Hello, lovely readers! Thank you for checking out my blog. For my first post, I thought I would introduce myself and what I’m going to be writing about. My name is Andrea, I am a twenty-five-year-old writer with schizo-affective disorder, and I am a lover of cats and English Breakfast tea.
…What? Is something wrong? Oh, I know what you’re thinking. Surely, dogs are superior to cats.
…No? Oh, you mean the schizo-affective thing. Now, why would that stand out to you among the information I listed for you? It doesn’t seem to fit with the rest, does it? One might believe that having a mental illness like this is a quality one might consider stranger than loving cute fuzzy animals or sweet black tea. Which is one of the reasons why many people keep their mental illnesses private, or at least among a small group of trusted family and friends. "Strangeness" is a bit of a mild word to describe society's perception of mental illnesses and those who have them. The stigma associated with mental illness is a toxic and harmful attitude that shapes people who suffer from mental illness as homicidal psychopaths who are to be feared. In reality, people who experience mental illness are just "normal" people (but what is "normal," really?) with different struggles than a person who doesn't experience mental illness.
But there are still too many people who perpetuate the stigma that it keeps many people with untreated mental illnesses from receiving the help they need. Because apparently, therapy is for "weak" people, and medication is for "crazy" people. With this blog, I hope to demystify mental health and talk openly about my own mental illness in order to help break the stigma.
So, about my illness. I have bipolar-type schizo-affective disorder, which I was just diagnosed with this past Thursday (April 5, 2018). Previously, I was only diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but my psychiatrist added the "schizo" part to it to encompass the visual distortions I've been experiencing (because, apparently, the stigma for "bipolar" wasn't bad enough). This past December, when I was diagnosed just with bipolar, I published a chapbook also called Free the Strange (2017) about my experiences with the manic and depressive stages of my illness. Feel free to check it out to learn more about my experiences, though I plan to go more in depth with my symptoms in other blog posts.
I believe I shall leave it at that. I hope to post every week, so keep checking back!
--A