mental-illness

Everyone has scars, they just aren__ as visible as yours.

I wanted to be dead. No. That's not quite right. I didn't want to be dead, I just didn't want to be alive.

Sometimes the darkness beyond is not glorious at all, it truly is an absolute absence of light. A clawing, needy tar that pulls you down. You drown but you don't. It turns you to lead so you sink faster in its viscous embrace. It robs you of hope and even the memory of hope. It makes you think you've always felt like this, and there's no place to go but down, where it slowly, ravenously digests your will, distilling it into the ebony crude of nightmares. And you know the darkness beyond despair, just as intimately as you know the soaring heights. Because in this and all universes, there is balance. You can't have the one without facing the other. And sometimes you think you can take it because the joy is worth the despair, and sometimes you know you can't take it and how did you ever think you could? And there is the dance; strength and weakness, confidence and desolation.

Watching me, judging me, smelling the crippling failure oozing from my skin, my desperation clawing and all-consuming panic drenching me as I gape in horror at the world and wonder why everyone is smiling and looking at me with secret knowledge of my aching shame.

One in two recently evicted mothers reports multiple symptoms of clinical depression, double the rate of similar mothers who were not forced from their homes. Even after years pass, evicted mothers are less happy, energetic, and optimistic than their peers. When several patients committed suicide in the days leading up to their eviction, a group of psychiatrists published a letter in Psychiatric Services, identifying eviction as a __ignificant precursor of suicide._ The letter emphasized that none of the patients were facing homelessness, leading the psychiatrists to attribute the suicides to eviction itself. __viction must be considered a traumatic rejection,_ they wrote, __ denial of one__ most basic human needs, and an exquisitely shameful experience._ Suicides attributed to evictions and foreclosures doubled between 2005 and 2010, years when housing costs soared.

I look back on my life the way one watches a badly scripted action flick, sitting at the edge of the seat, bursting out, "No, no, don't open that door! The bad guy is in there and he'll grab you and put his hand over your mouth and tie you up and then you'll miss the train and everything will fall apart!" Except there is no bad guy in this tale. The person who jumped through the door and grabbed me and tied me up was, unfortunately, me. My double image, the evil skinny chick who hisses, Don't eat. I'm not going to let you eat. I'll let you go as soon as you're thin, I swear I will. Everything will be okay when you're thin.

Our __ncreasing mental sickness_ may find expression in neurotic symptoms. These symptoms are conspicuous and extremely distressing. But __et us beware,_ says Dr. Fromm, __f defining mental hygiene as the prevention of symptoms. Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friend; where there are symptoms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the forces of life which strive for integration and happiness are still fighting._ The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. __any of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does._ They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish __he illusion of individuality,_ but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But __niformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too. . . . Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed.

I sleep and sleep and sleep, yet I still have an unquenchable thirst for it.

And then it happens. The panic. It's slow at first, creeping through the cracks in my thoughts until everything starts to feel heavy. It builds; it becomes something physical that clutches at my insides and squeezes out the air and the blood.

I want to believe him. I know stuff happens to people and they can't always be who they were or who they think they're supposed to be. But knowing that doesn't mean I'm okay with it. It's more like what Mr. Krueger says about black holes: We can't wish them away, so we'd better learn as much as we can about where they are and how they work so we don't get sucked in.

There__ nothing worse than bottling something up inside and letting it eat at you. It__ like being shot, and leaving the bullet inside our bodies. The wound would never heal. Instead, we need to let it out.

Sleeping is much safer than the nightmare I__ living. When I sleep I feel nothing and I do nothing and I see nothing and nothing matters and no one cares. There__ no one to hurt or disappoint or notice when I__ low and I don__ need to face anyone not anyone in the world or not even myself.

It__ a little-known secret, and it should probably stay that way: attempting suicide usually jump-starts your brain chemistry. There must be something about taking all those pills that either floods the brain sufficiently or depletes it so completely that balance is restored. Whatever the mechanism, the result is that you emerge on the other side of the attempt with an awareness of what it means to be alive. Simple acts seem miraculous: you can stand transfixed for hours just watching the wind ruffle the tiny hairs along the top of your arm. And always, with every sensation, is the knowledge that you must have survived for a reason. You just can__ doubt it anymore. You must have a purpose, or you would have died. You have the rest of your life to discover what that purpose is. And you can__ wait to start looking.

My heart is sinking and my chest physically aches from the heavy sadness that it carries within.

[If there was] certainty that an acute episode [of depression] will last only a week, a month, even a year, it would change everything. It would still be a ghastly ordeal, but the worst thing about it _ the incessant yearning for death, the compulsion toward suicide _ would drop away. But no, a limited depression, a depression with hope, is a contradiction. The experience of convulsive pain, along with the conviction that it will never end except in death _ that is the definition of a severe depression.

It is not the darkness of shadows: one that follows you, haunts you, terrifies you. Instead, it consumes you, becomes you, weighs you down. It IS you. It is comforting. Familiar. I have walked with it. Eaten with it. Loved with it. Smiled with it. Yet I feel it destroying me.Like cancer.But I can__ remove it. It stays inside of me, taunting me to kill it, myself, but it does not realize that this seduction keeps me alive.

I__ not flailing now, as my muscles are rigid with the tension of holding myself together. The pain over my heart returns, and from it I imagine tiny fissures spreading out into my body. Through my torso, down my arms and legs, over my face, leaving it crisscrossed with cracks. One good jolt _ and I could shatter into strange, razor-sharp shards.

The word __epressed_ is spoken phonetically as __eep rest_. We can view depression not as a mental illness, but on a deeper level, as a profound, and very misunderstood, state of deep rest, entered into when we are completely exhausted by the weight of our own identity.