Drawback #∞: There are no benefits until remission is found

During the PhD, I used almost every strategy that I could discover, and a few I invented. I dug as deep as it was possible to go. I thought I was besting my disease. In reality, I was only ever holding it at bay. My disease required medication, not talking. I don’t know how it took me so long to see something so obvious.

My condition declined so slowly, I never realised it was happening. After I completed my viva, I collapsed from exhaustion. My illness finally had me. It engulfed the shredded remains of my defiance with a ruthlessness I had never experienced before, and pray never happens again. I learned that when God wants you, he takes it all. Every. Last. Drop.

I understood with harrowing clarity what I had just done. I finished a PhD while severely mentally ill. It would not have been possible without an extremely high dose of delusion. By pretending to be wise, I missed what was right in front of me. My mum was the only person who kept telling me throughout the PhD that she thought psychotherapy was not the answer for my illness. Everyone else, including my therapists, thought otherwise. My story directly contradicts the narrative that all mental illnesses can be solved through talking. It is simply not true. I should have listened to my mum. The extreme suffering to come might have been averted.

I lost nearly all functioning. So much so, that my mum became my carer. Social interactions became overwhelmingly painful. In order to survive, I purposefully cut myself off from the world and became a recluse. This might be hard for many of you to understand. All I can tell you is that it was necessary. For the last three years, the only people I have had lengthy conversations with have been my mum and my brother. For all intents and purposes, I have been forgotten.1

My initial psychiatric treatment was beyond woeful. Every decision the psychiatrists made seemed to either do nothing or lead me closer to death. I felt that if I let things continue as they were, I was going to die. So, I made a decision that I should never have had to make. I began to guide the treatment of my own mental illness.

For almost two years, trialling treatment after treatment, I experienced pain and states of consciousness I did not think it was possible to experience. It felt like I was walking along a tightrope wire, one small misstep from annihilation. To a degree, I am still walking it. In early 2021, I was fortunate to find two medications that started to reduce symptoms that have been plaguing my mind for nearly a decade. Progress is frustratingly slow, but I am hesitantly confident that one day I will reach remission.

I will accept nothing less. This is because in order for the mentally ill to reap any of the benefits I have written about, we must be helped back to remission. The mentally healthy must care about the mentally ill. Otherwise, we spend all of our energy simply trying to survive in a society that does not understand us. Or worse, we slowly become sicker and sicker, falling into death.

When thinking about what it means to live a full life, many of us likely picture falling in love, starting a family or working in a fulfilling job. We picture visiting new places or experiencing new things. But this is only half a life. Without spending time with the many people in the world who are suffering, we never know the meaning of strength or courage. We never feel fully comfortable in our own skin. We never understand what is important in life and what is not. It becomes impossible to fulfil the potential each and every one of us holds.

What I find difficult to understand at best, and soul-crushing at worst, is why I am not seen as valuable. Most people see the horrors of my story but not the person who got through it. I think at the very least I am worth knowing. I hope I am worth helping. I will need a lot of support just to feel safe again, I’ll need a community to get back to full remission. With help, I hope to write articles that punch through the complex web of misconceptions and lies surrounding mental illness. I hope to educate and teach in podcasts. I hope to stand on a stage and weave the intellectual and emotional together with such skill that for the briefest periods of time everything will feel so simple. Before the complexities of life slowly seep back in, leaving the audience to wonder what exactly just happened. I hope I can help those more fortunate than me to see the value in helping people with less. With help, I hope I can live a full life.

Perhaps, then, we can show the world the benefits of mental illness.

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