I'm going to talk candidly about what it's like to live with mental illness, so, trigger warnings ahoy!
This week is Mental Health Awareness Week, apparently. I wasn't particularly aware that this was a thing until Sunday, when my tram drove past a Beyond Blue booth at Fed Square. They had a sign that had a few buzz words on it, and one of those words was 'recovery'. This did not sit well with me.
For those of you not aware, I have chronic depression. It is not severe; I have never needed to manage it with medication (*cough* *cough* not including self-medication *cough*), I can get by without regular access to mental health services. I am able to manage it quite well through self-analysis, because I have developed the skills to do so. I have a pretty good sense of how I'm going mental health wise, and what I need to do to turn things around when I feel a depressive episode coming on. I also have an incredible support network of friends who I can turn to, and, when I need to, I usually can access some sort of mental health service fairly easily. All in all, I have a lot of privilege when it comes to managing my illness.
But I have also learned how to function in a closet, of sorts. I am very good at hiding my illness. It's a survival strategy I picked up, because, the world is a pretty shitty place to live in when you've got mental illness. For the most part, I can pass as a mentally healthy (ish) person.
This sign on the Beyond Blue booth suggesting mental illness is something to be recovered from troubled me. From my own experience, depression ebbs and flows. It never goes away. It is managed. Constantly. That is not recovery; it's remission.
Apparently the idea of promoting 'recovery' is to give people hope. But which people? Cuz those of us living with the daily struggle of mental illness are well aware we're not going to magically one day get better forever. Promoting hope of recovery amongst us is a false hope that reeks of saviour complex. And to borrow from the sex worker rights movement, save me from my saviours!
'Recovery' here is being used as a feel-good awareness raising tool; to engage people who are not affected by mental illness by giving them hope that one day we will get better. If we just keep on believing in ourselves and trying our darnedest. As Helen Razor (amongst others) has pointed out, how inspirational our sad, awful lives must be. Fuck. Off.
The problem with using hope of recovery as an awareness raising strategy is, it puts the blame back onto us when we don't get better. Which we won't. Because we can't. Not forever anyways. With remission comes the constant threat, and occasional (or frequent) reality, of relapse.
I had my first major depressive episode when I was 8. I used to think this was when I developed depression, but that doesn't really make sense. If it was something I developed because of an event that would be trauma. No, the depression was already there, waiting to be activated. It just so happened that my parents divorce pulled the trigger. But if it hadn't been that, it would have been something else. Because that depression was always there, lurking in the back corners of my brain.
It's hard to describe what it was like, this first episode. Not because it's emotionally painful, but because my brain has actually erased most of that period of my life. I have very little memory of what it was like when my parents got divorced. There are things that I know happened, like moving house. I have no idea what it was like to pack up my stuff and move into an apartment. I don't even know if I was involved in that process. There are other things that are more fuzzy. Like, one day my Mom mentioned about how after the divorce she had to set up special permission with the school for me to be late, because I was unable to get to school on time. The deal was that I'd just pop into the front office and let them know when I'd arrived. Which explains why I have so many memories of stopping into the front office. I don't remember anything else, really.
My depression went undiagnosed into my 20s. I don't know when, exactly, that first major depressive episode came to an end, or how. I know that I grew up thinking it was normal to feel sad and kinda bleak about life. I didn't believe people who claimed to not have an underlying sadness to their expressed happiness. To be honest, I'm still suspicious of those types of people and prefer not to socialise with them. To paraphrase from a Nicki Minaj song, I don't mess with them...regulars.
Over the years the depths of my depression changed, but never really went away. I know I had another major depressive episode when I was about 19, but I don't know what brought it on. (Well, that's kind of a lie, but it's also my business and I'm not making it yours.) I'm not sure if it was my second, or just the second one that I remember.
I didn't have a name for what I was going through until I was about 23. I knew depression was a thing, but I didn't know what it was. Again, being sad felt so normal for me and I hadn't really had any convincing evidence that I was the abnormal one. That ability to believe that I was not substantially different from anyone else, that was a blessing. I don't know if I would have coped at that young age, knowing how wrong I was.
