ode to being a complex mental health patient

‘And yet I still do not feel healed. And increasingly I am sure that I never will. Because there is nothing really to heal from. Or rather the thing I am trying to heal from is not a discrete thing, but part of something much larger and inextricable from my being. There is no post- to my traumatic stress, because the trauma and the stress are not individual events or entities that can be relegated to the past; they are instead one seemingly eternal and all-encompassing thing that is there always, for worse and **for better.’

‘the society in which we live is inherently traumatic. It causes mass death and homelessness and food insecurity and that causes people to turn violent. And those things cause mental trauma on a massive scale. And sometimes that trauma is intense and concentrated enough within an individual that we’ve decided it requires healing from—because without healing from it, we become incapable of making it through our days in normative ways; we can no longer work or function as part of the society that has traumatized us. Which becomes a problem for a society which requires functioning bodies and minds to perpetuate the very things we then require healing from. ’

‘And yet the solutions they propose are the same—to heal each individual back to theoretical stability. The New York Times, for example, right after listing all the systemic reasons college students are so unwell these days, argues this all points to a need for more therapists on college campuses’

‘What caused what we at first called shell-shock and now call PTSD was not the existence of violence, as that has always existed, but the technology that enabled that violence on a scale the mind could not assimilate—a scale so large that it forced the trauma to be processed on a timeline of years, causing the mind to essentially malfunction and produce flashbacks and dissociation and all the rest.’

‘Many people think the process of having and living with a mental disorder is chronological: you get an assessment, then a diagnosis, then some treatment and finally you’re in recovery.’

‘Regardless of going round, across, diagonally, inside and outside of the circle of mental hell, there has always been a time stamp on my recovery from other people. They expect me to eventually get better. For me, time stamps are unrealistic and unhelpful. I’ve learned to stop waiting for an end-date. I am not going to wake up one day and feel recovered or as if I am no longer mentally ill. ’

‘I just move through life carrying my mental illness in different ways: I have bipolar in a hopeful way, in a manic way, in a depressed way, in a hysterical way, in a joyful way. But the point is I will always have it.’

‘their book, they propose its-not-time, a form of [crip time](https://cdsc.umn.edu/cds/terms#:~:text=Crip time%3A A concept arising,differently than able-bodyminded folk.) that was developed by disabled people to describe our experiences and relationship to time. To simplify, rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet linear time, or how everyone else experiences time, crip time bends time as we know it, to meet disabled bodies and minds.’

‘I feel liberated in not constantly having to chase a state of wellness or the need for permanent recovery, because I know this does not exist. ’