Being 25

Many people write about mental health, be it good mental health or mental illness. I unfortunately am on the side where I feel the need to write about my mental illness, I wish it was about my mental health being great but we are who we are.

I’ve been looking at statistics online & found an article by The Guardian with these statistics:

• 16 million people in the UK experience mental illness at some point in their lives.
• 1 in 4 adults each year suffer from mental illness, from anxiety to alcohol dependency.
• 3 in 4 mental illnesses start in childhood, 75% of mental illness start before they're 18. 10% of children between 5-16 have been diagnosed & 75% of these people will receive no treatment until they hit a ‘crisis’ point.
• These crisis points will show as self harm, being suicidal, violent & aggressive.
• Suicide is the leading cause of death in young men & woman between the ages of 20-34.
• Figures from the Office of National Statistics reveal the number of suicides each year is greater than the last 10 years.
• Most people, especially young people, link their mental illness to alienation & isolation. Most believing they’d be treated differently or would lose friends.

I am one of those who lost friends due to my mental illness, I think it can be due to the fact that they do not understand my illness. The statistics above do not surprise me, in fact I was one of those kids who had depression at the age of 13 & even had therapy at the age of 7.

Also I was one of those who did receive help till I completely broken down & started self harming daily. I’d hidden my problems so well until I couldn’t work anymore. I’d cry all night & hope that if I just hurt myself bad enough, all this would stop. I would of become part of those statistics, which is sad to think that even when someone dies by suicide, they're just another statistic.

I’m 25 now & I still live with borderline personality disorder, depression, anxiety, & fibromyalgia. Everyday I wish it would all stop, the pain, the flashbacks, the trauma. I wanted to be "normal," get up, go to work, live with my fiancé. But instead I live with my parents, I don’t work, I barely make it out of bed, & I still self harm.

I’ll continue to live with this, to fight my mind & my body. I will keep writing about what struggles I face & how everyday life effects me. Even how the news affects me, it’s not as simple as just ignoring it all & getting on with it.

You’re one of the lucky ones if you can do that, we all take our lives for granted in some ways & even I do. My parents for example, I’ve got a roof over my head, a place to sleep, & food in my stomach. I’m extremely grateful for my parents, they put up with the insane mood swings & acknowledge that I’ve self-harmed. They don’t understand it but not many do. It’s still a conversation I’ve never had with them & that’s purely because somethings are hard to tell the people who have brought you up & given you everything in life. My dad has depression, my mum has a history of mental illness but it’s still not a subject we speak of & maybe that’s due to their upbringing. The difference between how they grew up & now, I think takes them by surprise. Even me being gay was something we never spoke about because it was one of those things that was frowned upon by people around them. Belongs I’m happy, that’s all that matters they say.

But let me finish with something my therapist said: We say to ourselves that someone else has it worse compared to what were going through mentally. She said that to you this is your life, this is what you live through & as terrible as what others live through, you feel all this. You have to focus on your own life, focus on what will make you better. You can’t help anyone else if you can’t help yourself.