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WORLD Mental Health Day is one that is celebrated on October 10 every year to help raise mental health awareness, break growing stigmas and express our support for the people living with any mental illness.
I am a 21-year-old woman. I have schizophrenia and my life with it shouldn’t have to be a secret.
In recent years, the importance of providing better mental health advocacy, treatment options and services for the people with mental illness has been encouraged more than ever before.
However, those of us living with schizophrenia and other serious mental health conditions are being left behind because of the strong stigma that comes with it. Research clearly shows that a stigma is a form of social injustice that delays treatment attainment, promotes social isolation, stress and even puts individuals with schizophrenia at a higher risk for a more severe illness course.
At the age of 15, a few months prior to my first psychotic episode, there was a sudden decline in my overall daily functioning. It was a shock to my friends and family that I began losing weight at a tremendous rate, showed no interest in school and daily activities, isolated myself from everyone and appeared tired all the time despite once known for being “the life of the party”, “the social butterfly” or “the people person”.
As time passed, there was this deeply isolating feeling of a great growing distance between myself, everyone and everything around me. I began hearing mean voices in my head. There were visions of people staring at me from afar and I thought everyone hated me and wished I was dead. Dealing with the symptoms is hard enough for me now as an adult, but as a child it was all really frightening and it felt like I was alone.
My deteriorating situation began worrying my family so I was then brought to see a psychiatrist. Getting help was not easy, nor was the process of getting a diagnosis because on one hand, there was this frustration of not knowing how to explain what I was feeling or what was going on in my head.
The constant distracting hallucinations were making it hard for me to pay attention to what was real. After a very long process of getting evaluated, I was diagnosed with schizophrenia and began getting treatment for it with medications and frequent therapy. The symptoms persisted despite being in treatment and this meant putting my studies on hold and proceeding with finding other treatment options.
Considering the psychotic state of my mind, I was involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric unit of a hospital for seven days for the first time. My second involuntary admission was for 14 days a week after the first.
I was told to take my medications and rest until I felt better to be discharged from the hospital, but the sight of how the ward looked and the way the patients were being treated did not help me feel better. The weeks that I spent there locked away from the outside world and my family when I needed them the most has kept me traumatised to this day.
Just as I was thinking that it was over, after my discharge I was forcefully held and brought into a van by a group of nurses and driven to a psychiatric rehabilitation centre. I was then admitted against my will, yet again.
This time, I was getting in-patient treatment away from home for almost six months. Though we were living in a home-based treatment centre that provided us with facilities and daily activities that the hospital did not, the way most of us were treated as patients, was unkind and even cruel at times.
Making us feel like we are incompetent by stealing our voices, taking control over our lives, and treating us with no respect for our dignity as human beings, just because we have a mental illness will only further reduce opportunities for us to build a quality life.
From being the youngest patient in a facility that treated patients like prisoners doing their time, to disregarding our needs and requests to speak with our family by calling us manipulators, I realised stigmatising views or attitudes about mental illnesses are not just limited to uninformed members of the general public; even well-trained professionals act by it.
During my journey with schizophrenia, I have faced stigma while being in treatment, at school, college, and work. I cannot speak for everyone but in my experience, the stigma that’s associated with schizophrenia has been harder to live with than the symptoms of the illness itself.
Today, I take my medications every day, go to therapy, get enough sleep, exercise daily and get the right support from my family, my psychiatrist and psychologist who believe in me.
I continue to live with the symptoms and will most likely have to for the rest of my life. However, I have learned to adapt with the inconsistency of my mind’s wellbeing – to make peace with my disability by redefining recovery in my own words which means, to be able to live and lead a quality and fulfilling life independently despite my illness. – The Vibes, October 10, 2021
The writer is a Malaysian and her experiences are in Malaysian hospitals and facilities.
If there is anything weighing on your mental health, do reach out to the Befrienders for support at 03-7627-2929 or sam@befrienders.org.my
