Honestly, it's not that I find it scary, it's that of I feel I want to educate or talk about my mental illness with people or if I need to for medical purposes, I won't be able to because I'll either get one of four.stigmatic reactions or a mix of all:
a) *gasp* "Don't talk about that! You're making me really uncomfortable!
b) "You just need to learn to deal with ups and downs like everyone else. What you're going through is completely normal and every teenager has weird mood swings... you don't need psychotherapy and you definitely don't need that mood stabilizing shit. You're just being overly dramatic and you need to just see your guidance counselor more often and lighten up!" (this is especially explored in Ruby Wax's awesome TEDTalk called "What's so funny about mental illness" who uses her comedy experience and battle with clinical depression to educate people about how physical illness gets far more sympathy than that of mental illness that made me laugh, scream, and cry out of empathy) This is also explored in this awesome comic.
c) *shies away creeped out to the max* "They're fucking nuts and need to be locked away in an institution for life.
d) "But nobody has stigma for mental illness. We all love and support you."
Quite frankly, all of these make me want to barf. They all imply that either mental illness is just a way of medicalizing people's behavior and that everyone who admits they are mentally ill is a hypochondriac. Or they realize these conditions are diagnosed because the "normal" emotions, moods, feelings, and behaviors are severe enough to impact a person social, occupational, or academic functioning. However, these people that know this often take it too far and say that we are "incapable of leading normal lives" and need to permanently hospitalized. While this is true for a certain percentage of the severely mentally ill, the vast majority of us, whether mild, moderate, or severe can be managed with psychotherapy and/or medication.
I also do not like hearing that there is not stigma. Yes, we are working on de-stigmatizing mental illness through blogs like this and my friend Cara's blog, That Crazy Crippled Chick, where she candidly discusses her battles with cerebral palsy (which I also have) and an anxiety disorder. But stigma has not diminished. Admit it, you were caught off guard when you saw I said I was diagnosed with bipolar II, weren't you? Don't lie, you were.
I especially dislike the dismissiveness of Reaction B. Echoing Ruby Wax's sentiments from her TEDTalk, what if a woman had breast cancer and she saw a lump on her boob, got all freaked out, and went to her regular OB/GYN to get it checked out, and when she got home, instead of being afraid and consoling, he said, "Oh, you just need to learn to live withe fact that you have nipples just like everyone else... the doctor was wrong and you just need to live life like everyone else and not worry about things."
Um, excuse me, but if someone actually did that to a woman who had breast cancer, you would go completely apeshit, would you? Yes, you would. Because you know you're being ludicrous, dismissive, and frankly, a tad bit mean. Yet, the same person who knows that this action is not just on a person with cancer, might, scarily and confusingly, do virtually the exact same thing to a person with mental illness, just simply in a different context.
For non-mentally ill people to understand the concept above to a clear extent, here's my personal feeling of what living with bipolar is like. These awesome videos like TEDxTerryTalks - Laura Bain - Living with Bipolar Type II (she has the exact same time I have) and the awesome bipolar documentary, Up/Down, the bipolar experience is often described as winter versus summer, slippers versus stilettos, kites versus anchors, etc and while I agree very much with all of these analogies and metaphors, I thought it would be best to come up with my own.
So, for me, being bipolar is like being a trampoline all the time. "Jumping" represents your mood, energy, and ability to carry out day-to activities. You often jump normally, with just enough height to have fun, enjoy jumping, and want to jump again. But without warning (even though you know full well you have the ability to do this), you jump so high that you get almost "addicted" to jumping and have your head in the clouds. You're ecstatic, so you jump really high and because you're ecstatic, you have all this energy and you feel like you could jump even further into space. You never get tired, you want to jump all day long and feel rested after two to five hours of sleep. You want other people to jump with you and you get things done really fast and efficiently. You think you'll never come down, and even though you're scaring the shit out of yourself for acting this way, you feel amazing and never want to feel any other way. You're up in the sky at night and shooting stars take the place of normal thoughts. They sneak into your brain, blocking normal thoughts and are bright, amazing, and fast. They emulate race cars in this way, and you can't slow them down. Then, one day, out of the blue, you come down and crash and leave a giant, gaping, ugly hole in the trampoline. It gets really dark and cold. You can't get out of the hole. Even if you can sort of get out of the hole temporarily, you always revert back to your depressive episode. It feels as though your arms and legs are made of lead. You want to eat all the time and you stay up until the wee hours of the morning, despite severe fatigue. When you do go to bed on time, you almost always wake up in the middle of the night sweating. You are extremely sensitive to any form of mild criticism or rejection. You lose all motivation to do anything. You're stuck in the gaping hole, hopeless, trapped, tearful, confused, and cold. All your thoughts are gone. They come slow, staggered, jagged, sharp, heavy. Even so, all these thoughts are anyways are thoughts about the giant hole you're trapped in. People wonder what happened to the jumping and you're not jumping anymore, not ecstatic or normal, just not jumping at all. You have to jump because people need you to jump.
So, let me ask you this: After that whole analogy, do you really think I'm "crazy" or "making the choice" to be this way. Hell no.
Just tell me, am I Paige/crazy person now or am I just still plain old Paige? You tell me. Because, guess what? I actually don't like the phrase "You are not your diagnosis" simply because my diagnoses of cerebral palsy and bipolar disorder are part of who I am and they do define part of me, but only a mere piece of this huge puzzle that defines Paige Taylor. Yes, 296.89 is part of me (DSM code for bipolar II) but it doesn't own my entirety.
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