The Media’s Mental Health Mis-Awareness

When you write as openly about your personal experience of mental illness as I do, you expose yourself to a barrage of ill-informed and often insensitive questions and comments from people who believe they have a firm grasp of what it is like to have mental health issues, people who have absolutely no basis for this confidence in their own knowledge. From the hippy-dippy who tell you that you should eat more citrus fruits to improve your mood (who needs medication, eh?) to the Slimming World fanatics who think that it is completely acceptable to drop me a Facebook message asking for diet tips (yes, this has actually happened), I have had it all. And don’t even start me on the men who think that they are going to save my life by being Superman and loving me the way I could never love myself (puke). But I struggle to see any of these comments as malicious, preferring to have a little more faith in humanity than that. Instead, I think we must put the blame on the media and its distorted idea of what raising mental health awareness actually entails.

The exploitative nature of the media’s misrepresentation of mental illness is a regularly tackled issue but it has recently returned to the limelight with the growing popularity of Netflix sensation 13 Reasons Why. I personally cannot talk about said series because I honestly would rather spend my evenings tweezering my fingernails from their cuticles and then using my extracted fingernails to scoop my eyeballs out of my sockets than watch it. But this phenomenon is not only relevant to the latest hit, therefore I will try to explain my issues with how mental illness is presented in popular culture through examples that I am well-acquainted with.

Eating disorders receive little to no appropriate attention in dramatisations for reasons that are more practical than anything else: how is it possible to accurately depict the disintegration of the human form through self-starvation without putting your star at risk? That’s right, you can’t. Why, then, do producers insist that it is acceptable to employ a beautiful, young, NATURALLY AND HEALTHILY THIN actress in order to play the role of an anorexia victim when the need arises? Some of you may know where I am going with this. I can’t help myself; I have to talk about Skins.

I am constantly hearing Skins being glorified for its ‘true’ representation of what it is like to be a teenager in the noughties, allowing our young people to recognise that they were not alone; their struggles were the struggles of the masses. On the contrary, I personally found Skins particularly damaging. As a young teen who already possessed an unhealthy relationship with food but who had not yet spiraled into the murky depths of anorexia, the character of Cassie was particularly triggering. Sure, we saw her attend clinical appointments and experience mental anguish, but she had friends, partied hard, found love and, to top it all off, she was beautiful. Long flowing blonde locks, big Bambi eyes, pouty red lips…naturally beautiful. And she didn’t eat. Call me gullible all you want but for someone whose mind was already a little broken where food was concerned, Cassie seemed to provide me with the answer to all my problems: I just needed to commit to the starvation and I could be like her.

Skins failed. By employing the beautiful, model-esque Hannah Murray to play the suffering Cassie, they failed to warn our youth of the horrors of destructive eating disorders, instead managing to glamourise the fatal illness. They failed to show how starvation makes your skin fade, your teeth discolour, your hair fall out. They failed to show that there is nothing glamorous about a protruding tailbone making it impossible to sit down because the friction of a soft cushion against your fragile bones makes it too painful, midnight hot flushes because your body has tricked itself into thinking it has hit an early menopause because you haven’t had a period in three years…and don’t get me started on the fact that not even an entire pack of Wrigley’s Extra can take away the foul stench of a barren stomach which is craving nourishment. Yes, eating disorders quite literally stink. But Skins failed to show that, instead running a risk of birthing an entire generation of youngsters who pursue an impossible, grotesque dream. Instance Number 1 of the media’s mental health mis-awareness.

Rewinding a fair bit, a film which is very close to my heart is 1999’s Girl, Interrupted. In the depths of my despair, I watched this repeatedly and it is still an ongoing (if not slightly distasteful) joke among my friends and I that I possess a little bit of each of the girl’s personality traits within myself. What does that say about me, eh? From Winona Ryder’s Susanna’s recent diagnosis of borderline personality disorder to Angelina Jolie’s sociopath Lisa and even Brittany Murphy’s adoption of the role of sexually abused bulimic Daisy, all portrayals of illness in the film are actually quite accurate. Hoorah, problem solved!

Or not. I always remember garnering a strange sense of optimism from this film. I knew that I was experiencing a type of madness but there was hope: there was absolutely no way I could be alone. There is a world of girls out there experiencing the same things as me, and the camaraderie of the individuals in Girl, Interrupted, though at times disruptive and fractured, gave me a false impression that when I myself began attending a clinic that I would find my kindred.

