<h1>Sharing My Journey with Mental Illness: Breaking the Stigma and Creating Understanding</h1>
<p>One Thursday in July, my husband and I found ourselves at our county’s police academy training facility. With the help of a uniformed officer, we navigated through hallways until we reached the conference room where I was scheduled to speak on behalf of our local National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) office.</p>
<p>I stood at the front of the room, introducing myself and proudly listing my accomplishments – graduating from a certificate program at Columbia University, teaching classes and workshops, and maintaining a successful 25-year marriage. Then, I revealed the reason I was there: “I live with chronic paranoid schizophrenia.”</p>
<p>For nearly an hour, I spoke candidly about the five types of hallucinations and recounted the time when the voices in my head identified themselves as God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. I shared my struggles with paranoid thoughts about food being poisonous and the delusions I’ve experienced during periods of psychosis.</p>
<p>It is crucial for police officers to understand the perspective of someone who has lived through severe mental illness. They regularly encounter individuals in the midst of mental health crises during the course of their duties. I aimed to convey that while psychosis can cause erratic behavior, many people can be successfully treated for their conditions.</p>
<p>To the best of my ability, I answered the officers’ questions regarding various aspects of living with schizophrenia. Many expressed gratitude for my presence and appreciated my vulnerability in discussing a diagnosis that still carries a significant amount of misinformation and stigma.</p>
<p>For nearly 20 years, I kept my mental illness a secret from friends, extended family, and employers. However, since 2015, I have started sharing my experiences to generate income. I speak to law enforcement agencies, nursing students, people studying marriage and family therapy, as well as individuals in treatment facilities who are navigating similar diagnoses.</p>
<p>By opening up about my story, I offer these groups a better understanding of mental illness, while helping individuals living with such conditions feel less isolated. The specific details I share enable professionals to gain insight into the experience of losing touch with reality.</p>
<p>In my late 20s, I began to believe that people were conspiring against me. As my paranoia increased, I found myself unable to eat or sleep. Although my relatives eventually brought me to a hospital, I hesitated to commit to inpatient treatment for several days. This hospital stay eventually led to a diagnosis of bipolar disorder with psychotic features. Initially, I struggled with denial and shame associated with the labels attached to my identity.</p>
<p>Opening up about my mental illness, especially to men I was dating, typically resulted in their immediate disappearance from my life. I remember one man who declared, “I simply can’t handle this,” as he ended our relationship that very day, even though I had never exhibited symptoms when he was around. I soon learned that mental illness often acted as a relationship deal-breaker.</p>
<p>When I met my current husband, he also had reservations about my diagnosis. During the early stages of our relationship, my lack of compliance with medication caused me to cycle through severe episodes. I attempted suicide twice and experienced frequent episodes of hearing voices, paranoia, and delusions.</p>
<p>But we stuck together. Even after witnessing my symptoms firsthand, my husband continued to support me. Eventually, I began taking my treatment more seriously, allowing us to focus on building a foundation for our future marriage.</p>
<p>We decided to keep my mental illness a secret between us, only revealing it to my family. We chose not to divulge this information to my husband’s relatives, co-workers, or new friends we made after moving near the outskirts of Los Angeles.</p>
<p>The decision to keep my struggles hidden wasn’t solely due to the stigma and rejection I had previously encountered. It also stemmed from internalizing societal messages about my condition and the individuals living with it. I felt less lovable and likable, anticipating that others would view me as “crazy.”</p>
<p>”Telling people I had a mental illness — especially the men I was dating — almost always ended with them disappearing from my life.”</p>
<p>For nearly a decade, I experienced stability. I worked full-time, pursued education, and engaged in various community activities. I had friends with whom I worked, went hiking, and played racquetball. My husband and I also traveled regularly.</p>
<p>However, my psychiatrist eventually questioned my diagnosis and took me off all medication. Within a year, I began hallucinating non-stop, lost all ability to sleep, and experienced a complete detachment from reality. It took six months for doctors to stabilize me once again.</p>
<p>The new diagnosis I received from these doctors was chronic paranoid schizophrenia. The news hit both my husband and me like a punch. On the day we received this diagnosis, we hardly spoke. However, my husband finally reassured me by saying, “Well, there is nothing new about you today from yesterday.” That statement confirmed that he wasn’t planning on leaving, even with this new information at hand.</p>
<p>Despite this reassurance, we decided to double down on keeping our secret and protect the privacy of our personal lives and the realities of my illness. I imagined that if disclosing my bipolar disorder had led to rejection in the past, sharing my schizophrenia diagnosis would be even worse.</p>
<p>We maintained this secret for nearly 10 years until my psychiatrist gave me a homework assignment: tell just one friend about my diagnosis. She recognized that keeping such a significant aspect of my life a secret would hinder my ability to form genuine connections with others, ultimately isolating me.</p>
<p>My husband and I deliberated on this assignment for weeks. We debated whether we even wanted to disclose my illness to anyone after hiding it for so long. We weighed the potential loss of friends and the fact that once we told one person, more would inevitably find out.</p>
<p>Ultimately, we chose to confide in a social worker I had worked closely with at a YWCA. Over brunch, I mustered the courage to say, “I have schizophrenia.” Initially taken aback, he asked questions, but our conversation didn’t revolve solely around my diagnosis. That night, I wrote an essay detailing my experiences with mental illness, which was published in an online magazine. I shared the link on Facebook, inadvertently informing my in-laws, our co-workers, and even friends from high school about my condition.</p>
<p>We lost some friends along the way. I’m uncertain whether they thought “I can’t handle this” like those early boyfriends or if they were upset that we had kept such a critical part of our lives hidden from them. I sometimes reflect on whether this revelation hurt certain individuals who may have believed they were close to us, only to discover that we had not been living an authentic and fully transparent life.</p>
<p>Disclosing my secret left me feeling vulnerable and frightened. But there was also an immense sense of relief. For the first time since my early 30s, I could freely discuss my reality and who I am without hiding significant parts of my life.</p>
<p>Since then, I have continued to write about life with schizophrenia, ultimately leading me to the position at NAMI. I find myself in front of groups of police officers, explaining what it’s like to be in the midst of a mental health crisis.</p>
<p>My secret has become a tool for me, one that I no longer hide. I share it whenever someone asks or when mental health is the topic of conversation. I feel like I am using my challenging situation to make a difference in the lives of others. This gives meaning to my experience of having schizophrenia and transforms it into something that isn’t entirely negative.</p>
<p>In 2023, I encounter less stigma and more curiosity than ever before. It is a significant change from the years when I lived in secrecy and isolation, feeling fragmented from the world around me.</p>
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