Dealing with mental health and the People in your life.

Mental health...

It's a hard thing to watch someone deal with, and hard to be the one dealing with it.

So many people I know suffer from something.  Usually the result of childhood trauma.

From Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, Clinical Depression, to Bi-Polar Disorder and Schizoeffective Disorder.

Dealing with these and other mental disorders are hard.  Dealing with them and people that don't believe in them...that's harder.

Yep, in this day and age there are people that don't believe in mental disorders, despite the living evidence in their lives.

I, myself, was diagnosed fairly late into my life with PTSD and Dissociative Disorder.

It's helped knowing what it is.  I'd struggled my entire life not knowing what was wrong with me.

Some people have been supportive and helpful, while others just...act like it's nothing.

I have an ex-gf who also has PTSD and she has Borderline Personality Disorder.  She is a single mom raising her kids as best she can.  She is a good mom.  She struggles with her issues and doesn't always win.  None of us do.  But she is pretty amazing.  Of course, she doesn't see that.

When your life is seen through your lense of mental problems, it's very distorted.  The lense is warped.

But if the people in your life don't understand how hard it is for you, you feel alone.  You feel like you let them down.  You feel worthless.

I honestly didn't know much about Borderline Personality Disorder, despite having been married to a woman with it, until I was with her.

That may seem strange, but at the time I was married, I kept confusing terminology.  Because the name Borderline Personality Disorder is pretty nonsensical and inaccurate (which the Psychology world agrees with me on and are trying to find a better term for it).

It still kind of confuses me, but one thing  I do recall from reading about it: most people with it see things in a very black and white form.

My ex-wife sure did.  And my ex-gf...yeah, I think so.  But that last is just my conjecture.

You also have people that believe only soldiers can have PTSD.  They will literally say stupid crap like "You can't have that if you didn't serve."

I wish that were the case, dipwad.  PTSD is an experience, a memory, that gets put into the wrong area of the brain.   Instead of being stored where we normally store memories, people with PTSD have a traumatic event memory stored in their lizard brain (also called the reptile brain).
The lizard brain is where our fight or flight response is, so when something makes us remember the event, it triggers the fight or flight response.
Stress can trigger it too.

Apparently this backwards sentiment has grown so much that they are now starting to use two terms for the condition.
PTSD and CPTSD.
The second one is Combat Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The point is, those of us who deal with these things...we don't want pity.  We don't want group hugs.

We simply want people to understand how we struggle.  Failing that, at least acknowledge that we do.