This representation could not be anymore incorrect. For a start, you will never be friends with fellow patients. You’re lucky if you ever make eye-contact with another attendee, especially within the context of an eating disorder clinic; every other girl only offers the chance of a competition and comparison is ripe and destructive in such an environment. She’s skinnier than me: does that make me a failure? Why am I even here? I’m not even sick enough to be here…I can’t even be successful at being sick, for crying out loud…

Then there are your friends you have had for years who have also experienced mental health issues. These friendships are simultaneously the most cruel and the most beautiful. You will always be there for each other in your greatest hours of need but sadly there will be times when, without even speaking a word, both of you will acknowledge and recognise that your current mental state is unhealthy and damaging to the other, or vice versa. So, in a heartbreaking act of love, you drift apart and fall out of contact, knowing that the distance could save the other’s life. And suddenly you’re alone, all because you couldn’t risk hurting the one person who really understood your suffering.

90% of the time you will socialise with that group of friends in which you are the only one with serious mental health issues. And whilst their happiness, excitement and enthusiasm offers a lighthearted distraction from the darkness of your mind, this wave of optimism is only temporary. The next thing you know you are sitting in the smoking area of a pub with your more-than-slightly intoxicated best friend crying about how you don’t want to live anymore. And you know that by telling them that you are hurting them and you know how much they wish they could help but really you know that helping you is way beyond their capabilities. And you just can’t ignore the scared look in their eyes, like the best friend they once knew has become an alien they no longer recognise…

So, in short, Girl, Interrupted provided me with unrealistic expectations for the unbreakable bonds I was never going to make with a band of girls who were just as crazy as I am. Damn you, you beautiful bunch of 90s female icons…

My argument would be that film and television will never be able to fully communicate the mental processes of one suffering from such illnesses on a visual platform. These mental processes can only be communicated accurately through language, therefore the only true representation of mental illness and, in turn, the only way awareness can be raised is through literature. Right? Maybe…the issue is that quintessential texts famous and congratulated for their accurate portrayal of mental disintegration are usually limited based solely on the fact that they tend to be written from the perspective of an unreliable narrator whose individual experience is more than likely unique to them. Texts such as J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and even Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks Of Being A Wallflower were perfect companions for me when I needed them most (and I would recommend that everyone read each of these texts at some point in your lives), but I cannot ignore the possibility that these texts only resonate for a certain type of person. Namely that of the white Westerner. I am even isolated from the experiences described due to the fact that I am from the working class, unable to grasp the woes of the upper echelons of society, the middle classes to which the lead protagonists of each of these texts definitely belong. So even literature is handicapped in its ability to accurately represent the trials and tribulations of mental illness.

A new point of concern in this age of social media lies in the sharing and misunderstanding of material regarding mental health awareness. I am thinking in particular about the fad of spoken-word poetry about the experience of mental illness, made most notably popular by the YouTube channel Button Poetry.

I was first made aware of Button Poetry (like most people, I daresay) having stumbled upon Neil Hilborn’s unbelievable piece “OCD”. I can honestly say that I have never heard something that resonates with me so deeply and still shakes me to the core with every listening, the hairs on my arms finding it completely impossible to resist the temptation to stand on end each time. I knew that my experience of loving another and losing them was different to most people’s, and finally I had found someone who understood and had the words to describe this pain…

 

This poem means so much to me because Neil had the bravery I would never have to verbalise what it feels like to live with constant destructive thoughts ticking in your brain but to have these completely dissolve and fall silent when you find yourself with someone you genuinely care about. Romantically. Dare I say ‘love’? He also has the guts to openly acknowledge the complete breakdown that occurs in the obsessive individual when situations like this go awry.