What changed for me when I was 23 was that I started to have suicidal ideations. This is different from being suicidal; I had no active desire to kill myself, no plan, nor the means to execute one. It was just a sense that I'd be better off dead. Apparently I'm also quite the optimist, because at 23 that struck me as really ridiculous and helped to snap me out of what were becoming increasingly intense depressive episodes.
From that point on, I started learning about depression. Teaching myself, getting involved. I volunteered on a crisis line, which was a transformative experience. It taught me about empathy and listening and not to try to solve other people's problems. It taught me that life is incredibly complex, that people are ridiculously resilient, and that although my depression was pretty small potatoes to what other people go through, that does not in any way, shape, or form make my experiences lesser than anyone else's. Mental illness isn't a competition; but it should be a comradery.
When I am in a depressive episode, really basic things become overwhelmingly difficult. Like getting out of bed, or getting dressed. Leaving the house can feel like being sent into war. One of the things I find hardest when I'm depressed is eating. I have to decide what to eat while having no discernible appetite, then either buy it or buy the ingredients to make it. In which case I then have to do all that work of making it. So eating healthy and physically nourishing myself, that's not happening!
The other thing that I find almost impossible to do when I'm depressed is talk about being depressed. Admitting to what I am going through feels like the scariest thing in the world. Death would be much easier. But talking about it, admitting that it is happening, is a really key part of my recovery. That is the other reason my illness lives in a closet. Even now, when I'm in a pretty good place with my mental health, admitting to this inability to speak is frightening. Because that depression is still whispering to me from the back corners of my brain "What if somebody reads this and holds you accountable? What if they make you name me?"
There is something... almost comforting about having depression. It's like a companion for life that I know will never leave me. I can always count on it to be around; can't count on much else! Maybe you've heard of depression described as a little black dog. It's an apt analogy for that sense of companionship - for better or worse - that comes with living with mental illness. I mean, it's quite an active thing to manage. Even when my mental health is in good shape, I've got to be constantly aware of how I'm caring for myself, how I'm feeling, looking for warning signs that a depressive episode is coming on, thinking about what I need to do to maintain my mental health.
It's a job, for which my labour is both unpaid and unrecognised, but constantly expected. It is a job that if I don't do I will be punished for. Though I won't be rewarded for the work when I do it, because apparently living without the black plague of depression immediately hanging over me is reward enough. It's really not.
This is the problem with these mental health awareness campaigns. They offer nothing of substance to those of us going through the daily slog of existing with mental illness. They don't offer up any sort of structural change for how the world works, how it is organised in ways that actively penalise those who, for a myriad of reasons, are disadvantaged (as in, those who are not able bodied neurotypical cisgendered heterosexual middle class white men). Side bar: it needs to be stated here that those who are disadvantaged are not equally disadvantaged. The disadvantage some people experience is so minor that, really, they should probably just take a seat (white feminism, I'm looking at you). For others, the disadvantage they face is so extreme that they deserve a fucking medal for getting out of bed and facing the world.
I am going to discuss some of the ways in which I have been, and continue to be, penalised by society for having a mental illness. Now again, I need to state that my experience of mental illness comes with a lot of privilege. Like, as bad as shit sometimes gets, I'm pretty sure I'm going to be fine. That is a luxury and I am aware of it.
It took me about 7 years to finish my PhD because I couldn't manage working on it full time. My self-care necessitated that I slow down, but I didn't exactly have the space to do that. Partly because of my intense unwillingness to discuss being unwell when I'm unwell, but also because of practical restrictions relating to my visa. It's almost impossible to be granted a student visa in Australia when you're enrolled part-time. I think it is technically possible if you have health conditions and letters from doctors, but, having the kind of health condition that makes you unable to study full time is not going to be looked upon favourably if you are planning on later immigrating. On top of that, I often couldn't suspend my candidature when I had a major depressive episode (and I had many during my PhD) because then I wouldn't receive my scholarship money, and then I wouldn't be able to pay my rent. Which, it should go without saying, would make my mental health issues drastically worse.
