My experience with Mental Health

Mental health has been an important factor in my life since I was very young. However, I don’t really want to bore you with my whole life story, so I’ll try to keep it short.

My first experience with mental health was one I was unaware of until two years after it happened. I was ten years old, only in fifth grade, when my sister was a freshman in high school. She got involved with the wrong people, and then she made some bad decisions. I wasn’t aware that any of this was happening at the time. However, one day I woke up, and she was gone. It was like this for a week or two, and then she showed back up. She said she went somewhere for help and showed me a fun unbreakable pen that she had gotten.

I later learned that my sister had gone to a mental hospital. I was not aware of this at all at the time that it was happening. My parents obviously knew I wouldn’t understand at such a young age. When I got into 7th grade, I came upstairs one day to my mom pleading with my sister. She wanted my sister to eat something. I didn’t understand. I brushed my teeth, and I went to school. When I got home, my dad took me out to dinner. He explained to me that my sister had an eating disorder, and she needed to go to an inpatient facility in Minnesota. I was devastated, and put a lot of blame on myself.

This is the crucial point where my mental health started to go downhill. I started to isolate myself, and with my parents being preoccupied with my sister, they didn’t really pay much attention at all to it. I became severely depressed, and I began hurting myself. Eventually, I didn’t want to live like that anymore. After a month and a half, I told my parents. They brought me to a therapist who I didn’t like, and I lied my way through the sessions.

The helpful part of those sessions was when I got diagnosed. I got diagnosed with depression, anxiety, mild-severe obsessive compulsive disorder, and self mutilation risk. I was upset about my diagnosis for a long time. I didn’t want to believe that anything was wrong with me, and I still had lots of thoughts about doing bad things to myself.

Eventually, I decided to see the therapist I see now. She’s very wonderful, and I enjoy working through my issues with her. I’ve struggled through a lot, but I’m proud to say that I came out bigger and stronger from the situations I’ve encountered. I would never eliminate any of those experiences from my life because they made me a better person.

My point of this is IT DOES GET BETTER. I was in the headspace too of feeling like it’s never going to be over, but time does heal. I used to hate living so much, and now I wake up in the morning, have my coffee, and I am grateful as heck for being where I am today.

I did it, and so can you. Stay strong warrior; You got this.