Unfortunately, I have seen this video and others like it (namely Sabrina Benaim’s “Explaining My Depression To My Mother” and Anna Binkovitz’s “On Being Left”) being shared on social media platforms and being immortalised as romantic, having communicated an eternal love that we should all aspire to. I don’t know Mr. Hilborn and I don’t claim to know the thought processes that led him to write this piece, but speaking as someone who has OCD and has had the experience that he writes about, I am about 99.99999% certain that this is not the message he is trying to communicate. By definition, someone with OCD has an obsessive personality (no way, Niamh, really?). Living with an obsessive personality is extremely difficult, as obsessions can take many different shapes and forms. For example, I personally obsess about food, study, appearance, morality…the list goes on. Therefore, an individual with obsessive tendencies will often avoid romantic relationships for fear of being hurt or rejected. However, when Cupid shoots his little love arrows, who are we to tell him no? Those who share this poem with a caption of, “Awwww, *heart eye emoji*” close their ears and their minds to the suffering that these words tell of. They will never know what it feels like to finally find the one person who makes all those thoughts of self-hatred and the wrongs of your past go away just by being present, the one person who makes all your self-consciousness disappear because you know you are beautiful because in this moment you are happy and true happiness is true beauty…and then to learn that you can’t be with that person, for whatever reason. They will never know what it feels like to not sleep for months on end replaying one scene in your mind over and over again. They will never know what it feels like to want to tear your skin off because no matter how much you scrub and scratch, the trace and tingle of their fingertips will never go away. This is not romance. This, this is an accurate representation of mental illness.

Mental illness is a sensory experience. It’s the distorted sounds and voices of those around you, it’s the smells of the past that bring back painful memories, it’s the inability to taste anything for days because you have become completely and utterly numb to everything…so can we ever really create an accurate enough representation to raise adequate awareness on an aesthetic platform? I struggle to believe it is possible. And I would go as far as to argue that we either make an active effort to only provide documentary evidence, with no unrealistic dramatisations whatsoever, or we provide nothing at all, because anything that falls short of the appropriate mark, by its nature, becomes exploitative. Or maybe I’m just a bitter, mentally-ill hipster who is angry because my problems are coming into the mainstream. I’m not, but I daresay there are some who will read this article and arrive at this conclusion. Maybe this is too controversial an issue to be tackling on such a small scale…you decide.

-Niamhy xx

The Unhappy ‘Ending’ And Why It Is Okay To Have One

Today I am haunted by an otherwise insignificant memory of me telling someone around Christmas time last year that I don’t cry anymore because all of the ‘bad things’ that could happen to me have already happened, and because of this nothing really bothers me anymore. This morning as I winced trying to apply eyeliner (in an attempt to make myself ‘presentable’) to raw and bulging eyes, I can’t help but wish I could rewind to that moment in my life and eat those words. I take it back. I take it all back.

I was reminded just a few days ago that I had abandoned the ship that is this blog by someone who very nicely said that what I had written had really inspired and touched them, and this remark genuinely overwhelmed and humbled me. But for a time I thought that this blog was no longer necessary and that to continue writing would only perpetuate an illness I ‘didn’t have anymore’ and prolong the suffering. On paper, I am very nearly a fully-fledged independent real human person or, to use the actual science-y medical jargon, a “recovered anorexic”. That being said, in reality I struggle to identify with this label that will soon be attributed to me (I am currently on a 20-week break from my clinic to test the water and see if I can actually cope on my own without constant support from the Northern Ireland Eating Disorder Service’s marvellous network of psychiatrists, dietitians and therapists I owe my life to before I am discharged completely). By saying I am ‘recovered’ implies that I no longer experience any of the thoughts or engage in any of the behaviours that are associated with my anorexic state, and unfortunately that is not the case. I still obsess over food more than your average person, engage in a strict exercise regime and am very aware that my relationship with food still bears stains of someone who has had an eating disorder. Sandwiches have kind of become a Disney villain for me again and consuming liquid calories does encourage a cold sweat (this fear no longer stops me from enjoying vodka however, and if that isn’t a victory I don’t know what is). That being said, whilst my weight has dropped slightly since my last therapy session, on the whole I have never been more content with my shape and eating habits, and although I do on occasion have little slips, I can honestly say I feel ready to leave the ED clinic behind.

I don’t think a full exorcism of anorexia will ever take place in this rickety old brain of mine. But I have learned to identify the most concerning behaviours and quash them before they spiral out of control. Anorexia doesn’t really frighten me anymore. Unfortunately for me, however, there seems to be some new monsters living under my bed.

Current buzzwords coming out of the mouth of the doctor in the house are ‘Generalised Anxiety Disorder’ and ‘Depression’. These are terms thrown about by the average Tumblr teenager to denote normal feelings of negativity that humans experience on a daily basis and, as a result of this, have come to be misunderstood by many. It is of the utmost importance that those who genuinely suffer from these illnesses reclaim these titles and make a decided effort to educate about what it feels like to actually experience these disorders. Which is what I’m going to try to do now. Wish me luck.

