What is a mental illness ? How do we decide that someone has one? How ‘different’ does someone have to be to be mentally ill?
I’ve found that there is huge stigma attached to most if not all mental illness’. Most people avoid talking about it. I think there are a few reasons for this. Mostly it’s fear. Fear of the unknown. What might that person do? What if they react to something differently? Am I different too? Do i have a mental illness? People will treat you differently, kind of like you are disabled, not that it matters if you were disabled.
I have come to realise that my life is far from what I want it to be. It’s not how it should be and those things don’t help. There are huge difficulties between myself and my wife. Neither of us understands the other as we should do. We fear each other I think. When we got together it was a real swept off your feet type relationship. I’m trying to be very honest here too without being too personal, not easy. Lately we don’t even touch each other. It’s tense mostly. My wife has depression, which I struggle to deal with on lots of levels. She struggles with me and my mind in lots of ways too. We’ve had joint counselling and I’ve had my own counselling too, mainly for grief but life too. Our marriage isn’t intimate and hasn’t been for maybe more years than it has been. I really struggle with that lack of intimacy. It makes my mind do quadrupole time of trying to work things out. It makes my wife depressed because she knows it affects me and that I struggle with the lack of intimacy. I’m pretty highly sexed I think, but maybe I’m not and its just lack of it that makes it worse.
I have huge fears all of my own about mental illness. Sometimes I wonder if I actually don’t have a mental illness. I know I think differently to most people, but do I really? Or do others just not open up as much as me? We are all on some scale or spectrum somewhere. I’m not afraid to question life or to seek answers either.
I guess I too fear mental illness as much as I embrace it. Maybe I fear too much in life. Life is very short after all.
