 Hello there, my beautiful internet friends. Welcome back to my channel. Thank you so much for joining me here today. Today, we're gonna be going through a list of the top things I wish I knew before being diagnosed with a mental illness. And more than that, things that I wish everybody knew about mental illness or mental disorders. I wish I knew these things in high school interacting with friends. I wish I was taught them as a kid growing up. I think that they are very important things to know and they are what I have learned over the past 10 years of living with depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Not quite 10 years. Call it eight, but close enough. The first thing that I wish I and other people knew is that mental illness is a physical illness. Your brain is a organ in your body. Your brain is an organ, right? God, science class was way too long ago. And there are things that can go wrong with it, just like there are things that can go wrong with any other part of your body. I think this meets the top of my list because in my own experience, people take physical pain and physical issues so much more seriously than just mental issues for the most part. Dealing with depression, anxiety, and PTSD has been exponentially harder for me than even losing my leg. In part because of the expectations and the judgment surrounding it. If someone sees my leg missing, they know that something's wrong. They accept that and they wanna help. If something's wrong in my brain, first of all, not everyone believes that it exists. Not everyone believes that something can go wrong with your brain. Some people think it's all made up or all in your head and that's just not accurate. There are things that can chemically and structurally go wrong or be damaged or get hurt or heal over time in your brain. So mental illness is a physical illness. It's an illness just like any other. The second, oh God, I wish this wasn't true. It's not a fast journey. I cannot tell you how many times I have told myself over the course of seeking treatment and seeking no ways to heal and to get on through life in a better fashion. How many times I've told myself you should be over this by now, you should be better. Why are you still dealing with triggers from PTSD? That was definitely something I told myself even a couple weeks out from the trauma that I experienced. You know, why, oh my God, you're getting depressed again. Seriously, we've been through this before. You know what works, you know what doesn't, so how did you get yourself in this position again? There's a lot of negative self-talk that goes on in my head regarding the fact that this journey should be faster. And the reality is that I may always struggle with some of these things to some extent. I'll continue figuring ways to work through them, continuing ways to manage the symptoms, searching for solutions, but the reality is is that this may always be a factor in our lives. And for many people dealing with mental illness, it may always be a factor in their lives. Finding a way to live with it, finding a way through it, finding proper treatment, it's not a fast thing. And even if you do find something that works for you, it takes a long time to implement. It takes a long time to become your knee-druck reaction and that's okay. That's just how it goes and it's just part of the journey. Number three, people hide it really, really well. This is something I noticed after starting to talk to people about mental illness, about the things that I was experiencing. Growing up, I didn't really talk about feelings, I just prayed them away for the most part. And in dealing with it myself, I realized that you get really good at pretending everything's okay. And then I realized that other people were doing that and had been doing that around me for a very long time. So just because you can't see something on the surface doesn't mean that something's wrong. In fact, it can mean quite the opposite. Number four, this one I think is especially important along with all of the rest of them, but this one in particular, different things work for different people. There was a time in my life, especially right after I went through all the travel that I went through where I kind of thought that if people were really dealing with something, they would deal with it a certain way. Like this thing was working for me and so I was sure that that thing would be working for everyone. For instance, I am a huge advocate for therapy, for counseling. It has done amazing things in my life and I kind of had this assumption in the back of my head for a little while that if therapy didn't work for someone, they were just working with the wrong person or whatever. Like therapy works for everyone, right? Well, it doesn't, it actually doesn't. The same can be said for medication, the same can be said for meditation, the same can be said for so many different things. I have found things that helped me in my mental health journey and those things may not be the things that help you sincerely. Number five, I wish that I knew that it was okay to ask other people about. I wish that I knew that it was okay to ask them how they were doing if depression was still really heavy this week or how have you been, how has your mental health been lately? It's okay to ask about that. I have one friend I can think of in particular who will outright ask me, hey, how are you doing with everything, like the trauma that you've experienced? I know it's been a number of years, but how are you doing with that nowadays? And it makes me almost wanna cry with gratefulness and joy because I think we