One of the more extreme symptoms I have recently begun to experience, and possibly the most concerning and scary for the sufferer, is that of derealisation. The old faithful NHS website describes this as a process in which one sees other people and the environment around them as unreal or dreamlike. It is essentially a wharped perception of reality. For myself, my dissociative experience unfolds like so: I will step out of the house about to embark upon my daily business and will all of a sudden become very aware of my own size and stature. I will become very conscious of the fact that the distance between my head and the ground is not very far, and this will immediately equate to feelings of insignificance. This is when it starts getting properly weird…I will begin to imagine that I can feel myself physically shrink, whilst everything around me expands and grows. Yeah. Some serious Alice In Wonderland shit.

However, as I said, this is a particularly extreme symptom, and I assume the reason I experience something so distressing has a lot to do with my past body image issues. These disorders manifest themselves in a variety of different ways, so there are any number of associated symptoms, and the sufferer can experience all or only one or two. I am also aware that I am conflating two separate illnesses, but for the sake of the length of this post and my attention span we will stick with it.

Sticking with the anxiety for a moment, the OCD behaviours I displayed at the height of my anorexia have returned, but this time, instead of obsessing over food, I have turned to compulsively studying. Before you all jump on the parental bandwagon of saying, “Oh, I wish my son/daughter had that problem!”…no. You don’t. You soon realise that obsessing over a subject that you love isn’t exactly great for your health when it’s 4am, you’re reading yet another article about medieval philosophies of evil and haven’t actually seen your bed in three days. And this is when the depression starts to kick in. You cry a lot. You start to think you have no-one and feelings of loneliness reach their peak because you’ve essentially become a recluse, hermitting yourself away in order to study. Which is really just an attempt to distract from the thoughts that are really consuming you. Thoughts about loneliness. Fears that you have hurt everyone around you. You start thinking about things you have said to people you care about and worry that you have hurt their feelings. You start to think that everyone you know hates you. And you can’t blame them because you hate yourself too. And you hate yourself because you hate the bad things that have happened to you. And you get angry because of the bad things that happen to you. And who knows, you may even start to lash out at those around you because, let’s face it, anger is very difficult to control. And then you really do hurt those who care about you because the words that come out of your mouth aren’t your words; they are the words of the cruel monster that lives in your head. And once you’ve calmed down and the episode has finally ended, you realise how much you have affected those around you. And the self-loathing begins again. The very definition of a vicious cycle, number 1.

The final symptom and thought process I wish to address is probably not the most cheerful topic of discussion for a Friday evening but is one which should be brought to the fore. I have recently become consumed with thoughts of my own mortality. This is not the same as experiencing suicidal thoughts, let’s make that fact clear. Rather, my awareness of the unavoidable fact that I will soon die has increased tenfold. This may sound completely bizarre to those on the outside; sure, we’re all going to die, so what? But when every waking moment is occupied by musings of when and how it will happen and the unpredicability of the act of dying…yeah. It can get pretty exhausting. An exhaustion which never goes away because sleeping is now an impossibility, behind every closed eye a memory of something or someone you have lost that you miss intensely. And you’re going to die soon, so shouldn’t you stop wasting your time wallowing and start doing something to get all that stuff back? But you’re going to die soon, so what’s the point? The very definition of a vicious cycle, number 2.

After all that heavy stuff, I think we might be in need of some comic relief. But we gotta keep with the mortality theme, and considering myself and the ol’ Reaper have become good acquaintances over the past while…tell me, do you have a fever?

The last thing I want is for readers of this post to pity me. I am not a pathetic figure seeking your sympathy. I am trying my best to be strong and brave, my hope being that if I write about my feelings and experiences I may break the taboo and encourage conversation. I know I am not alone among my peers. Distress and despair is ripe amongst young people but this generation (particularly the so-called ‘millennials’) are shot down and told to stop complaining; we don’t know how good we have it. But when does discontent and unhappiness warp and distort, becoming something much more sinister than simple feelings of restlessness?

Despite constantly declining medicinal help throughout my two years in therapy for an eating disorder, I have now accepted that this is not something I can do alone. These thoughts are not my thoughts, this existence is not me. I am now reaching out for drug therapy and will hopefully be starting a course of antidepressants within the next few weeks. I always frowned upon the biomedical approach to treating mental illness, always believing that it was a sign of weakness, turning to drugs being the easy way out. I could not have been more wrong. It takes a really strong person to recognise and accept that some matters are simply beyond our own capabilities.

