My laptop is currently being repaired since it broke. After feeling a bit lost without it, I am currently using my old laptop so if there is any mistake in this post it's probably because of that.
First things first, since most of the viewers of the blog are from the USA, I am going to add the US emergency numbers to the page Need urgent help? . If you want one from a specific country please request it.
My absence was not completely due to that, there were also good things in the last month, but I have been a bit off-line and I must apologise. In this post I will not focus on the reasons of my absence but on something else of a greater importance. I think this is a problem that most people with a mental illness have probably faced at some point in their life.
I know depression can lead me to think that no one understands me and that it won't always be true. But sometimes, it is true. Some people just don't understand depression or mental illnesses. Some people do nothing to understand and label mentally ill people as either crazy or attention seekers or weak. And sometimes someone close to us is that person who does not understand, and we happen to care about what that specific person thinks, and their words hurt like hell.
So let's talk about my specific case to make it clearer. At the beginning of January my therapist, my parents and I had decided that I should take a leave of absence for a year from university and leave my accommodation in campus to go back home. I didn't tell many people about it at the beginning.
I told one of my best friends around March. Let's call him John to call him some way. I told him on whatsapp, he studies outside the country and I didn't want to have to do it on Skype. I didn't give him too much information even though at the time I already had a diagnosis and was preparing with my therapist my entrance at the day centre. However, I decided I would give him little information, just to test the water. I told him I had had to leave uni for a year because I had had a depressive episode.
His reply was so cliché and uneducated I could almost not believe it. However I decided to not stress and be patient. He said that something really horrible must have happened for me to decide to leave university and asked what was wrong.
I explained that everything in my life was alright, that nothing had actually happened. Only that I suffered depression and I had had a lot of panic attacks during the first semester and the symptoms had only been getting worse.
He asked me something so horrible that I can't even write it here. But he basically asked me if someone had done something bad to me. If someone had hurt me.
I said no. And then again tried to explain that depression was a mental illness and that it could happen even when everything else in your life was fine.
His reply was something along the lines of "Oh. I see... if no one has hurt you, then you're fine. That's nothing then"
I think I tried to say again in just one line that depression was a mental illness and that there was very little info about it out there but I had already realised that I had lost him. And his simple "I know, but you have every reason to be happy" made me realise that I was right.
We haven't talked until now much. And the other day he told a friend of mine that he'd rather not see me because he is going to tell me what he thinks and I am not going to like it.
Some people don't understand. And we can try to educate them about it. But if they show no interest in what it is, my personal opinion is that those people are of no interest for us. Someone who doesn't understand you, who doesn't want to be with you anymore in your down-times, is not your friend. Friends are not only for the good times. And I guess that if I can find a silver lining to hitting rock-bottom (or being in a hard situation), it is that I can see who is there now, and who has walked away. And as much as it can hurt in a first instance, I have realised what I ask you to realise if someone walks away or doesn't understand you: you are better off without them.
I have found this blog which I thought was quite interesting and along these lines:
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