Of course, PhD scholarships don't last for 7 years, so this meant I had to take out loans. A lot of loans. And now I am straddled with a crippling amount of debt. As many, many people have pointed out to me, this is not a unique phenomenon for people in my age range. Arguably though, my debt load is tad higher than my Australian cohorts. And now that I have entered the mandatory repayment period, managing my mental health isn't optional. If I don't keep my shit together, if I can't get out of bed and go to work, I won't be able to afford to live.
Going into academia adds extra challenges onto this. At the moment I am jumping from casual job to casual job, with my workload literally changing from week to week. There is no stability in my current situation, so I have to make sure I do a damn good job whenever work comes my way so that I can build good networks and keep the work coming in. But on top of that, in order to advance into a more stable job, I need to publish. On my own, unpaid time. On top of working as many paid hours as I can possibly manage. And then once I get into that position, the expectations placed on my workload will increase exponentially. I have no idea how that will work seeing as this doesn't come with some sort of magical ability to traverse time.
I am not asking for or interested in your pity. I am making choices about how I want to live my life and I am aware of the challenges those choices contain. (There are also some clear benefits to working in academia, like the ability to work from home, in my pyjamas, at whatever hour suits me. The pay is pretty decent, really. And I get to do what I love, mostly.) I don't exactly know how I'll deal with those challenges, but, I'm leaving that in future Joni's capable hands. The point of telling you all that is to highlight how fucked up managing life with even mild depression and a whole lot of social privilege is.
There are different takes on mental illness and agency. Some people say their mental illness makes them unable to make rational choices, other people say they are not their illness and are responsible for the decisions they make. I think the reality for most of us is that the interplay between controlling and being controlled by our illness is more complex.
Last year I wrote about the culmination of events in my life that had occurred over the preceding 2 or 3 years that left my mental health and general well being reeling. When I wrote that, I felt like things were finally turning around, like I was turning over a new leaf and on my way to a better life. Instead, things got worse. Or, bad in a different way. I don't know. But 32 was a particularly shit year. Most of it was spend in depressive episodes, some minor, some major, all awful.
The thing is, when my mental health is in a good place, I can maintain that. I can sense when I'm starting to slip into a bad place and adjust things in my life to help stop the depression from coming on. When I'm in a good place with my mental health, I control my illness. But, we can't control life. Sometimes things happen that prevent me from engaging in my usual self-care strategies. Like having no money and being really fucking stressed out about it.
But also, sometimes things happen and I decide not to take care of myself. Because depression is slippery like that. It whispers at you to just let things slide, to take the easy route for a change. And considering how hard and how fucking draining it is to constantly be actively maintaining good mental health, the temptation to just, say, have a pint of icecream for dinner instead of cooking for myself can get very strong! Then before I know it, the idea of eating food seems awful and I can't bring myself to cook and the only thing I can stomach eating is icecream, and hey, here come those 40 kilos I worked my ass off to lose. And aren't I just a fat sack of shit who can't even manage to cook a fucking stirfry? And then hey, guess who's back!
The older I get, the more I know about the world, the less able I am to convince myself that feeling like I'd be better off dead is ridiculous. Instead, it becomes about facing that as a truth and living anyways. Finding joy and happiness and meaning anyways.
So, yeah, let's talk about mental health. But let's do so in a way that acknowledges the lived realities of those of us who have mental illness, instead of in a way that panders to those that don't. Let's talk about how the world needs to change. Let's talk about the structural barriers that create systematic oppression, that make living in the world an act of willfully subjecting oneself to violence. Let's talk about what it would be like to recognise life is awful, in a meaningful way. Let's talk about how we can open up space, as a society, to let people breakdown. Let's talk about how we can support each other, collectively, so that we are not forced into maintaining abusive relationships just to survive. Let's talk about the courage it takes to get up every day and face your demons, knowing those demons will never really go away. Let's talk about those who have not been able to continue that fight and remember them and honour them for how hard they tried. Let's acknowledge that sometimes giving up that fight is the only reward we'll ever get for being in it in the first place.
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