wait for other people to bring it up a lot. I know I do that in many situations. I still try to figure out what the right time is to talk about something, to not talk about something, to ask someone about something or just be quiet. But for the most part, the people in my life who openly ask me questions, want to know, are ready, willing to listen, have been really helpful to me. It's rarely, if ever, been an imposition and has been something I've been really grateful for. So I wish I knew that asking people about it, if they disclose that this is something they were dealing with, could be a really helpful healing thing to them. Number six, mental illness does not discriminate. It doesn't matter what gender or what race, what nationality, anything that you are, sometimes it just happens, it occurs. I made a video on my other channel, TraumaTak, which I will link down below. I've actually been posting on there much longer than here, and it's a channel all about mental health and life in the aftermath of trauma. So check it out if you feel like it. But I recently made a video about a comment someone made about, oh, you're a rich white male living in America and you're dealing with depression. And it frustrated me so much that someone would say something like that because depression can be very real regardless of the external circumstances that you are experiencing. It does not discriminate. External things don't fix it. If I had all the money and all the time and all the resources in the world, I would still be trying to find my way through dealing with what I deal with in my head. That is true for everyone that I am presently aware of. It doesn't matter what your background is or who you are, it can happen to you. And I wish that I understood that more fully because I thought for a long time that if someone's circumstances in life were basically okay, that they were probably basically okay. And that's very inaccurate. Number seven. This is not seven. Number seven, listening is one of the most helpful healing things in the entire world. And I'll add on the caveat that listening without judgment is necessary in that context. I think most of us have heard analogies of guys trying to fix things, women just want to be listened to. But the same is true for dealing with mental health and mental illness, at least in my experience. People who are just there to listen, who don't make suggestions, who don't interrupt me, who don't listen waiting for their turn to speak. And certainly who listen without judgment have quite sincerely been the greatest sources of healing in my life. A lot of the times we feel like we have to make it better for someone and make it better is tied to an action. So if I do this thing, I can help. If I say this thing, maybe it'll be helpful. Maybe I can make this suggestion for a new treatment that they haven't tried yet. And maybe you can and maybe that would be a good thing. But simply being present with someone, letting them exist, letting them be, letting them speak about where they are and what they're dealing with and what they feel without judging it, without cutting in, without trying to fix it is so healing because the reality is is that you can't fix it. You can definitely help by being there. Maybe you know a thing or two that they could assist. But the most helpful thing is someone just letting you know that it's okay not to be okay by being there with you, by letting you express what you're feeling. At least for me with what I deal with, verbalizing it, getting it out of my system helps me from getting into very dark places instead of closing it all inside even if they are dark and not very pretty things. If I speak them out or write them out or if someone's sitting and listening to me, I don't really know how to explain it, but things change when you're able to speak them out loud, sometimes in tiny increments, sometimes in huge steps. Being able to put what you are feeling into words and have someone there with you is incredible and I'll just leave it at that. But listening without judgment is absolutely vital. Number eight, expectations are really harmful. We all have expectations about different things whether consciously or subconsciously and thinking about the mental illnesses that I have dealt with, I did have certain expectations of what that would look like, how it would manifest, how I would heal from it, how I'd navigate it, you know, who I was because of that, how it worked and holding onto those expectations whether for yourself or other people can be really damaging because you don't know everything. We build these expectations built on stories or things we've read or experiences that we've had but our experience and our breadth of knowledge is not the entire world. So expecting that I could get better from PTSD in a year was nothing but harmful because I was constantly berating myself for not being better. Expecting my friend in high school before I knew much of anything to be okay because the trauma she experienced was just when she was a little kid, so why would it matter now that you're 17 was incredibly harmful, incredibly hurtful to her and I see that now but I didn't know it at the time. The more that I have been able to drop expectations that I have about myself when it comes to mental health, the better. I have almost held myself to like goals and checklists of how to get better when it comes to mental health and unfortunately that is just not how it works and trying to hold myself to that standard or anyone else doesn't do anything but hurt us. So leaving expectations at the back door when you enter the conversation, when