Thread by @IsabelHardman

Just realised it is #mentalhealthawarenessweek2019 (loooong hashtag). It’s also pretty much bang on three years to the day that my suicidal thoughts and crippling paranoia became so evidently bad that a friend insisted I go to the doctor and ask for help.

I also *think* that this is the week when I finish writing my second book, which is on mental health and the great outdoors. Lots of synchronicity there, not all of it particularly nice.

Anyway, am not tweeting about this because I’m keen for sympathy - I’ve got plenty of family and friends who offer the kind of unconditional love that just seems inexplicable, whether I’m healthy or sick. Or to offer some kind of triumphalist ‘recovery’ story.

But as I enter the final pages of Book 2, I’ve been mulling ‘mental health awareness’ a lot. We are unquestionably better at speaking openly about mental illness. I overhear people discussing their mental health and conditions like depression the whole time now.

But I don’t think as a society we are really aware or accepting of the reality of mental illness. Even the relatively user-friendly illness of depression, for instance, is not a sadness that can be alleviated with hugs and the right friends.

It can give the sufferer incredibly difficult-to-handle black moods which pull everyone else down, sometimes with what appears to be abject rudeness. We are forgiving of the idea that someone might struggle to get out of bed in the morning, less so when they seem angry and dark.

Far harder for those with illnesses that are still considered rather scary, especially psychotic conditions. Based on the interviews I’ve done over the past couple of years, I don’t think the stigma has lifted v much for these at all.

You simply do not hear people saying ‘my schizophrenia has been particularly bad recently’ in a social setting like you do with anxiety and depression.

I have a diagnosis which seems to scare people less - PTSD - but the thing I struggle with the most is that people aren’t prepared for what it actually entails. The paranoia has led to me accusing pretty much everyone I love (and plenty I barely know) of all kinds of shit

There’s also anger, a huge amount of it, that just bursts out unexpectedly at apparently random times and people. Most people I know vaguely say ‘you always seem quite happy and kind’ but I don’t think the people who know me properly could say that any more.

And so we come to the sense of loss that I and a lot of other people with MH problems feel. Yes, I have lost SO much in terms of sanity, when it comes to work opportunities (3 years of on-and-off sick leave) etc. But the worst is the loss of dignity caused by a mental illness.

There are the people closest to me, either through blood or love, who clearly see this for what it is, an illness. But the sense of loss I have in relationships a bit further afield, whether people I work with or more tenuous friends, is very hard to come to terms with.

You can apologise a thousand times for an outburst of anger, or paranoia, or letting someone who you work with down once again by having to pull out at the last minute because you cannot even form sentences. But there is always, always a ghost of that left in the relationship

And often the symptoms aren’t ‘I can see dragons on the walls’ but stuff that seems plausible, that you can get sucked into yourself because it’s based on events that really might or might not happen.

I have come to terms with the fact that I may never be fully recovered, and that I’m definitely not going to go back to Old Isabel. But if I had one thing I really wanted people to be more aware of, it would be the sense of shame that MH sufferers have -

And not about the fact of their illness, which is hard in itself, but about what it has led them to do over the years, and the people who have been affected by that.

Also more money needed everywhere, and lots of other things to do with public policy, but this is the thing that I think of the most when I look back over the past three years.

If you want to be more ‘mental health aware’, then that does involve realising that MH problems don’t go away with sympathy, and they require a vast amount of patience, forgiveness and ability to forget certain episodes.