by Chad Fitzpatrick, Bayport, Minnesota
This is about my life and observation of it and changes as I change. I would like to share with you what living with a mental illness is like and how I’ve learned to manage it. Every mental illness is different because every person is different. There is no easy cures or treatments but there are many different tools available to us so we can learn how to manage and survive living with a mental illness.
It is us to us to figure out how to manage our own individual mental illness, which at times is not easy to do. Especially, if your brain is lying to you and you feel unworthy and your exhausted because you don’t understand your mental illness and you don’t want to ask for help because your brain continues to lie to you by telling you that no one will understand and that you are just a crazy lunatic and there’s no help for someone like you.
When people behind these prison walls and out there in the free world hear the words “Mental Illness,” they automatically think the person is crazy, unstable, wacko, or belongs in the nuthouse. But that is because for many, many years talking about a person’s mental illness was considered taboo, but now with time changing we as a society are starting to speak openly about mental illness and the impact it has on our society and what we can do to help those that struggle with a mental illness.
Those of us who lived with a mental illness think we are a failure because of the first, second, or third, etc. “Cure” treatment for our own individual mental illness didn’t work the way we had expected it to or wanted it to. But we have to realize and accept that an illness is an illness and that is not our fault that certain type of treatment or therapy we tried to treat our mental illness with didn’t work perfectly or it worked for a while but then stopped working.
We are not a math problem. There is no easy solution. We are human beings. What works for me won’t always work for you and vice versa. But I truly believe that there is a type of treatment/therapy out there for everyone to learn how to manage and survive their mental illness. Sometimes people don’t understand that for a lot of us with mental illness we struggle being human some days. If the stigma of having mental illness is too much, just know you are not alone. So in closing, I leave you with this: If you are alive, you have fought and battled your own mental illness. You have been scarred, worn, exhausted at times and perhaps even close to giving up, but you didn’t. The only person you have to be better than is the person you were yesterday.