Reframing Mental Health When You're Not Okay

Reflecting On My Own Struggles With Mental Health And Depathologising My Experience

This article comes with a significant warning, and will contain references to significant psychological distress and suicide. It is not a topic I take likely, and if this might be dysregulating for you to read, I advise that you come back to it at another time.

I am not okay. I haven't been for a while. A number of circumstances in my life, but chiefly alterations to the medication I take for my Schizophrenia, have caused a rapid decline in my mental health over the space of 2 or 3 months.

Only days ago I was ready to give up on life. Luckily, the crisis line that I called sent emergency workers who took me to a facility where I was assessed, and referred to what is known as the Crisis Resolution Home Treatment Team (CRHTT).

This team provide support with a similar intensity to inpatient treatment, but through visits to your home rather than hospitalisation. While I am hopeful that there are better times emerging on the horizon, situations like these present a challenge to my critical position around psychiatric diagnoses.

How do I justify my refusal to identify as “mentally ill” when observably, and by my own experience, I seem to be unwell?

The thoughts and feelings that I am going through feel abberant and as though my brain is malfunctioning. In a broader sense, it feels like my brain is doing something it wasn't supposed to do. However, I believe my brain is doing precisely what it is supposed to do.

A lifetime of trauma and pain have changed the way my brain functions. It did what all brains do and adapted, forming new pathways and subsequent thoughts and behaviours, largely in an attempt to protect me from further harm. This acute mental health crisis then is not an illness, rather a release of distress by a brain that is using everything it has developed to protect me.

The main aspect of my experience, regardless of whether I am in active psychosis or not, is that i don't feel safe. This feeling is like a gathering storm that you watch off of the shore, far enough away that it's not causing you problem on the land, but close enough that you know you need to be prepared.

The problem is that it takes tremendous resolve to stay out of the path of that storm. From time to time it catches up with you and makes landfall. It is at this point that all hell breaks loose. What people see as my “mental illness” is actually my brain using everything that trauma has taught it to survive the storm.

For me, this presents a fundamental contradiction of the idea of mental illness. Neuronormative society's positions these experiences as being inherently pathological. A brain that needs chemical adjustment in order to return to a state of wellness. In my experience, those adjustments reduce my distress, but my neurocognitive style remains what it was, only more manageable.

I don't see it as pathological. Should I not adapt to trauma and learn to survive? The salient issue is that the world around me continues to trigger my feelings of unsafety and my brains means of coping with that impact on my life, which itself is ruled by power structures that are not well suited to my neurocognitive style.

In this sense, my distress is a matter of feeling safe or not safe, and not my brain malfunctioning. My brain is functioning just fine, however the world around me has taught me to fear it, and continues to trigger survival strategies that reinforce distressing feelings by their impact on my environment and relationships.

This is why I still see medication as a accommodation for my existence in this world. It allows me to dull the fear enough to work on developing new skills and strategies to survive in this world, ones that do less relational harm.

And so, while my current state feels unending and terrible, it also comes with the knowledge that it should come with opportunities to grow and evolve as a person. Becoming someone who feels less like they are buffered by the storm, and more like they are dancing in the rain.