Live, thrive, survive

Once a year I find myself in the position of offering an ‘open letter’ of sorts to a community. Last year, it was web design and hosting – this year, its far closer to home.

My name is Kai and I’m bipolar one.

I define myself in those blank, coverall terms, because, like telling people I’m British, or a writer, or artist, or designer or anything else, I am what I was created as. It doesn’t define me, not exactly, but it should give people an idea of what to expect – IF they know what it means.

Increasingly, lately, I’ve found that people just don’t.

Mental health is a muddy torrent of terms, information streams – its messed up even further by the loud and more often than not, flat out wrong assumptions those of US with diagnoses tell people. And to confuse it even further, people think that they can diagnose themselves.

Self diagnosis, in its place, as a tool or starting point when you go to your doctor is wonderful. Its something that, in its place, can help you to start adjusting as quickly as you are able and it means its not a shock out of the blue.

There’s no reason to remain undiagnosed – and no reason to make others feel bad by playing the ‘I’m (this) card’ without actually knowing. Its a disservice to you, and those in the community who have their diagnosis and have buckled down and get on with it. And of course, we have our off days, but…our off days are made harder by the constant downplaying that our language, our communities, and to be honest, the world at large, operates under. Most of us do play the role of the victim too, which makes the cycle self perpetuating.

I’m making this open letter plain – please consider the lives of those around you – the at least 1 in four people, the world over, who are touched by mental health issues. 25% of the world, OR MORE, live with some form of mental health disorder, and we all live with the stigma that’s dual fold – depression is downplayed by the common use of the term in society today, and people can and DO self diagnose without medical opinion, whilst once we are diagnosed, we’re faced with a battle of educating, enlightening and aiding those that we come in contact with to understand who and what we are – and that though we define our illness, and it doesn’t control US, it does, in many ways, control our reactions, our thoughts, our perceptions and defines, emotionally at least, who we are, and how we handle situations of stress, pain, joy, anguish, pleasure. And those definitions are then straight jacketed by the beliefs of those around us. And its time for that to stop.

Mental health isn’t something that’s going to fix itself overnight – either in the personal sense of the survivors we encounter daily, or the survivors we become. Its also not going to go away – and as a global conciousness, I think its about time we REALLY adapted to the idea that people feel things deeply. And those depths can sometimes be painful – fatal.

So the next time you turn around and call someone insane, crazy, or tell them to pull themselves together, to buck up, to take a ‘chill pill’ or the next time you tell someone that a passing down phase is you ‘depressed’, spare a thought for those of us who live, thrive and survive under the very same conditions you’re using to call attention to your bad days. And remember that if you are depressed, though you don’t need the label to get help, the label itself can open the doors you need to the right sort of help, at the right times. And there’s no shame in knowing what you are – just a whole new world of experiences.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 at 8:48 am and is filed under D Kai Wilson, Op-eds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.