Mental Illness

After a request from a friend i've been asked to do a blog post about Mental illness. At first I didn't want to do this, Mental illness is something that I've have to deal with personally and externally my whole life I'm not going to talk about every illness because there isn't enough time in the day, but I will be picking out the ones closest to me and things I have experienced. My own personal experiences of it have been terrifying at times and this blog is probably the most difficult I've had to write. 1 in 4 people suffer from a mental illness. Just let that sink in, how many of your friends or family do you think have suffered? It's a frightening statistic that gets scarier as time goes by.

Depression is the most common mental illness and affects 17 million people every year.1 in 33 children suffer from depression as do 1 in 8 teenagers. Forms of depression include  Dysthymia, Bi-polar, Post-natal depression and Seasonal Affective disorder. A lot of people think that Depression isn't a real illness and that it just means you're in a bad mood or feeling melancholic. Let me tell you this, it isn't like that at all. It can begin that way, especially in teen years but often this passes. When it lingers however and it begins to affect you life in drastic ways, this is when it can be diagnosed as clinical depression. For me, it was a constant feeling of worthlessness, that I was never going to amount to anything. Everything seemed bleak and it was difficult to find pleasure in things that I used to. It interfered with my sleeping and eating patterns and I found it hard to find anything that made me believe that it was worth trying to keep going. People think that you can just snap out of it, or that you're just being stupid but that isn't true either. Depression is a proven medical issue caused by a lack of serotonin in the brain. It is hard to deal with and it is easy to push away anyone who wants to help you deal with it. I lost friends and I almost lost my boyfriend because of it. I've seen it affect my friends before and it's hard to watch them suffer without knowing how to help them.

With Depression often (but not always) comes Anxiety. Research suggests that as many as 1 in 6 young people will suffer from anxiety at some point in their lives. In America, 40 million people suffer with some sort of anxiety disorder and it is estimated that only a third of these people get treatment. That means almost 25 million people in America alone are suffering in silence. Anxiety can also come in different forms such as Social Anxiety, phobias, Post-traumatic stress and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Anxiety isn't something that can be controlled, it isn't an 'over-reaction' as it is often perceived. It can make people imagine that things in their lives are much worse than they actually are and can sometimes stop people from confronting their fear. It's like being in a constant state of worry. The physical symptoms of it can include increased heart rate, 'jelly legs', shaking, dry mouth, nausea, hyperventilation, dizziness and difficulty breathing. The psychological symptoms include, feeling like you're losing control, thinking you might die, feeling like people are looking at you all the time, feeling like you want to run away and escape, feeling detached from the environment and the people around you, feeling on edge. On a personal level, I have seen people have to deal with the more difficult forms of anxiety and have been there through the difficult times. I've seen people have panic attacks, break down in tears shaking, telling me that they don't know how to deal with it. From this perspective alone, it is one of the most difficult mental illnesses to deal with, I can hardly imagine how hard it must be to be suffering from it.

The final thing I want to talk about is eating disorders and body dysmorphia. Until recently this was something i'd turned a blind eye to, I didn't understand it, until recently I didn't think I knew anyone that suffered from it but I was shocked to find it was closer to me than i ever thought. Eating disorders can often go hand in hand with Anxiety and/or depression. They can be triggered things including, a traumatic experience, stressful situations or having a history of eating disorders or substance abuse in the family. Anorexia and Bulimia are the most well known eating disorders. Anorexia usually develops between the ages of 16-17 and affects 1 in 250 women and 1 in 2000 men. Bulimia normally develops later between the ages of 18-19 and around 90 percent of its sufferers are female. Many people who have an eating disorder will not seek help because they don't believe that anything is wrong with them. They just think that their weight is an issue and set out to deal with it. Anorexia and Bulimia can be easily hidden in it's early stages and in many cases are not noticed until it begins to seriously affect the health of the sufferer to the point where it can cause death. Recovery can take a long time, and things like Counselling and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy play a huge part in the recovery process. When I found out that a close friend of mine was suffering this way it was a very sobering experience.

They say that you don't fully understand something until it's happening in front of you and I can not emphisise enough how true this is. Too many people have a lack of understanding of mental illness, a lot of people think that just because you can't physically see the effects of the illness, that it doesn't class as one. Others think that mental illnesses are just cries for attention. They aren't, mental illnesses are a serious problem affecting more and more people each year. The mind is one of the scariest and terrible things at times, how long before people realise that these illnesses can not be helped? How long before we start to do something about the millions of people suffering in silence every day?

It's not a choice.

