Normalizing mental health isn’t supposed to just be acceptance

April 26, 2022Leave a comment

I’ve always disliked a lot of the language around normalizing mental health, because a lot of it doesn’t focus on the health it focuses on the illness and though depression and anxiety are common I want to normalize coping mechanisms and treatment not the disordered behavior that comes with them. That behavior should be recognized, treated kindly, but used as a gateway to treat it not to simply accept it.

Just because mental illness is normal doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t aim to fix it, and most people agree with that, I just often find accounts or groups who push for acceptance that this is just the way it is, and honestly the purpose of normalizing mental health is to help people feel unashamed enough to ask for help and find healthier days ahead.

If your motion is radical mental health acceptance without a push towards treatment (whether medication or not, both are fine) than you have no place amongst those trying to heal from it. It’s harmful to push for acceptance without healing and we wouldn’t be having this conversation about physical ailments. Mental health is physical heath and should be treated the same.

False moods and false thoughts – battling mental health

September 24, 2021Leave a comment

Before I say anything else I know that someone will disagree with my use of “false” all moods are real and all thoughts come to our head are thoughts, I know that, what I’m talking about is the moods and thoughts that are controlled more by our mental illness or imbalances than they are by us. They are false answers to questions we could normally answer correctly.

Those moods and thoughts are a lot of time out of our control, but how we acknowledge them and how we act on them is completely our choice. Once we know they are “false” or from our imbalances it is easier to choose to not act on them or to do so properly, the problem is a lot of these moods and thoughts feel just as real and rational as our other thoughts and learning to tell the difference between them is insanely hard.

It might be easier to know where our thoughts are coming from if we ran every one by a group of trusted peers, but even leaking some of them toxic thoughts can hurt people and it can hurt us having other people tell us what is “real” and what isn’t. So how do you go about trying to figure it out?

Sometimes thinking about what a trusted peer would say to it can help a lot. It can give you insight. Sometimes thinking about what you would say when you were more stable can give you insight. Would you have reacted this way when you were in a happier mindset? No? Why not? Would your calm and collected friend widen her eyes at your thoughts in response to something?

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Pregnancy mood swings remind me of my bipolar mood swings. So does overcoming them.

April 20, 2021Leave a comment

Pregnancy reminds me of my bipolar disorder. That’s a weird statement to make, but it’s true. Your hormones are all over the place, and not unlike the chemical reactions in your brain that make you cycle from manic to depressive. It finds you in the exact same strange space were you know your emotions aren’t 100% correct or rational but you know you are feeling them fully anyway.

A lot of the mood swings make me ponder the lessons I’ve been trying to teach myself for years. Is this a rational feeling? How can I try to turn it into one without devaluing the fact that it is real?

Just because you know an emotion isn’t right doesn’t make it go away. Knowing your manic doesn’t let you switch off your manic traits like a light switch, but it is a start, and lets be real, you have to start somewhere. It lets you start trying to fight for control.

I’ve found most of my control in this disease through medication, but even those of us who have had a lot of luck with our bipolar medications can tell you that we still swing some, and I still have to take on those swings one on one. Rational brain verses the chemical brain.

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My limit: People with access to bipolar treatment who choose not to treat it.

March 1, 20212 Comments

I’m bipolar, I write about it a lot. I cover a lot of mental health topics on this blog. I’m passionate about it. But even people who are super understanding and have been through a lot have their limits, and I want to talk about that. I want to talk about something that deeply annoys me in bipolar communities, and that’s people who have access to treatment and refuse it because they like the high of mania despite the fact that they are putting their loved ones through daily hell.

Untreated bipolar happens to everyone with the disorder. We all start untreated. Sometimes people can’t afford it. Sometimes we have to go off our medications for health reasons. Sometimes we haven’t found the right treatment and we’re in limbo as we try to get it right. It’s hard and I will support people through those rocky years without any hesitation. It’s when people have no excuse for being untreated. It’s when they give up because it’s difficult to find the right meds and therapy. It’s when they don’t do anything to try and prevent their toxic actions that hurt people. It’s when they roll over in defeat without caring the consequences.

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