I cannot work out whether more effort has been exerted hiding my mental health problems or fighting them. As you grow up and become a teenager and then an adult, you are not initially aware that not everyone feels as desolate and hopeless or as manic and psychotic as you. You wrongly assume all people think like you and the way you act is normal.

The first signs of problems hit me through substance abuse and all the cliches that go with abusing drugs and alcohol from a young age. Booze for me smooths off the edges and drugs make life more exciting. I used to say life is like a scone and drugs and booze are the jam and cream, I was a witty addict. Sadly the laughter was soon replaced with terrible addiction to alcohol, valium and pain killers. In my mid twenties I crashed hard and ended up in rehab. I successfully quit the addiction but did not deal with the underlying causes, the mental illness.

I was elated that I had quit booze and prescription drugs but still used marijuana heavily and habitually. I of course needed something to medicate the underlying mental illness that I was as yet to fully face down. I also had a brief dalliance with coke, all whilst telling people I was clean and proud, what a bunch of shit that was. Less than 18 months out of rehab and I was chronically addicted to weed and developing a coke problem. I quit the cocaine after about 6 months and after a particularly awful psychotic episode one evening where I thought my taxi driver was going to murder me. I of course continued to abuse weed daily and did until very recently, I quit finally in the winter of 2021.

I have spent so many years obscuring myself and confusing the underlying mental illness, that it is only now that I feel the full force of my illness and how sick I was and still am. I suffer more now I don't have the drugs to cover up. It's more raw and real to me now. I get to witness depression and mania in all it's glory or should I say in it's awful turmoil. It's like I have been hiding from or hiding from others my mental illness. I'm now paying that debt of not dealing with it all my life and the pain is somedays intolerable.

Drugs offer an escape that prescribed meds don't, prescribed meds are like a day out at the funfair and not being allowed to go on any rides or have any candy floss. Illicit drugs however are the candy floss and are the rollercoasters. Sadly mentally ill people can't spiritually or physically afford to use drugs and not come undone.

I find now myself in a place where I feel the only answer to my pain is to show my illness and make it visible instead of trying to suppress and hide it. What I mean by this I don't fully understand yet, I just know that trying to obliterate or hide away my mental illness has ironically made me more mentally ill over the years. I want to feel what facing myself fully feels like, I'm exhausted by myself and trying to escape the inescapable fact that I'm mentally ill. The psychotic episode didn't convince me, the psychiatrist diagnosis of bipolar, autism and potentially borderline personality disorder didn't convince me, but weeks and months of despair and depression seems to of done the trick of finally making me realise that I am mentally ill.

Now I must face and conquer it in anyway I can, I cannot move on or plan or succeed at anything in life until I do this. It will hang round my neck like a noose or haunt me like the albatross in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I first must come out and say I am mentally ill and let everyone see me for what I truly am. I need to become mentally visible and own that feeling, hopefully I can use my struggle and progression to build a conversation and maybe even a movement to make it easier for the mentally ill to be seen, to be heard and to be visible.

By Stuart Alexander

From: United Kingdom

Website: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/stuxanderC

Twitter: tristimania101