Untold Mental Health Stories: Liv's Chapter

This post has been written from the catalyst of a single, drunkenly written, hastily deleted, tweet. It read along the lines of - ‘it sucks that along with all the shit my mental health problems bring me, I still can’t talk about it without it being a huge deal’. This struck a chord with me. Of course we should talk about our own personal mental health issues, it’s the only way to share our similar struggles and our helping hands. But it’s so hard, when a two dimensional narrative of mental health exists, to find a balance. To make sure people know the complexity and seriousness of your difficulties without scaring them off or making them feel uncomfortable. Because if you’re really struggling and people aren’t aware of the problem then you’ll go unnoticed. But if you’re seen to be coping well then the validity of your mental health problem is called into question. I remembered how difficult I had found it to talk about the (much smaller scale) issue of disordered eating I had suffered with for a few years. One thing that had really helped was writing about it. So I spoke to the author of the tweet, Liv, and asked if she would like to talk to me about the nuances, intricacies and less well known difficulties of struggling with mental illness, and so this is her story.

Liv has suffered with mental health problems quite severely for over 6 years. This time scale has encompassed quite important events in her life, like exams and university, that can be fundamental in inflating your future prospects in terms of career, money etc, and which have been affected by her mental health issues in multiple ways. Liv has been through a few diagnoses, including Borderline Personality Disorder, which she thought sounded a bit sinister. However, at one point her doctor said he didn’t like to put a label on it, which made her feel like what she was suffering from wasn’t a legitimate condition, and left her even more confused than when the ‘labels’ given to her had kept changing. As well as struggling with confirming what exactly she suffers from, Liv struggles not only with the actual symptoms of her mental illness like lack of motivation and crippling anxiety in social situations, but also from the fear of how people will react to this behaviour. Sometimes she can’t get out of bed for days. The added paranoia and shame of people presuming she is lazy is another knock to her mental wellbeing at a time when she is already unwell.

Anticipating how people will perceive her mental health difficulties has been a source of anxiety in her education too. Liv’s perception of education has always been that she should be getting top grades, and when she was younger learning and examinations came quite easy to her. So when her mental health started to deteriorate, her motivation to learn and revise deteriorated too. “When all you can think about is killing yourself or doing) whatever you can to distract yourself from that thought, reading a play or learning an equation seems pointless, and you just do what you can to scrape by”, she admits. Going from easily achieving top marks to finding it hard to scrape passes distorted Liv’s mental health, as her academic ability had always been something she placed a lot of value on in her own self-esteem.

The effects on her education also highlights ways that the cost of mental health is often ignored, because money doesn’t just fluctuate with mental state in obvious ways like needing to pay for therapy (which I don’t know WHO CAN AFFORD). Liv has had to retake a year of university, which is thousands of pounds worth of added expense. Not being able to find sufficient support and consistent services has been detrimental to her mental health and subsequently had knock on effects on her life outside of purely her emotional wellbeing. Liv’s financial situation also suffers quite directly from her mental health conditions, as impulsivity arrives with her high moods, and fuels her low ones. “Without thinking I’ll just make ridiculous purchases because nothing really matters and if things get too bad ‘I can just kill myself right?’”. Having come so close before, Liv knows how easy it would be for her to end it all, and so financial responsibilities sometimes don’t seem so heavy. If her financial situation gets too bad, if the pile of money owed is too huge, her mind tells her that her life can pay the debt. Her impulsive spending and reckless behaviour invites dismissive glances and eye rolls from people who assume she doesn’t care, and furthers Liv’s anxiety about coming across as ‘normal’ at social events. Although she does manage to overcome these feelings and seem quite confident, small comments or changes to the group can cause this confidence to crumble away, and she finds that when this happens – it is just best for her to be alone.

Feelings of invalidation and dismissal do not come only from her peers, but sadly, from medical professionals too. Once, when talking to a nurse about a medication she was on, Liv was met with “Are you sure? That’s an anti-psychotic you know?”. The insinuation that she must be confused, that she couldn’t possibly have a serious mental health condition that would require that medication, left Liv feeling like even medical professionals weren’t taking her seriously. These comments come with glances that suggest “well you look fine to me..” that further invalidate Liv’s mental illness which by diagnosis – fluctuates and causes changes in mood. This is yet another way that Liv often faces negative reception to problems she has. When explaining that she is unable to attend something or talk to someone, she often hears “well you were fine yesterday” as if they won’t believe her symptoms exist unless they are constantly present. “I just wish people realised that I can’t control when I’m going to be affected by things”, she says. By nature, both bipolar and borderline personality disorder consist of rapidly changing moods, emotions and reactions. But even without this in consideration, surely no one suffering from a mental health disorder should feel that they have to justify their illness from day to day? Surely a relatively good day should be celebrated, rather than used as evidence against the validity of a suicidal one? Surely the fact that Liv is infectiously funny on good days shouldn’t be used as evidence that her low ones are false?

Today, mental health is more prominent in our consciousness as a society, but we have to ensure that our concern and empathy doesn’t end with those in the most severe cases. Liv’s story includes the sickening tragedy of attempted suicide, but her financial impulsivity, changing moods, and inability to focus are also symptoms of that same mental illness, and they should be treated with the weight they deserve. Having your mental health issues invalidated not only means they go unrecognised, but also actively deteriorates the already diseased mind.

Mental health issues have become more visible and less taboo recently, but awareness of the complexities of them remain relatively two-dimensional. A video that animated J K Rowling’s life and experience of depression recently went viral, and whilst it could be applauded on championing an overall message of hope, the video’s narrative attributes her experience of depression directly to specific life events, like her divorce. It then concludes by saying that ‘she poured everything into doing the one thing that she did better than anyone else – writing’. This message forces Rowling’s narrative onto a single page, as if her life was as simple as shitty events that led to depression, and then her book was published and DING - everything got better. By attributing her depression to specific events, it portrays the message that depression must be caused by something, and invalidates the reality that depression is an illness which, like cancer and other serious diseases, often comes down to pure and tragic luck. Putting so much weight on her literary success as the end of her depression portrays it as a kind of cure, when in reality, mental illnesses can affect anyone at any time, regardless of financial, personal and career satisfaction. It’s the kind of message portrayed in this video which, while doing some good in acting as a general reminder to stay hopeful, dangerously simplifies mental illnesses. This kind of thinking about mental health is just as harmful as the blank stigma we used to have. Although it’s more visible as a societal issue now, in that we can talk quite generally about mental health and it’s been added to the national curriculum, there’s still just as much difficulty in talking about your personal mental health and getting your own difficulties taken seriously. Simplified mental health narratives like the one featured in that viral video invalidate the complexities of mental illness that work like a spider’s web with multiple strands and connections. By focusing on the extremity of suicide, it ignores the smaller, often dismissed symptoms that lead to it. By portraying Rowling’s as a snap recovery, it invalidates the fact that for most people, there is never an end or a cure, just coping mechanisms and finding a way to live alongside it. It’s great that a video like that can go viral, but Liv still feels that she can’t talk about her mental health issues without becoming a burden. So if we’re going to retweet and share Rowling’s story in the spirit of mental health awareness, then we should share Liv’s too.

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