What hurts most about this whole thing is that for a while I was happy. For about three months at the end of 2016 I lived in a state of blissful happiness and life was so beautiful. But the fact is that man is not invincible. I am not invincible. This blog has been resurrected and I anticipate that I will be a lot more active over the next few months. I can only hope that what I write will reach out, resonate and educate.

It’s okay to seek help again because I simply cannot ignore this arrhythmic ticking in my brain anymore. And I’m scared.

-Niamhy

A-Z Of Reasons To Recover: F Is For Finding Happiness

I have a confession to make. The Niamh you have become acquainted with through the posts on this blog is not altogether real. I have constructed a character. There is nothing wrong with that; surely all of the personas we carry off on social media platforms are simply one facet of our true selves, but for the purposes of this post, I feel it is necessary for me to strip back the facade and (perhaps for the first time) unveil my personality in all its naked honesty.

I wish.

It is important for me to do this in order to tackle some misunderstandings about anorexia nervosa and eating disorders in general. For the common outsider, it seems to be the case that their understanding of anorexia nervosa is that this illness is simply a case of self-starvation. Thus, the recovery process is easy: eat some food, gain some weight, hey presto! All better. And that is perfectly understandable; the taboo surrounding such a difficult and complex disorder has led to a lack of education, so much so that even my own mother would admit to this being the extent of her knowledge before her own daughter was diagnosed.

This is not the case. While it is evident that, in general, my physical health is certainly on the mend as a result of my food consumption increasing significantly, I am in no way better. I am not so shallow as to fail to recognise the good nature of mankind when casual acquaintances, friends and family members comment on “how well I look” (despite the fact that this may translate in my head to, “Wow, look how much weight you’ve gained!”); I appreciate efforts to congratulate me on tackling my greatest fear for the sake of my health. But I do think that the use of the word “well” in this instance is anachronistic.

Here is the ugly truth: I am not “well”. I would argue that, despite approaching a healthy BMI, at this time I am the sickest I have ever been. I would argue that I am currently at greater risk of physical harm than I would ever have been at my lowest weight and all of the medical complications that came along with being at such a low weight. And this is because I am currently a danger to myself.

I know this isn’t a pleasant thing to read but I cannot ignore how necessary this is in order to stimulate some discussion and to educate, even if it is an address to a small readership. I hate myself. This is not news to me; after all, an individual must experience true self-loathing in order to feel that they do not deserve to eat. But before, starvation was the perfect distraction from such a harsh reality. If I could succeed at starvation, I had a raison d’être. This has been taken away from me. And that is terrifying.

I have lived with disordered eating for eight years of my life. Those were my eight years of adolescence, the time in a person’s life when they truly come into their own and begin to understand who they are as an individual and learn what their position is in society. Unfortunately, I have no idea who this person is. When your main focus in life is to eat so little as to be a waif in the wind and to be the greatest dieter that the world has ever seen, it is almost impossible to be yourself. You are not you. You are Anorexia. And, at the time, that is all that matters and you are perfectly okay with that.

I am proud to say that I am now trying to leave Anorexia in the past in order to be Niamh, but this is honestly the hardest part of the journey so far. It is difficult having to face your greatest fear every few hours in the form of eating. It is difficult waking up every morning knowing that you have to spend the next few hours or so walking around the planet wearing a body that you are not comfortable in. It is difficult knowing that you wasted years of your life creating something only to have it taken away from you. It is difficult knowing that you are causing your loved ones pain because sadness is an inherent part of your life now and you can’t explain why. It is difficult hating yourself.

I don’t know whether depression is a cause or a symptom of my anorexia nervosa (and yes, it is “my” anorexia nervosa; I feel I have every right to “own” my illness now) but what I do know is that it is certainly present throughout and after the event. So the next time you use the term “depressed” in reference to a fleeting feeling of sadness or frustration, take a moment to think about what the word “depression” really refers to. Self-loathing. Worthlessness. Hopelessness. These emotions are constantly present in the mind of someone suffering from depression. So please, think before you speak.

Finally, before you assume I or any other ED warrior is recovered because I now eat sandwiches for lunch or my palette has developed beyond one serving of spinach for dinner or I don’t perform jumping jacks until I collapse into a sweat-drenched faint, think again. There is more going on in this head of mine than you will ever know.

-Niamhy xx