From the Outside

    I had always thought of myself as someone who had a lot of experience with mental illness. Both of my parents had clinically diagnosed mental health conditions. I watched my grandmother take anti-anxiety medication for the entire part of her life that I knew her, and I watched her still battle her anxiety even with her medication. I had other friends and loved ones who had checked into in-patient treatment for mental health concerns, many of them more than once. I also personally knew people that either struggled with suicidal ideation or had actually attempted to take their own lives. 

    Up until my own struggle with OCD and panic disorder began, I felt like I understood what it was like to have a mental health condition. I had seen my loved ones struggling and suffering with mental illness, and I thought that since I had also struggled and suffered with difficult things throughout my life, that meant I understood what they were going through. I thought all suffering was the same because from the outside looking in, suffering just looks like suffering, if that makes sense.

    Prior to the beginning of my own struggle with mental illness, all of my "experience" with mental illness had been from the outside looking in. As you can imagine, when I suddenly found myself on the inside of that struggle looking out, it was a completely new experience. Sure, I had seen mental illness in other people. Sure, I had a basic knowledge of the causes and symptoms of various mental health conditions thanks to my bachelors degree in psychology. But...neither of those things prepared me for what it was like to feel a mental health condition wreaking havoc on my mind, body, and life. 

    I had ideas of suffering and mental illness, but I honestly couldn't wrap my mind around how this "thing" could interfere so much in the lives of people so as to make it nearly impossible to get out of bed, to leave their homes, to be a functional human being, or to stay alive even, no matter how hard they tried. From the outside looking in it's so easy to mistakenly just see people that maybe aren't trying hard enough or to see people just "giving in" to their mental health condition, or people who chose "a permanent solution to a temporary problem" instead of people that have expended tremendous amounts of effort trying to be as functional and as normal as possible until their stores of energy are depleted.

    Then, it happened to me, and like many of my friends and loved ones, I found myself thinking, "Other people really don't understand what this is like. I didn't...until now." From the outside looking in, I had never experienced the kind of suffering that comes with mental illness. (Nobody tells you that it's a different kind of suffering. Not worse, better, or more traumatic...just different.) I had never experienced that kind of fear that comes with not knowing if I could trust myself and my own thoughts. I had also never experienced the kind of prolonged anguish that can make a person think it would be a blessing not to wake up the next morning until I was living in it. 

    From the outside looking in, it's so easy to pass judgement on the way people deal with their mental health. When you aren't trapped on the inside of that struggle it's so easy to say that you would have handled something differently or that you never would have allowed your mind to run away to whatever place someone else is in. You don't know what you'd do though, until it's happening to you. None of us behave as logically as we imagine we will in any given situation where fear and pain are the dominant emotions or when survival mode is activated. 

    I'll end with this: As cliché as it sounds, mental illness is one of those things that it's impossible to truly understand until it happens to you. Sure, you can have experience dealing with other people's mental health, but that experience is that of an observer watching from the outside of the struggle and the suffering, untouched by it. That experience is completely different to the experience of the person with the mental health condition who is trapped on the inside looking out, who can't have distance from it. From the outside looking in, it's so easy to view a person's struggle with mental health through the societal lens of the stigma that tells us that those people are lazy or dramatic or attention-seeking instead of simply seeing people that are trying their best with the internal and external resources that they have at any given moment.