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0 By Lisa Lewis-Martin
Mental health illnesses can be as devastating, just as much as life-threatening illnesses. Everybody donates to charities for cancer, autism, etc, but Borderline Personality Disorder is invisible. We don’t look ill, some of us hold down a job, some of us even smile now and again, but if you don’t suffer from it then how on earth would you know?
It’s not just depression or anxiety, it’s much more than that! It’s caused by neglect, abuse, abandonment, and many things in our childhood or young adult life.
We love or we hate
It’s happy moods changing to thoughts of suicide within seconds. It’s thinking everything is good, or it’s bad, there’s no in-between. Wondering who you’re going to be when you wake up. We have no self-awareness of who we are – we can change our look many times in one day because we don’t know who we are. We love or we hate. If we love you then we adore you, but as soon as you hurt us, by words, ignorance, looks, then that switch turns to hate… with a vengeance!
It’s feeling your hurtful past all over again. Something can trigger you – a song, or a word – and you’re putting that thing to your skin and hurting yourself, or popping all those pills just to feel nothing. We cannot control our emotions. We dissociate from the reality of the world, and can quite often find ourselves in danger, not knowing how we got there!
It’s all this, but so much more too!
Misunderstood and stigmatised
We are misunderstood and stigmatised, and ignored every day because people do not understand! GPs, mental health teams, crisis teams don’t, or can’t, help us. Therapy isn’t funded for us. Some of us have to pay for private therapy (we really need DBT, to start getting better), but that’s just talking with someone, and it costs between £40–60 for one hour!
We just want to be listened to, to be understood, and know that we are worthy. We are worthy of living, every day!
UNITED STATES
UNITED KINGDOM
