What You May Miss When You Dismiss Someone as a Drunk

When I was in my mid-to-late teens, I had a problem with drugs and alcohol. For the best part of four years, I continually got high and drank myself into oblivion. Most people who saw me during that time could’ve dismissed me as just another addict or drunk. And I guess that’s what I was. That’s how I looked, right? But to really know what was going on, you’d have to look deeper. Sadly, very few people ever do.

• What is Bipolar disorder?

I have mental illnesses. Bipolar I disorder, borderline personality disorder and anxiety disorder. I didn’t receive this diagnosis until about two years ago. Prior to that, I lived misdiagnosed. My first diagnosis came after I tried to kill myself when I was 15. First it was psychotic depression, then schizoaffective disorder and then major depressive disorder. I had a constantly changing diagnosis and received little actual help. Nobody knew what to do with me. I was suicidal, psychotic and reckless.

Because I wasn’t receiving the help I needed, I decided to take matters into my own hands.

I didn’t consciously decided to be an addict or a drunk, but my emotional pain was tearing me apart; I just needed it to stop. The only method I could think of was drugs. I needed to not exist for a while. Drugs took away my cares. They took away everything. I didn’t get addicted to the drugs, I got addicted to the feeling they gave me.

There were drugs I took to calm me down, some I took to keep my weight down and others that completely took me away and obliterated everything. And of course there was the alcohol. I was drinking nearly every single night and binge drinking two or three nights a week.

I was a mess, I won’t deny that. But it was how I coped. It was the only thing I could find to make me feel better. I was 16 years old with a care team that wasn’t equipped to deal with serious mental illness. There was no psychiatrist in my town, my therapist was useless and my doctor didn’t know anything about mental illness because it wasn’t his specialty — he was just a general doctor. What do you even do with that? So I helped myself instead.

So before you judge someone for having a problem with drugs or alcohol, take a minute to look beyond what you see. You don’t know why or how they ended up in the situation they’re in, nor are they a bad person for it.

I’ve been clean of drugs and alcohol for more than five years now. I’ve finally found a brilliant care team that took the time to correctly diagnose me and get me the medication and help I so desperately needed. I’m fairly stable. I’m a work in progress. We all are.

That is just my story, and a small part of it at that. Everyone has a story and it’s never as simple as you might think. Don’t be so quick to judge others before you know the reasons behind what they do. I turned to drugs out of desperation and pain. I’m not a bad person for that. I was in a bad place mentally, and I just needed help.