voice to all the rubbish that had been festering away inside for decades.
By and large it worked really well. I went through a course of EFT with a really talented therapist, and addressed the food issues directly with help from another EFT practitioner. Last year I had a lot of hands-on energy healing that helped me to release even more, and the difference in my self-esteem was enormous. My friends and family started noticing how much healthier I looked, and my relationships improved as I gained the confidence just to be myself, rather than the watered-down, amended and sanitised version of me that I assumed would be acceptable to everybody else (or at least wouldn’t give them any bother).
But now, at a time when I’m probably stronger, happier and more resilient than I’ve ever been, now I get labelled “mentally ill” simply because I’m not hiding stuff any more. My baseline mental health status has been updated to “suffers from mental ill-health” on the basis of the blip that led to my hospitalisation, which means that now I’m being watched closely for signs of being unwell. Now people believe there’s something wrong with me, when in fact the truth is I’m finally coming to terms with a number of shitty things that happened to me a long time ago, and I’m just not pretending to be perfect any more.
Well bloody bollocks to that!
We need to reframe how we talk about mental health, because the truth is many, many people who are labelled mentally ill are in fact trauma victims who are either unable or unwilling to continue hiding the effects of what happened to them. Is it kind or fair to say to them “this is all in your head” as if they were making up their mind or their body’s responses to what happened? Is it correct to instruct them to internalise their trauma as something that’s wrong with them, as a “mental illness”, rather than as a reasonable and normal response to something that affected them profoundly?
This is why it’s so important for us to talk openly about mental health and overcome the stigma associated with just not being ok at the moment. I believe we need to reframe “mental illness” as being frequently rooted in trauma, and start considering the possibility that the people who are strong enough to be open and honest about their struggles with mental health may in fact be a lot further along in the process of dealing with their shit than our labels give them credit for.