you come into the house can be a really good thing. Number nine, and this is also a very important one, having something wrong with your brain or off with your chemistry or an experience that has really affected you does not make you any less of a person. It doesn't make you a pariah, it doesn't make you damage goods, it doesn't make you anything other than you. I think I had this idea, this sort of judgment in my head that if someone's brain didn't work right, if my brain didn't work right, that something was inherently less about me and that's not true at all. This is exactly the same as if you broke your wrist. If you have a broken wrist, you're not less of a person, you're just dealing with something that hurts, you're dealing with an injury and inconsistency in your body and that's very similar to what it's like dealing with mental illness. It doesn't make you less of a person, less of a human, it just means you're dealing with a specific thing that may be different than a percentage of the population but that's okay. You're you and that's what matters. Number 10 at the end of our list here, not everybody will get it, not everybody will understand. When I went through the trauma that I went through a number of years ago which I've spoken about bits and pieces here on my channel and more heavily on TraumaTalk, I opened up to people who were close to me at that time about what I had gone through and a lot of them didn't have similar experiences, a lot of them didn't have any education when it came to sexual assault or abusive relationships and didn't get it, didn't know what to say or unintentionally judgmental, unintentionally sided with the person who did bad things to me and in some cases intentionally. That's my rat just tearing up cardboard. Delicious cardboard. Number 10, not everybody's gonna understand and that's okay. Some of the most painful experiences I've had when I tried to open up to people who I thought I could trust about what I was experiencing, what I was going through and their reaction was not what I needed. It takes trial and error sometimes to find safe people in your life to talk to you about what you're experiencing, the right therapist, if that's something you want to look into, the right doctor, the right medication, whatever it is, it takes a while to find the right fit for you and along the way, there may be some people who don't get it. Those experiences feel horrible but they do not mean that you shouldn't reach out, that you shouldn't get help because there are a lot of people who do understand. There are a lot of people who want to listen, who want to learn more or who know a lot about this and can relate. Not everyone was gonna be a safe person for me to talk to about this and I learned that as I began opening up more and talking about what I experienced and what was currently going on. Some people don't have the capacity for it. Some people choose not to have the capacity for it. Some people are ignorant and don't care to get educated. Sometimes they're ignorant and they do care to be educated and maybe they can become a safe person but it's okay and it's no statement on who you are or what you're going through if someone doesn't get it because not everyone's going to get it. So when I had a couple bad experiences, if I had determined that those were simply the way that life was, no one got it, everyone was gonna be a jerk, I would have found myself in a very dark place a lot faster. Whether it's online forums, Facebook groups, therapists, friends, family members, there are people who get it, there are communities for what you are experiencing and what you are going through and I promise you they are out there. If you are sitting in a place right now where you feel like no one gets it, no one's understands and you're just this weird, broken human being, I assure you that you're not. You're not weird or broken or damaged. You're experiencing something, you're dealing with something and there is help for you to be found. If you know me, you know that I really like talking about mental health so I could probably talk about this a lot longer but I'm gonna leave that as the 10 things on my list that I wish I knew and I wish other people knew about mental health. It can be a really weird journey to go through, it is. If you're personally experiencing mental health issues or mental illness, it can be a really weird path to go down and these are 10 things that have helped me that I've learned along the way. I'd love to hear some of yours. What are some things that you wish you knew before experiencing it or before knowing someone who was dealing with it? What are things that you wish the world knew about mental health and mental illness? Leave me a comment down below. If you like this kind of content, I would love it if you'd give this video a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel. I talk a lot about my journey through amputation and mental health and disability and all different sorts of things here. I'd love to see you back here if you feel like it. A huge thank you to all of my patrons over on Patreon for keeping this channel alive and well and supporting me in so many different ways. You can see all of their names listed at the end of this video. If you wanna learn a little bit more about Patreon, here's the link. I really appreciate you guys spending a few minutes out of your day here with me. You could be anywhere in the world doing absolutely anything and you chose to hang out with me for a little while and I really appreciate that. I love you guys. I'm thinking about you and I'll see you in the next video. Bye guys.