When I was first diagnosed I spent a lot of time online searching through web sites, journals, blogs and articles trying to learn as much as possible with the vague notion in my head that I would find the key to solving this puzzle that is my life. I have seen written works that were so completely on a scientific level that you need a post graduate degree to understand it and I have seen posts that did nothing but promote the negative stigma that surrounds mental illness and everything in between. There are a lot of experts out there and there are people who give these experts a bad name and the trick is to tell them apart.
Take a depression quiz that tells you that your moderately to severely depressed just by asking five simple questions and if your curiosity is like my own you do a little research and come to the conclusion that the reason for this rather simplistic diagnosis probably has more to do with the company who provides this helpful tool who also happens to run one of the major antidepressant factors that manufacture a chemical band aid. It does not stop here as a number of major research projects are funded by those who produce mental meds which makes me wonder how true the actual results are. Now don’t get me wrong without a lot of this research mental health would still be in the dark ages of lobotomies and state asylums that were overfilled to the brink of explosion.
Then you reach untreatableonline and here I am talking about a wide variety of mental disorders and what it is like to walk a mile in my shoes. A quick look shows that I have an education in Social Services which is accurate but what I learned through books and what I have learned through experience is worlds apart. My education in the formal setting regarding psychology consisted of two classes a week for two semesters and to show a more accurate portrait all I could tell you about Borderline Personality Disorder was that it is both a difficult disorder to live with and a difficult disorder to treat and that was it. The goal of this blog has never been to produce text book scenarios and how to treat them for I would not have a clue how to do so. When I speak of BPD or Depression or PTSD or Anxiety I am telling you how it works in my brain and chances are it is going to have similarities to the next person who deals with these disorders but at the same time it is going to have differences. For the people who think that something is wrong my goal is to give them an idea of what I deal with to see if they can connect the dots in their own lives then bring this information to their doctor for the next logical step. For those who are in the same boat as I am the goal is to show you the path that I have taken through recovery and what has worked and what has not in the hope that they will see their situation from a slightly different angle and maybe ease their way down this rocky road. For the people who are caring for someone who is mentally ill I am trying to show the chaos from an inside perspective which will hopefully show the difficulty of this journey and it is a marathon and not a sprint. Now for all the people who believe in the stigma who cross my blog (some of which have sent a number of not very nice emails) the goal is simple to make you think and question the beliefs that were created in fear and wrong information. People have this idea of what a mentally ill person looks like and my job is to crush it for we differ from case to case from diagnosis to diagnosis from person to person. People with BPD are monsters and it is completely obvious who has this disorder yet I spent over two months on a psych ward, over forty visits with a psychiatrist, counselors and therapists, was recognized as a top social worker who was surrounded by other social workers for a number of years yet in the end the first person to figure out that I had BPD was me. Am I an expert? Of course not but what I can do is show you the view of the world through my eyes and allow you to reach your own conclusions. This post kind of took a funny switch on me but hopefully the message is still the one I was trying to get across. Take care
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