2 diagnoses; ADHD and depression.
ADHD changes over the course of your life. As a kid you don't really care; you take the medicine to make you get good grades and get a good job. But when you're an adult you take the medication to make you function as normal as possible. But even increasing the dosage doesn't help as much as you want it to. So you look at doing other things, like developing your own system of functioning just to make it through the day. Short bursts of work combined with hours of 'I can't do anymore'. The best way that I can explain it is picture working on something for 8 hours straight, ONE thing and ONE thing only. No deviations, no changes in pace, no change of task, just that ONE thing. At the end of the 8th hour you're thinking 'Holy fuck I just want this to end'. That's what it's like living with ADHD, but that cycle is all of 15 minutes if you're lucky, and it's always with the most important things: school, work, household tasks, memory tasks like grocery shopping or going upstairs to get something.
Recently I've tried to make light of the fact that I have it and that I deal with it on a regular basis. But the honest truth is that I hate myself, my symptoms, and the constant inability to function as a normal human being. To the point of seriously considering ending it all because I know that I'll never be 'normal'. As an adult, it's much harder to manage and control the symptoms and the impact it has on my life. I can't make a cup of tea because I get so excited when I see the water swirling in the cup and the tea infusing throughout the water, and then I wonder how tea does that? Is tea dried, what about Tetley and Red Rose are they different? Where does it come from? I think I read something on wikipedia once about tea. And the whole time I'm standing over the cup of tea and the stove burner is glowing red hot. I've left the house with the iron plugged in. I've left the stove on.
ADHD is like trying to study the sociological explanation of feminism in relation to Nazi Germany at a metal concert with Justin Bieber as the singer. It doesn't make sense. It's highly distracting. And it's all in your head.
Depression: awful. Depression is 'the common cold' of mental health now, so I've been told. That doesn't make it any less debilitating. I think the worse thing apart from the dreading gloom that hangs overhead and the constant feeling of just wanted to fade away is the lack of motivation for anything. It's not just the lack of motivation, but the fact of knowing that because of ADHD even if I DID start something it would never come to fruition.
What's it like? Picture sitting on the edge of your bed, wait for a phone call. Your partner was supposed to be there a while ago but they haven't shown up yet. You KNOW something is wrong, you can feel it, but you have no proof. You feel the worst you've ever felt; they're hurt, got in a car accident, broke up with you and didn't tell you, something like that. But you have no proof, you just know. You want nothing more than to curl up into a little ball and fade away. But you can't; that's too much energy, requires too much motivation. What's the point, anyway? You can just sit on the edge of the bed and feel like shit the same as you can when you curl up into a ball and fell like shit. So you wait. And before you know it the day is over and you try to go to sleep. You wake up the next day and sit on the bed doing the same thing.
The worst thing with any mental illness is the stigma. If you have diabetes your pancreas is dysfunctional. If you have high blood pressure you heart is not working properly. If you have a mental illness, why do we not attribute it to the brain? The brain is an organ and can have problems like any other organ. But it's easier to say 'you need to control yourself' or 'snap out of it'. There's a big shift lately in mental health awareness, but there's a long way to go.
Mental illness isn't just depression or eating disorders. Autism, personality disorders, brain damage, mood disorders... These are all things that need more understanding and less judgment.