July is the month of the consciousness for mental health from Moore Campbell.
As Shannon Shelton Miller said
Four years ago my husband found me in a fetal position on our bedroom floor hysterical and lying under tears. I had one of the worst depressed episodes that I had experienced for years.
After struggling for more than a decade, a bipolar disorder was diagnosed almost 20 years ago, and I thought I had found everything out. I am in therapy, take my medication, practice self -care and make all the “mental wellness” shovels that we hear from. Life and work went well and my husband, children and I were healthy. But two weeks before this episode, I fought myself through the day and scratched the day when I only wanted to sink into the darkest, deepest hole.
Pamela Price’s children on the family weekend at Virginia Tech, 2022.
This breakdown led to one of the first real conversations that my husband and I had about how it is to live in my head. It also made me even more relentless in the fact that people know what it is on this trip and to understand that we will have moments in which we just are not in order.
The signs of my mental illness were already there at the age of 13. My grandparents showed me because my mother had to struggle with drug addiction, and I hardly knew my father, who continues to fight alcohol addiction today.
My grandparents were very strict and there was no place to express how I felt that my mother disappeared for months. I was angry, annoying and hopeless, and our family simply did not have the awareness or tools to express my right to express love, care, care or concern for me and that I dealt with at such a young age. I was convinced that I was better without hesitation or regretting, I would take half a bottle of my grandfather’s muscle relaxer.
My attempted suicide did not work and I woke up angrily and angered in the hospital a week and a half later that I was still alive, and I felt even more hopeless. To make things worse, nobody in my family asked me why I tried to kill myself or what was wrong. When I got out of the hospital, I saw twice an apparently undetermined therapist, and the incident was never spoken again. We were all expected to simply return to our lives.
I felt more alone and as if nobody really looked after me. I was skillfully hiding my problems and began to perfect the many masks that I would wear during all of my fighting fighting fights. My goal was only 18 so that I could join the military and get out there.
In many ways, it was one of the best decisions of my life to become part of the military, but it still did not mean that I received help. Instead, I got even better in hiding my problems. When I returned to suicide in my 20s, I knew that something had to change – until then I was a mother and my daughter left from me.
I saw an older doctor who just said I had a rough childhood and was depressed. He did not give me a diagnosis, just an antidepressant recipe and sent me on my way. He was hyperfocused about the fact that I grew up in an arm in an income housing. But everyone around me was poor at the time, so I never had sadness or depression about it. I often wondered if poverty was his focus because I was a black woman and whether he had asked more about what I felt and experienced whether I hadn’t been a woman with color.
I continued to fight and saw a therapist who diagnosed me with a severe depressive disorder. But something felt because depression was not the one with which I fought most. I hopped between anger and irritability and feelings of euphoria. I didn’t want to go to sleep and sometimes I had Paranoia and didn’t hear the world around me as everyone else did. Sometimes I replied by not sure that it was unsure for people around me, including my family.
Once when I was in the end of 20, I injured my daughter. That was my wake -up call. I trusted a good friend and recommended her therapist, who practiced with her psychiatrist. They provided me with a number of tests, which led to a diagnosis of a bipolar I disorder with psychotic characteristics.
Surprisingly, I was in peace with my diagnosis. It was the turning point that gave me a way forward. I was able to reach the right medication to tackle the disruptive mania and other symptoms, and with this practice remained in therapy. My manic and depressive episodes took off the heavy and I experienced it – and the voices in my head that had plagued me for so long – less often. Really good therapy and the right medication have helped things not escalate so far where I had to be admitted to the hospital or my husband has the feeling that they can call someone.
Nevertheless, a few years ago, the collapse of my bedroom floor was a memory that I could still have these episodes with the right treatment and medication. I am now 45 years old and my therapist told me that my depressive episodes could be more intense if I get older. So we are open to medication adjustments and increase in therapy sessions as required.
Pamela with her husband.
When I talk to my husband about how it is to live with bipolar disorder, I ask him to take into account the physical pain that he feels from his time in the military and to imagine that pain mentally feels pain – and he does his best to understand and support me. We also try to be proactive with our children and ask them: “How are you?” ‘How are you doing?’ “Do you want to talk about anything?” Questions like these would have put me a long way for the 13-year-old.
In today’s message it is about being mentally good, being a period of time and learning how to be emotionally resilient and does not come from a place of emotional deficit. Especially since black women always try to push through and say that everything is “ok”, but we are strangled by the very superheroes that we store to save others if we may be those who have to save.
Yes, I am a black woman and have a bipolar disorder. But I’m also a mother, a woman and director of a non -profit organization. I am all of these amazing things and bipolar disorders is only part of my life. It is my condition, not my identity.
Every September 10th, the day of suicide prevention, I sit in front of my camera phone and take a message to the girl who was found that she didn’t want to be here. I remind you of how far we got and how beautiful our life is. I do this every year and this year I will tell her that my eldest daughter is now a college graduate and follows a career as a licensed therapist that our family is doing astonishing vacation and that I was in almost all 50 states.
I told the 13-year-old Pam Life okay.
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Our real women, real stories are the authentic experiences of women in real life. The views, opinions and experiences that are shared in these stories are not supported by healthwomen and do not necessarily reflect the official politics or position of healthwomen.
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