“It’s up to you to control your mental illness”

I have a lot of different diagnosis, and while I understand it’s my job to manage them, I don’t think all the time people understand exactly what that looks like or how hard it is.

With my personality disorder, I’d have severe episodes and even when I was in treatment and “managing it”, I couldn’t control my severe reactions to things and would go totally catatonic in certain situations, where it was like… I actually can’t prevent this right now, I can’t speak, and I can’t physically do anything, my brain has 100% shut down. In those situations I was technically “treating” the disorder, but what was happening in my body was stronger than my ability to control it.

I also have bipolar, and I have had doctors fuck up my meds to the point where I actually could not reason, even though I was being “treated”. It wasn’t a choice, my brain was acting against my own best interests and convincing itself of things that weren’t true, so I actually had zero control. I was eventually forced into treatment, but if I hadn’t been, I don’t know what would have happened to me.

Sometimes people don’t understand that yes, it is up to me to manage my disorders - but even when I was on meds, in intensive therapy, and doing the best that I could - things happened that were outside of my physical control that I could do nothing about - and my emotional responses to things were also outside of my control, even when I tried really hard to manage and treat them.

I am not even going to get into the conversation of being an addict/alcoholic, where I’ve met many people desperate to get better, did every form of treatment and continued treatment, and still couldn’t get better.

I think this opinion is common because a lot of people don’t understand severe mental illness or personality disorders or addiction and what it’s like to live with it long term - or they’d rather grab on to some idyllic ideas about disorders because it’s easier to write someone off than to look at someone’s situation and to be like - wow, some things are beyond mental control, and even worse, that could be me. But I’d never end up like that (they say). In treatment I’ve met 100s of people who said “I’d never end up like that” and did.

You can do your absolute best to manage it, and still fail.

Lots of people don’t even have the means to get the help they need, can’t fight through the healthcare system, are incorrectly diagnosed and wrongly treated, deal with abuse from medical figures, get the wrong diagnosis/therapist/psychiatrist or struggle with the trade off and side effects of the meds, or their bodies are resistant to medication. No one talks about when therapy/psychiatry/meds fail you.

I put a lot of work and effort into therapists, psychiatrists, addiction treatment, and medication management, and ten years after starting treatment, I still deal with symptoms that are beyond my ability to just think around them. I am working extremely hard everyday to try and rise above them, and for the most part I do, but I do have lapses here and there, and I’m lucky I have people in my life who understand I’m not “choosing this” and everyday I wake up I have to battle with all of this until I go to sleep.