World Mental Health Day 2024

It’s World Mental Health Day and I have far too many thoughts and feelings about that for a mere social media post.

For starters, I have been extremely open about my mental health issues (Perhaps I should say my ‘mental health journey’ but I’m not great with wankwords!) over the past dozen or so years – some would say I have overshared. I do so not to seek pity, definitely not for attention (the attention I have received is at least 50% negative), and not even to seek understanding (though that would be nice) – I do so to a) be honest and true to myself and my ideals, and b) to, in some small way, try to reduce the stigma of mental health issues.

I kept my issues hidden for a long time, fearing being shunned, ostracised, victimised, ridiculed, afraid of losing opportunities, friendships, respect.

And all of that has happened. Every one of those things.

I’ve had ‘friends’ distance themselves, family shame and ridicule me, ostracise and estrange me. I’ve not been invited to parties and dinners and events because of it. I’ve lost jobs – and also quit jobs – because my thinking does not align with the management (hard for it not to when the wiring in my brain is misfiring all over the place!)

All of which makes me very sad… BUT through it all I have tried to live with integrity and openness. I think that the cost of doing so has been immense – but to have hidden who I am any longer would have cost me more in myself.

Let’s backtrack a little. Eighteen years ago, when my daughter was exactly halfway in utero, my partner changed. She’d been a little difficult for a long while, but it was like she either became a different person or – my personal opinion – she stopped bothering to wear her mask any more.

She became so impossible to live with, so emotionally abusive, that I stayed out with friends, or lingered around at work events longer than I needed to, or just went and parked at the beach and sat there scared to return – anything to avoid returning home to the maelstrom of chaos she created, which she seemed to thrive on. It was like, which of those nine people was I going home to? I honestly wondered if she was schizophrenic, or bipolar.

But no, she wasn’t. She was a toxic, compulsive lying, gaslighting, emotionally abusive narcissist and probably a sociopath. Still is. She was verbally abusive, manipulative, wilfully erratic in her relentless efforts to destabilise our relationship and the relationships I had with friends and family. Whilst that is a subject for a discussion another time, I will say that it was a terrible, terrifying period of my life, and it broke me around the time of my daughter’s birth. Those twenty-four hours, and the fallout from it, remain one of the worst days of my life in every way APART FROM her birth. That is also another story for another day.

I tumbled into a deep depression as the abuse carried on. I withdrew from friends and family, it negatively affected my work and my business. I didn’t know what was happening to me, why I was feeling like I was. I felt weak, emasculated, trapped. I didn’t know how to ask for help, and I wasn’t offered much. That person remains the worst emotional vampire of a human I have ever had the misfortune to meet, and she loved nothing so much as gorging herself on the chaos and sadness she created.

Over the years I had been there with a shoulder to cry on for multiple friends who’d been in or just out of bad relationships, even abusive relationships in a few instances. I had consoled them, let them talk, offered advice if and when appropriate – especially about leaving their abusers – yet it took me a ridiculously long time to realise that now it was ME stuck in an abusive relationship. Once I realised, I ended it.

But with a child involved, ties could never be cut completely, and my daughter became that person’s weapon of choice.

It took a couple more years after that to realise – and be diagnosed – that I was mired in acute Clinical Depression.

Part of the problem with neurotypical people’s understanding of Depression (with a capital D) is that the word depressed is often used so casually. How’s your day? I missed out on a thing – it’s so depressing, dude. These rainy days are so depressing, man. No, these things are upsetting, not depressing.

Being Clinically Depressed is staring at nothing for hours because you can’t face DOING anything. It’s crying at literally nothing, being triggered by a smile or a cute animal on an advertisement. It’s sheer panic at normal everyday tasks. It’s feeling like there’s no point to anything important. It’s like your psyche and emotional health are some perfect crystalline structure, and it has cracked and broken so badly that you can barely function at times. It’s a lethargy of the soul and an inner turmoil, both at the same time. I firmly believe that if you have never experienced Clinical Depression yourself, you can’t really understand what it is like.

As a result of this extended (years long) Clinical Depression – into which I relapsed a few times for varying lengths of time during that vile person’s destructive war of attrition, especially when she brainwashed my daughter enough to abandon us and we were estranged for four-and-a-half long, miserable years – I changed.

Things broke inside me.

I lost a lot of my joy, my happiness. I lost a lot of my light.

I also realised that maybe I’d had problems a lot longer than I had imagined. I began reading more and more about mental health issues in an effort to understand myself and what I was going through – trying to find tools to help me deal with these changes in my wiring, in my cortisol levels, in the dark clouds which were ever more present in my head and my heart.

