Stigma Via Health Professionals

Click to read Cate’s bio

I wasn’t expecting it from this source.  Actually I had seen this particular health professional about five times and had decided that she knew her stuff.  What’s more, I had decided that she was responding to what I was saying to the extent that I felt comfortable with her.  A big thing.

But I admit I had forgotten a brief moment in my first appointment with her when she responded to something I said with “you haven’t got a mental illness“.

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Almost Too Sensitive For The Regular World

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Think Black and White
“Image courtesy of [anankkml] / FreeDigitalPhotos.net”.

I’ve borrowed my title from a good friend.  She struggles like me and when she suggested we were both “almost too sensitive for the regular world“, I finally had the words that I hadn’t been able to find.  How do I fit into this regular world when so much of it grates so painfully against my raw skin?

Miss Diagnoses

Anyone who has ever looked up a “serious mental illness” like bipolar disorder has been smacked in the face with dire warnings and frightening statistics about misdiagnosis. If you google my lifelong companion ADD, you’ll see lots and lots of dire warnings and hand-wringing about overdiagnosis. But you won’t run into are dire warnings, frightening statistics, and hand-wringing about repeated, compounded misdiagnoses.

A Work In Progress

I’m going to tell a secret:
All things that breathe, that grow,

Lines and Colours

In my mind, I am normal. This is because I live with me twenty-four seven (OK, not always twenty-four seven because some of those hours I am asleep).

I have BPD. In the past, I never realised that I feel emotions more easily, more deeply, and for longer than others do. I thought the intensity of my emotions was normal. Turns out, it’s not. I read somewhere that in non-BPD people an emotion typically fires for 12 seconds. In BPD’ers it can last up to 20 percent longer. BPD’ers emotions also repeatedly re-fire, or re-live, or recur, however you want to say it, so emotional reactions occur for even longer. I do. I go over and over and over the emotions, pinging from one to another like a steel ball in a pinball machine.

New place, new luck

Hello everyone,

I wish that I could have posted earlier to speak with all you and keep updated…

But here I am.

After seven years of living abroad and three of those being very sick, I have returned to England to see how it goes here starting afresh again. I have been back for just over a week.

Helping to Break Stigma

When I received the job offer a few weeks ago I thought it over for a few days before excitedly accepting. My new manager arranged that she would send me some paperwork to fill out, and the next week we would meet so I could have a look around one of the branch practices I would be working in.

When I’d quit my previous job a few weeks ago I never expected to land on my feet. My parents were terrified that I had no long term prospects and I was just going to be a temp nurse.

The struggle

Hi everyone,

I haven’t posted in a long time and my last post was extremely positive. Unfortunately I have truly crashed since then.

I have treatment resistant depression, BPD, AvPD and OCD. Sometimes I wonder if they’ll add any more diagnoses to my list.