mental illness
I don’t know if I believe that no one never recovers from mental illness and that it has to be this battle for life. I have lots of mixed feelings about that.
It doesn’t feel quite right - lots of mental health issues disappear when cutting off the right people, or moving away, or gaining new friends, or getting more money, or changing place of employment or other things because they were things that dragged you down and caused the behavior in the first place. Makes sense then that it’d get a lot easier afterwards, if not disappear. I think I saw a lot of people diagnosed with OCD and/or depression talk about how a change in their life basically cured it.
I mean, can it come back for them when things get bad again? Sure. But I don’t think this constitutes as “not recovering” and dealing with it for life; then we’d never recover from a cold or a flu either. The trigger comes back, and we’re sick in both mental and physical illness.
I guess in mental illness, we think once we got it, it’s just dormant forever, because when there’s a future phase, it seems so familiar and like it broke out, it flared up - because we don’t have a measurement or understanding of whether this is a new “”infection”” or not, like we have with the flu or cold. But if it was just triggered as a reaction to something in your life, why think that it just laid dormant, instead of being re-acquired? Is it beneficial to think like that?
In a cold, we have our immune system causing the phlegm. We could think of some mental illness symptoms as being the mental histamine response to a threat. Activated through environmental and generic factors, maybe. But environment can change, gene expression can change as we age, our capacity to handle things changes.
I guess it depends. If I suppress the breakout of a disease constantly with meds, seeing it as chronic makes sense. Take the meds away, you’re back at zero. You never recover, you are basically just in remission. This makes sense for people who have to be on meds for life for a mental illness, or have to otherwise manage a potential breakout daily. But I don’t think it’s worthwhile to see all mental illness that way, because for many people, it really is just a part of their life they are able to move out of, for whatever reason. Not every depression is chronic, for example.
Of course, it could be that I only think this way as a cope. Who wants to think they’re permanently “tainted” for life? Who wants to read “you’ll have good phases here and there but it’s never truly gone!”
What makes this so hard is that ultimately, mental illness recovery is depending on so many factors outside of most people’s control, especially while you’re sick - if you are actively depressed and unable to work, you are dependent on your family and likely not going to earn more money, so you stay broke and reliant on what potentially are your abusers. You have no mobility and no control over your life in this position, which reinforces the mental illness, which lower your prospects of getting out of this. Because the factors that would help are so unlikely to happen, it feels hopeless, chronic, and like we are the problem; we are the illness haver, and it seems like we are the illness origin, but are we really? Is it helpful to see ourselves as the defective ones if our bodies are pushed to behave this way due to circumstances outside of us, that possibly already began before we could do something about it?
It doesn’t help this view that mental illness as a term covers so much. My arguments apply better to depression or OCD or BPD than schizophrenia, for example. So I recognize that as a limitation.
But I am still hopeful that many can recover and not need meds forever. I am no longer in therapy and I have stopped antidepressants ages ago. I can just feel things always getting better and healing further the older I get, because getting older has increased my agency and the time away from my abuser. The older I get, the more the scale shifts in my favor because more of my life was lived away from the abuse than under it, which helps a lot. When I get depressed, it is due to other factors like my hormones (PMDD) or genuinely sad and stressful events like physical illness. I don’t feel like it brings out an inherent depression in me; instead, first growing up in abuse made it happen a lot, and now it occasionally happens due to other things, and all of it makes sense.
If a loved one dies, you grieve. You’re sad, your behaviors change for a while. We wouldn’t call that mental illness, it’s just a normal reaction to what has happened. I see my depression and PTSD the same way; normal, temporary reactions to what I had to deal with that are no longer in my life.
Resilience and our capability to handle conflict or difficult life situations also plays a role, of course. How quickly do we feel overwhelmed? How much time do we spend imagining different scenarios and worrying? We can enter a thought spiral really quickly that can trigger us. I have no clear answer for that; of course the abuse and other bad circumstances we live through shapes our thoughts, habits and character a bit, and those in turn can be more likely to further mental illness symptoms. But everything about us is so malleable; you don’t think the way you used to 5-10 years ago, same with habits, your character, your interests. So I think this can change as well; you aren’t set in stone.
I don’t know if it’s helpful to tell people they’ll always be mentally ill. It often makes it harder to even try to recover, because it seems futile. But if I hadn’t chosen recovery and gained a little strength to change a thing in my life that again gives me a little strength and stability and repeat that cycle, I would still be at home, abused, or homeless.