July is Bebe Moore Campbell National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month.
As said Shannon Shelton Miller
Four years ago my husband found me in a fetus position in our bedroom floor, hysterical and in tears. I had one of the worst depressive episodes I had experienced in years.
After struggling for more than a decade, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder almost 20 years ago and I thought I had sorted everything out. I am in therapy, take my medication, practice self -care and take all the “mental wellness” steps that we hear about. Life and work went well, and my husband, children and I were healthy. But for two weeks before that episode, I had fought and blocked me a way through the day that I had only been fooled into the darkest, deepest hole.
The children of Pamela Price during the Weekend family at Virginia Tech, 2022.
That breakdown led to one of the first real conversations that my husband and I talked about what it is like to live in my head. It also made me even more determined to want people to know what it’s like on this trip and to understand that we will have moments when we just won’t be in order.
The signs of my mental illness were already when I was 13. My grandparents raise me because my mother was struggling with drug addiction, and I hardly knew my father who continues to fight alcohol addiction today.
My grandparents were very strict and there was no room to express how I felt about my mother who disappeared in succession for months. I was angry, resentment and hopeless, and our family just didn’t have the consciousness or aids to express love, care or care for me well and what I had to deal with at such a young age. I was convinced that I would be better off, so without hesitation or regret I took half a bottle of my grandfather’s muscle relaxants.
My suicide attempt did not work, and I woke up a week and a half later in the hospital, angry and upset that I was still alive, and I still felt hopeless. To make matters worse, nobody in my family asked me why I tried to kill or what was wrong. Once I came out of the hospital, I saw an apparently carefree therapist twice and it was never talked about. All of us was expected to go back to our lives.
I felt even more alone and as if nobody really cared about me. I was skilled in hiding my problems and started to perfect the many masks that I would wear during my mental health struggle. My goal was only to get 18 so that I could get to the army and leave there.
In many ways, the army was one of the best decisions of my life, but it still didn’t lead to getting help. Instead, I became even better at hiding my problems. When suicidal thoughts returned when I was in the twenties, I knew something had to change – by that time I was a mother and my daughter was away from me.
I saw an older doctor who just said I had had a tough childhood and was depressed. He did not give me a diagnosis, only an antidepressants and sent me on my way. He was hyperfocus on the fact that I grew up badly in a low income. But everyone around me was poor then, so I never had sad or depression about that. I often wondered if poverty was his focus because I was a black woman, and if he would have asked more what I felt and experienced if I hadn’t been a woman in color.
I kept struggling and saw a therapist who diagnosed me with a serious depressive disorder. But something felt off because depression was not what I had struggled the most. I bounced between anger and irritability and feelings of euphoria. I didn’t want to go to sleep and sometimes I had paranoia and didn’t hear the world around me like everyone did. Sometimes I reacted by extracting in a way that was unsafe for the people around me, including my family.
Once, when I was twenty, I hurt my daughter. That was my wake-up call. I entrusted a good friend and recommended her therapist who practiced her psychiatrist. They brought me through a series of tests, which led to a diagnosis of bipolar I disease with psychotic characteristics.
Surprisingly, I had peace with my diagnosis. It was the turning point that gave me a path ahead. I was able to go on the right medicines to tackle the disturbing mania and other symptoms, and I stayed in therapy with that practice. My manic and depressive episodes fell seriously and I experienced them – and the voices in my head that had plagued me for so long – less often. Really good therapy and the right medication did not help things to escalate to the point that I had to be admitted to the hospital or that my husband had the feeling that he had to call someone for help.
Yet a few years ago the demolition in my bedroom floor was a reminder that I might still have these episodes, even with the right treatment and medication. I am now 45 and my therapist told me that my depressive episodes can be more intense as I get older, so we are open to making medication adjustments and increasing therapy sessions if necessary.
Pamela with her husband.
When I talk to my husband about what it’s like to live with bipolar disorder, I ask him to consider the physical pain he feels in the army and imagine that that pain feels mentally – and he does his best to understand and support me. We also try to be proactive with our children and ask them: “How do you feel?” “How are you?” “Do you want to talk about something?” Questions like they would have taken a long way for the 13-year-old me.
My message today is about mentally good, point out and learn how I can be emotionally resilient and not get out of a place of emotional shortage. Especially when black women we always try to penetrate and say that everything is ‘good’, but we are strangled by the very superhero capes that we encourage to save others when we are those who have to save.
Yes, I am a black woman and I have a bipolar disorder. But I am also still a mother, a woman and a director of a non -profit organization. I am all these amazing things, and a bipolar disorder is only part of my life. It is my condition, not my identity.
Every September 10, World Suicide Prevent DayI am in front of my camera telephone and record a message to the girl who was determined that she did not want to be here. I remind her of how far we got and how beautiful our lives are. I have been doing that every year since 2018 and this year I will tell her that my oldest daughter has now graduated, a career as a recognized therapist pursues that our family is taking great vacations, and that I have been to almost all 50 states.
I say that the 13-year-old Pam Life came well.
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Our real women, real stories are the authentic experiences of real women. The views, opinions and experiences that are shared in these stories are not endorsed by Healthywomen and reflect not necessarily the official policy or position of healthy women.
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