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Recovering from Mental Illness

I have touched on this before. A couple of times. Other bloggers on healthyplace.com have as well because it is important. Very important. It is part of living with--and recovering from--a mental illness. Living With A Mental Illness Makes Us Feel Different
What a piss-off of a title, right? Sorry! Feel free to skip to some of my more lighthearted posts: I think I have one involving flying a kite and eating three meals a day. But we cannot pretend that living with a mental illness is smooth sailing; it can ruin your life if not treated properly.
I wrote a blog a couple of weeks ago-- "Mental Illness--Acting on Impulse!"--but this post is different. I am not focusing on impulsive behavior such as overspending, abusing drugs and alcohol and self-medicating moods. I want to talk about acting on emotions.
Loved ones of those with a mental illness want to understand and help however they can. And I assume those who read my blog are not just those who are diagnosed and living with a mental illness, but also people who are trying to understand the complexity of mental illness--readers who wonder how they may be able to help a person they love. A person that is struggling. There are ways to help even though you cannot understand someone with a mental illness--not really.
Mental illness carries stereotypes--no kidding!--these stereotypes lead to stigma, stigma leads to discrimination. It is a nasty cycle that is lessening with the passing years but exists nonetheless.
So, what is a case study? Let's refer to Wikipedia--Wikipedia knows everything, right? It can even define feelings!
When I read the heading of this post, the words mental illness and addiction sort of mold together, like a candle, dripping wax into the same spot. Mental illness and addiction go hand in hand--those diagnosed with a mental illness have a much higher incidence of addiction, this is known in the psychiatric community as co-morbid illness. Fancy words to apply to the content of this post.
I could write a million posts (granted my hands might hurt, my head even more) on how frightening life, before being diagnosed with a mental illness, is.
First, let me pull out my Thesaurus (I have not done this for. . .a month? Two? Long overdue?) to define the word impulse and then we'll narrow it down a bit--a lot. We'll apply it to mental illness and shake the word up a bit.
In my last post The Experience of Depression: The Flip-Side of Mania I focused on both depression and, you guessed it, mania. I have a secret: I'm not feeling so great. I am clinically depressed.