A friend of mine was talking to me today about her faith and her views about being gay. Her claim was that it is a choice that is made by the person alone and that it is still considered to be a sin. Now I have every respect for her faith, in fact I think that faith is a wonderful thing to have, but when it come to this subject matter I can't understand how people can still accept this.

In a lot of ways it upsets me that people still believe that being gay is a choice someone makes. If you believe in the idea that 'you cannot choose who you fall in love with' for the opposite gender then how can you suggest that because you fall in love with someone of the same sex all of sudden you have chosen to do so? I didn't choose to fall in love with a male any more than my female friend fell in love with a woman. Love is an emotion that makes the human race very flawed. It is the one thing that we have no control over, desire isn't a thing that we can turn on and off.

The idea that you can do such a thing baffles me. If this were the case, we would settle for the first person that we 'chose'. It suggests that you can never fall in love with anyone else because we can choose not to do so. It is entirely possible to love more than one person and more often than not it causes heartbreak. We don't choose to fall in love with someone else because as I said before, love isn't a thing that you can control.

Dr Christian Jessen (Embarrassing bodies) is openly gay, he has recently filmed a documentary called 'Cure me, I'm gay' in which he goes undercover claiming he wants to be cured and tries out various 'cures' to see what would happen. Some of the 'treatments' he received were frankly horrific. In one clip he is made to drink a syrup that would make him sick, then put in a room with pictures of naked men and a recording telling him what a disgusting person he was for 'choosing' to be that way. At first, I didn't understand why people would put themselves through that. Then I realised, it's because of the view that homosexuality is a sin. People torture themselves this way because of this view, and the desire to be accepted is a strong one.

The beauty of love is that we don't understand it, we can't explain why it happens, we can't explain why we love. I to this day can't explain the love I feel for my boyfriend, I just accept that it happened. I didn't choose for it to happen, I had no idea that it would. Why is it okay for opposite genders to feel that for each other but not two people of the same?

There isn't a 'cure' for being gay. You can't change who people are.  Let love exist, whether it be between two men, two women, an man and woman, transgenders, transexuals, genderqueer, bisexuals, asexuals, pansexuals and whoever else. Everyone deserves to love freely, not to be forced otherwise.

Sexism towards men...

I wasn't going to do a post about sexism because it's not something i ever personally felt strongly about. But, since my essay is about sexism and it seems that I can't really get away from the subject, I've decided to address the topic properly regardless of anyone's thoughts. I have accepted that sexism is always going to exist. And by sexism, I mean discrimination towards BOTH genders. I think it's sort of sad how people think of sexism and automatically assume it means discrimination towards only women. Are women the only sex? No. this affects men just as much and that's what I want to talk about.

Why can men only take 2 weeks paternity leave when a woman a year? This marginalises the role of fathers and denies them the opportunity to take an equal share in the role of parenting. It is a piece of legislation which further perpetuates the stereotype of man as breadwinner and woman as carer. Why can't we scrap the terms all together and call it 'parental leave'? That way responsibility could be shared between both parents. Why is it if a man can't afford to pay child support he's seen as a lowlife waste of space whereas if it's a woman who can't support her child people take pity? Who decided that this meant that men didn't care about their children if they couldn't pay?

What about health? 40,000 men are diagnosed with Prostate cancer every year, compared to the 48,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer. Why is breast cancer awareness and campaigning recognised more than Prostate cancer? It's also a little known face that Prostate cancer research receives less funding than Breast cancer does...

My final point is this. Statistics show that men are on average 3-5 times more likely to commit suicide than women. In fact it is the biggest killer of young men in the UK. There is a lot of pressure on men to be the ;breadwinner'. To be financially secure, to support families. If a man is unemployed I believe that it would affect him more than it would a woman in a similar situation (of course, there are exceptions!) I think that a lot of men would find it difficult to speak up about problems they're having. It's not easy to talk about thinks lke anxiety, depression and emotional termoil as it is, but with the generalisation that men are the less sensitive of the genders, i think it'd be harder for them to come forward and admit them. It's seen as their weakness and failure as a 'man'.

Finding my place

I was told that there's a moment in you life when things just slot into place.I never believed it. I thought i was going to be the person who just drifted and never really did anything  productive with her life. But all of a sudden in the space of 24 hours I feel like my life has slotted into place and I know what i want to do and be.

I would love to teach, but i don't think I would have felt as fulfilled as a person if I go ahead and do so. I want fun and excitement and to feel like I'm making a change in the world. Yes teaching would give me that, but to be involved with the law and the criminal justice system? That fills me with so much excitement that i've hardly stopped talking about it all day! I want to do forensic linguistics.. code breaking and looking at how language is used to cover up crime! How exciting does that sound?!

Everything that seemed to go right today, and things really seem to be looking up!