Everyminute.org

We enter this world from darkness into light, and the darkest parts of humanity are created by ignorance. For the past eleven years, I have struggled with a mental illness. I have been given the diagnosis of bipolar, then schizo-affective subtype depressive, and, finally, just schizo-affective. In the darkness of the early years of my mental illness, I changed medications frequently. I was frequently hospitalized, and I was living in a fog of confusion, anger, sadness, and mental pain. It is easier for a doctor to mend a broken leg than a broken brain. The brain is the part of human anatomy that separates us most from the lower forms of life. While it is what gives us our highest faculties of insight and reason, it is also, unfortunately, the most mystifying structure of our bodies. I found it incredible that a community of doctors who had only a modicum of understanding of how it functions could treat its malfunctions. I felt that most of the medications had been like shots in the dark, some of them closer to target. If there had been a way to get an accurate, instant diagnosis and a tailor-made treatment plan, then I would have been out of the dark years ago.

I have made a lot of progress from sleeping sixteen hours per day, chain-smoking, creating public spectacles, being alienated from my family and community, and trouble with the law. I am now volunteering with NAMI Tennessee, writing prolifically, reestablishing contact with people who were scared off by my uncontrolled illness, and growing in so many respects. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. Medications are now more effective without side effects like the Thorazine shuffle. Cognitive therapy and other methods are available for sorting things out. Vocational rehabilitation can assist those with mental illness like me in getting an education and getting a career. I am now glad that I did not kill myself. I would not have lived to see the vindicating light of proper treatment dispel the dark days of the stigma of mental illness.

Because we are not fully enlightened yet, we need to make concerted effort to ensure that research is funded and that people network to be a safety net in every community to those who fall victim to mental illness. Even though death is 100% imminent, suicide is 100% preventable. No one should die by suicide.


Christie Elise Jones
Poet, Philosopher, and Social Misfit Extraordinaire