Mental Illness - seems difficult to understand, isn't really.

When I was first diagnosed with my Mental Illness in the early 2000's my doctors really went to town on me. They diagnosed me with Paranoid Schizophrenia, and if you don't know much about Mental Illnesses, people with this are the most likely to be the victims of abuse and are extremely susceptible to suicide. To say that my mind was a mess with this blatant overuse of tagging was an understatement.

It's crazy when one thinks about it. Schizophrenia - you hear about those crazy people that take down loads of people with guns in america because of their apparent instability. Yet it isn't very well explained what it is, or the effects it has on a person. When I hear a shooter tagged with mental illness it makes my blood boil, because schizophrenics are more likely to be at the end of a nozzle than at the firing pin.

I once had a taxi driver explain to me about schizophrenics being scary people that emit several personalities. I said to him,

"Er, you're confusing that with Multiple Personality Disorder. A completely different issue"

Yet he was insistent that I was talking out of my arsehole. Some people will never listen, but, that's up to them.

So what is this mumbo jumbo I'm talking about? Schizophrenia and mental illness seems quite complex a subject when we think of it. The word schizophrenia alone sends shivers down the spine. But, when it comes down to the basis of it all, it's actually not that difficult to understand. And for the record, I hate tags.

I'll use myself as an example:

I was born to a dysfunctional family. My mum was a worrier, put other people's needs above her own and let people walk all over her. My Dad did the exact opposite of mum, walked over everyone and didn't give a fuck.

I was born into this, and, through the insecurity of mum, dad trampled all over me until I was barely a shell of an identity. We escaped in the end, but the maximum damage was done already. At that point in my life I had begun to form these routines in my head that would work for me for the rest of my life. This is what I imagined love and care was, it's what I was taught.

Armed with this information, I took my very dysfunctional ideals into school with me and formed friendships and built bonds between others around the fucked up shit I learned as an infant, and, it also played a big part in my decision making process.

From the not so great childhood, and crappy friends in my teenage years influencing me to make shitty decisions I then went on to create even more dangerous avenues such as drugs, and from there I became stuck in a perpetual cycle of not learning from my mistakes.

Because I had never been taught how to love and function properly in the first place. The game for me was disadvantaged from the start.

That for me is Mental Illness in a nutshell. The harshness of life that isn't generally experienced by the general population.

What I don't like though, is that now we have all these tags and labels for seemingly straight forward life issues. Hard to fix, but the idea that life plays a big role in Mental Illness should be more straight forward than these confusing tags.

When I was tagged with Paranoid Schizophrenia I honestly felt doomed. Doomed to fail. And at one point in my life I started to blame the illness for the way I was behaving, whereas if I was taking proper accountability then it would be entirely the other way around.

I just think we should say,

"Man, he's had a hard life" 

It's so much kinder than a label that we can use to confuse and segregate. 

Labels are new, remember. We didn't have schizophrenics 50 years ago! It's just another way to tag people and fit us into neat little categories.

For the record I am now a healthy member of society - so those of you that are reading this feeling useless, then take some pride in yourself that there is hope.

There's hope for us all :)