My story of growing up with an undiagnosed mental illness

I have suffered from generalised anxiety for most of my life, it can make it very hard to function as society feels you should. It is especially difficult before you have a diagnosis, when you don’t understand what is going on in your head and body.

Before receiving an official diagnosis, it was hard to take my troubles seriously. Even harder was living with a family who didn’t understand me, teachers who thought I was too sensitive and needed to harden up and peers who openly named me the weird, moody, scary, psycho chick. I couldn’t be “normal” so I embraced the labels my peers gave me, I hid behind this imagery. “That’s just Sam” became a common statement among my groups of friends.

I hid well behind my labels, delving into the metal and goth cultures, alcohol and pot, I wagged school, sitting alone in a park because the thought of being around people made me cry uncontrollably. Of course, I always had a good story for where I was, the crazier the better, I didn’t care if my friends believed me.

High school ended and people expected me to go out in the real world. This is something I didn’t know how to deal with, but also something I didn’t know how to talk about. After all it was the 90s and mental illness was very much a taboo topic. Suicide seemingly came out of the blue, nobody knew why someone would do it. You were deemed fine as long as you got out of bed every day.

Of course, since it was the 90s it didn’t matter how late you stayed in bed or that you stayed up most nights writing morbid poetry. Being so drunk you forgot your address was cool. Smoking pot in a nightclub’s bathroom stall just a normal night out. You could find a good place to party every single night of the week and who cared if you turned up to your shitkicker job still drunk or hungover.

The 90s was the birth of grunge, and my generation took up the unwashed, grass-stained (pun intended), emotionally wrecked banner with pride. It was the perfect place for an emotionally fragile, non-functioning young adult to hide. Sitting on a couch for days getting so stoned you forget to bath while watching the same re runs on Mtv was not an alarming warning sign of severe depression. It was perfectly normal and the same thing everyone else was doing.

The 90s was probably the best decade of my life, I self-medicated without ever really admitting something was wrong. Most of the time I knew something was wrong but it was easy to ignore. My family had already written me off as a waste of space, I lost touch with all of the decent friends I had, choosing to hang around only with the ones who would party with me.

I ignored my university studies and instead took jobs way beneath my skill and intelligence level. I was a stoner, I drank too much, I flitted through jobs every 6 months or so, I played online computer games, in the words of my father I “pissed my money up against a wall”. I used to get mad at him for saying this but I could not deny I spent every dollar I made on drugs and alcohol.

Of course, the 90s ended and the last die-hard stoners of my generation disappeared in a puff of bong smoke. The things I had used to hide behind as a teenager and young adult were no longer acceptable. People actually expected me to have my life together, know what I wanted and be in a position to go out and get it.

The 00s were not kind to someone like me, piece by piece the charade that was my life came crushing down. Not being able to get out of bed before lunch time made me lazy. Throwing in a job after 6 or 12 months because I just can’t make myself leave the house made me selfish and flaky. People started throwing words like clinically depressed, anti-depressants, professional help, at me.

On some level, I had always known there was something wrong with me but now other people were seeing it too. As a teenager, I had often thought about suicide, I use to hide my father’s pills thinking when I had collected enough I would take them all.

Now as an adult with no direction I turned again to these thoughts of self-harm. I was prescribed sleeping pills from my doctor and I would often play Russian roulette with them, washing handfuls down with alcohol. I would sleep for a couple of days, miss work but eventually I would wake up and have to go on with my crappy life.

I started seeing doctors to try and get help, but I would never admit I thought about suicide and instead told them I just over thought things too much. For years all I got was sedatives and sleeping pills which I took too many of never caring if I would wake up or not.

It wasn’t until I met the man who would become my husband that I realised I really wanted help and started truly looking for doctors who could help me.

Reaching my late 30s without ever being diagnosed with a mental illness made finding a doctor to take me seriously quite hard. Eventually I did find the help I needed and if you would like to know about that story it is the first blog I posted on my mental illness, Isn’t It time we shattered the stigma attached to “Invisible Illnesses”?

My story of growing up with an undiagnosed mental illness is not original, there are many people who would be able to tell you a story like mine. Many people suffer in silence however, afraid the world will judge them for being open and honest about mental illness. Others are not sure if there is anything wrong with them, like I was they are trying to make sense of not being able to function “normally” in a world they are not equipped to deal with.

Being diagnosed with Anxiety and Depression was such a relief for me, I would really love to hear from others how they found themselves feeling about their diagnoses.