When You're Afraid of Getting a Mental Illness Diagnosis
When writing about mental illnesses, the audience usually reads about what it’s like having a specific diagnosis.
But I want to talk about what it’s like being undiagnosed because I am too scared to speak up.
Nowadays, we hear all kinds of talk about ending the stigma, which is so important. Stigma towards mental illness has cause thousands of people like myself to feel too self-conscious to just speak up about it to a doctor because we do not want to feel judged.
What is it like to feel trapped? It’s horrible. You constantly experience symptoms of mental health disorders and are constantly trying to find ways to just deal with it and to just “brush it off” somehow because you are too scared a doctor may look down on you.
What symptoms do I personally experience? Anger, rage, sadness, suicidal thoughts, nightmares, self-harm, mood swings, crying after sex when sex is supposed to make you feel good. Mental health issues, diagnosed or not, make everything bright in the world so much darker sometimes.
Courage is a hard thing to find within yourself when you are struggling from something related to your mental health. You want all the help you can get, but you have no motivation to go looking for it. Because as scary as mental illnesses can be, you don’t know anything different.
You don’t believe there is in fact some way to help you. You don’t want medication because you want to be a person who can control her feelings without it, or you want medication but you’re too scared to speak to a doctor for a prescription that may help because your anxiety tells you they are going to think you’re a drug addict for asking for pills.
You want to have sex with your boyfriend but your depression reminds you that you were used all through high school by boys who said they loved you, then disappeared the second they got what they were looking for, and now every time you interact sexually with someone you think they are going to leave you afterwards (even if you have been together two years).
I guess the point to me writing this is that even the people with undiagnosed mental health issues just want to live a “normal” life; but it is so damn scary to even try to find that normal. We may be scared of what people are going to think, we may be scared that there is no help for us, we may be scared that this is going to be baggage we carry around forever. And I cannot emphasize how important it is to focus on undiagnosed mental health issues also because, although undiagnosed, they are real issues that thousands deal with every single day.
If you or someone you know needs help, visit our suicide prevention resources page.
If you need support right now, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255, the Trevor Project at 1-866-488-7386 or text “START” to 741-741.
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