Weaker or Stronger: Mental Illness and Victim Blaming.
Someone I care about sent me a message; she told me I should see a psychologist about my bipolar disorder ... she said it would make me "stronger". The unspoken corollary to that must be that at present I am weak.
I love this person; I love her very much.
But she doesn't realize how wrong she is. I wish, instead of bipolar disorder, I had Cancer ... I wish this because no one would ever look at me dealing with cancer and imagine it was all in my head; that it wasn't as serious as I made it out to be; that I was weak for what it was doing to me.
No one ever blames the victim suffering from Cancer. No one ever says, "well, if he tried a little harder, looked on the bright side, smiled a little more, he'd get better". But as sure as cancer is a betrayal of your body, eating you alive - so is manic depression. It tears at you; it's like having a storm in your skin that one moment can be stilled and the next can be raging with dark and brooding clouds - or bursting with lightning and wind. Every emotion is extreme; conversations and thoughts become minefields ready to explode as your mania and your depression fight for control over how they'll translate the world around you.
I will say it has its benefits ... I experience colors and sounds and even a spring breeze in ways most people never will; there is ecstasy everywhere in the world just waiting to be discovered ... and if you've never been manic, you may never know what it is like to truly experience the beauty and odor of a flower on a gentle day in the waning hours of summer, as Autumn waits on the horizon. I actually feel sorry for you, in that.
Of course, you probably won't spend hours feeling like every sound or voice is grating against your bones and making you want to scream. Or feel like your bones are ripping themselves apart until you can barely keep yourself from stabbing something into your chest to let the pressure out. You probably won't wake up with handfuls of hair and bloody fingernails from clawing at yourself all night ... and remember, the mania is the happier of the two sides of this coin.
Depression ... well, you've probably all heard the stories about depression ... whether you believe in it or no, it's old news by now. The fact that some days it's all I can do to get out of bed; or that it takes a physical effort to talk - literally a physical effort to talk - you've heard all that. That I will be so numb that I can barely feel my face and expressions seem like foreign things ... or that emotions become too much trouble and the effort of empathizing with anything is beyond my ability ... you've seen the after school specials. Depression doesn't need an introduction.
Of course, most people don't know about the extremes of all that. Most people know some days I am very down, and some days I'm excitable, some days I'm hard to get along with, and I seem to make everything harder for myself than it has to be. (that last part is one of my favorites) And there's really no way to tell them because, like Cancer, bipolar disorder comes in a lot of different levels of intensity ... the big difference is, I don't have the physical symptoms to show off to prove it. But it will still kill you by inches.
And there's the hardest part ... I don't have any physical wounds to show for it. I have scars, of course, on my wrists and inside my elbows and less ominous scars all along the inside and outside of my skin from where I've taken the knife just so I can feel something; anything, for a minute. But those are self inflicted and they don't hold the weight of sallow skin and sunken eyes, of weeping sores and trembling hands. (actually my hands do tremble ever so slightly; a permanent side effect of a medication I took a few years back to try and combat the bipolar) But for the most part people just have to take my word for how much pain I'm in; for how hard it is from day to day ... and that's not easy to do when the symptoms are invisible.
It used to be that when you suffered from a mental disorder you covered it up with alcohol, or drugs, or just beat the hell out of your kids and wives and anyone else at hand. There were no real medications, no fancy names, so you got wrote off as a drunk, or an arsehole, or if you were very lucky you became a tortured artist like so many that have died while under the influence ... why do you think they were on all those drugs to begin with? Some mental illness, bipolar to be sure, comes with inspiration and imagination and grand flights of fancy ... you just have to keep something close by for when the mania goes wrong or gives way to the other half. Mental illnesses weren't made up in the 1950's by Big Pharma to sell their new line of designer drugs - they were just given a new face, a fancy polish and a bit of the spotlight.
But there's a long history of denial and victim blaming in mental illness. Hell, you still see it today from otherwise educated people who refuse to recognize the value of psychology; or who will instantly write off the mentally ill as inconsequential once a mainstream physical explanation cannot be found. I recall when fibromyalgia was believed to be a psychological condition - back when I was first looking down the neck of that diagnosis - and no one was taking it seriously. "Oh, it's just a mental thing" was the dismissive, overriding attitude in the medical community; and as such, it wasn't real. Of course, now that they've decided it has a "real" medical diagnosis, it's getting all sorts of attention. Of course.
The truth is, we are discovering that mental illness does not happen in a bubble, it does not happen without the support of the physical body, and second - it is no less real, and no less severe than the diseases killing those people in your local hospital. Have you seen a schizophrenic, or a bulimic? Seen people who suffer from OCD so bad they scrub the skin off their hands? Someone so terrified of leaving their house they spend every hour hidden in their homes, imagining the next person they see is going to kill them? These are real things, not imaginary, not funny quirks, or jokes, or problems one can just "get over".
We need to stop pretending that mental illness is "pretend illness", and start realizing that those sores and wounds you're looking for ... they're not invisible - and if you can't see them that isn't the fault of the victim; it's the fault of the observer.