Cat Fight In The Kitchen-Wattpad Rant

Mental Illness

Hi, everyone! I meant to update a week ago, but I got kinda sick. So this is a week late. Woopsie. You guys probably couldn't care less, but at least I apologized!

Anyway, I always avoid talking about this outright (and I feel like I've already covered it so much), but you wouldn't believe the amount of requests I get for this, so here. I'm giving in and talking about Mental Illness

Now there are about a million reasons why I've been avoiding this so blatantly, but about nine hundred ninety thousand of those reasons you don't care about and nine of would really piss you off, so I'm down to one: I'm really upset about how it's always treated.

And I get that I'm extremely jaded about this topic, but can I just say that it really pisses me off how much people bitch and moan about how this topic is treated but completely refuse to acknowledge how far we've come in even just the last ten years? Because it does.

Let me set the record straight. We have a loooong way to go because mental illness is something that's insanely stigmatized. But I'm really tired of everyone pretending that we haven't made progress. When I was a kid, you didn't talk about mental illness. At all.

Now, therapy is a legitimate practice. I know a lot of people tell me there's still a stigma around it, and I know there is, but it's nowhere near as bad as it used to be. And there's this increase in the number of people diagnosed with mental illnesses, because doctors are being educated. Teachers are being taught the signs. Counselors are learning techniques to help school kids be diagnosed.

Help and information for these mental disorders has never been more available than it is now and I just really wanted to take a moment to stand back and appreciate the groundwork everyone has made to pave the way for education. I'm so happy that I can easily google a disorder and find actual organizations set up to provide accurate, lifesaving information. You can find countless discussion boards where you can connect with people suffering through the exact same things as you. There are communities out there offering support and I think that's amazing.

So for once, instead of adding my voice to those complaining that we need more education on mental illness, I wanna offer my support to these groups. Seriously. Check them out. They do amazing work and I think by pretending they don't exist to make our plight more urgent is unfair. It's like my best friend always says: focusing on the negative does nothing but insult the positive. And I wanna shine some light on the positive.

I think that's the reason I haven't wanted to do this rant, because I'm honestly kind of jealous. All these people on here complain about how their mental illness isn't represented enough or inaccurately and all I can think is at least you have a diagnosis. At least you're educated on what symptoms are. You know what you're feeling is part of a condition and not because you're fucked up. You have access to treatment and information. Whether or not you chose to expose yourself to the help offered, it's there.

I can't stop myself from thinking that if all the information out there now had been there even just fifteen years ago, it wouldn't have taken me eleven years to finally be diagnosed with PTSD. I wouldn't have spent eleven years feeling so alone. If mental health was this approachable when I was a younger it would have saved a lot of heartache and a lot of suicide attempts.

So without further ado, lemme give you some tips for how to address mental illness in a story:

1. It's different for everyone

There are so many diseases and disorders and they all come with their own lists of symptoms and treatments, but you have to understand that for every person that has a mental illness, there are that many different manifestations of it. Depression doesn't always present in the same way. Anxiety doesn't always present in the same way. PTSD, BPD, OCD, Bipolar, Autisim, Schizophrenia, Anorexia, Bulimia, EDNOS. They all present themselves uniquely in every person with them. (And I know I'm gonna get jumped for not mentioning other mental illnesses that I can't think about right, but give me a break. I didn't even want to do this rant).