And I realised that trauma was nothing new to me. I began to suspect that I’d had issues my whole life. I’ve never felt like I fit in. Not in my family, not at my schools or with most of my friends or at my workplaces. I ALWAYS felt like I was compromising in order to be accepted, but that I wasn’t being properly listened to or taken seriously or respected.

I realised that my dreams as a child were systematically shut down and crushed. That I was instilled with negative expectations and emotions by a parent who didn’t care. Well, I will correct that – she did care, but to my mind, she cared for the IDEAL she had of who she wanted me to be, not who I actually was or am.

I realised that I’d been masking my issues my whole life – finding ways to instinctively fit in rather than stand out awkwardly like a sore thumb.

I recalled a family friend – one of our ‘fake aunties’ – showing Mum an article about Aspergers when I was on the cusp of my teen years, telling her she should get me tested because that was “definitely Shane.” She didn’t. I guess she didn’t want to think she could have had a broken kid.

So, I began to strongly suspect that I have been autistic/Aspergers my whole life. I’m currently seeking a referral for a diagnosis one way or another, but I certainly seem to fit the Aspergers/autism/AuDHD (where autism and ADHD co-occur) profiles.

It would have been helpful to know that as a teenager – too have some tools to not only understand but deal with those differences, rather than flail around in abandon trying desperately to make sense of a world which to me did NOT make sense, and to overmedicate on alcohol and comfort food, only to realise in my 50’s that I’M the one who didn’t make sense all along!

I’ve made a lot of friends along the way. Lost a lot of friends as well. Had more than my share of girlfriends and lost a lot of them for reasons I never understood as well, before I tried to settle with the (world’s most) wrong one, then finally did settle with the right one. I lost my daughter for four-and-a-half years, with scant support from anyone, least of all most of my family. My Dad passed two years ago when things weren’t 100% between us because he could half-but-never-quite understand me. My mother, brother and sister all became estranged – at their behest – over two years ago because, to quote my brother, “your mental health problems are affecting our mental health.” It was his way of not having to try to understand or accept (or pay any mind to) what I was trying to deal with. Of course, it was always all about him. Gawd forbid they might have been supportive, but I shouldn’t have expected that any more than expecting cheetahs to change their spots.

So, we circle back to the start of this convoluted and meandering post about World Mental Health Day 2024, and the debilitating stigmas associated with mental health issues…

I’m not a bad person. I try to treat people with respect until they show themselves unworthy of that. I try to be kind, generous of spirit, helpful and there for people should they need me.

AND… I have mental health issues.

I’m not the person I used to be, unfortunately. Sometimes I am unusually quiet because my head is full of storms. Sometimes I am slower to laugh or crack a joke because the world doesn’t seem as fun as it did when I was younger, and I’m more jaded and cynical now. Sometimes I am more withdrawn because I am wary of people after being treated so badly by so many for so long. Sometimes I may seem awkward because I am unsure of what’s going on and I’m being protective of myself. Sometimes I may blurt out the wrong thing in misguided enthusiasm or because I’ve misread the room. (Autism!!)

But I am still Shane. And I’m still trying. Trying to be productive and supportive and encouraging and present and to help others and to help myself.

I’m not psycho. I’m not about to pick up a knife (bad example – as a chef I pick up knives almost every day!) or attack anybody. The vast majority of mental health issues do NOT mean you’re in danger from people experiencing them.

Do people with mental health issues deserve to be cut off by friends and family because it’s easier for those people than having to think about mental health issues they’ve never experienced (and hopefully never will)? I don’t think so.

Should people with mental health issues not be invited to a party, or not get a job, or not be welcome at a relative’s significant birthday party because they’re not their idea of ‘normal’? I don’t think so.

Mental health issues will affect, the stats show, 44% of Australians between the ages of 16 and 85 at some point in their lifetime.

FORTY FOUR PERCENT.

Forty-Four people out of every hundred. We all know at least a hundred friends and acquaintances. Just imagine almost half of them struggling at one point or another, possibly for a large portion of their lives.

It may take a few minutes extra to engage with someone in a wheelchair, or on crutches, or open a door for someone with a broken arm or talk to someone with Down’s Syndrome or Cerebral Palsy or any other physically presented issue.

Surely the same courtesy shouldn’t be too much of an effort to those who have told you they have mental health issues – even though you can’t SEE the wound?!

Let’s end the stigma of mental health. Treat EVERYONE with respect and compassion and as much understanding as we can manage.

#worldmentalhealthday2024

Shane Pinnegar
Shane Pinnegar is an author, chef and music/pop culture writer who lives in Western Australia. He has a lovely wife, two rambunctious dogs with no respect for personal space, especially on the sofa or bed, twenty-something koi, a flock of itinerate galahs who visit regularly, and a never-comprehensive-enough rock n' roll record collection.

1 Comment

  1. A long and winding road to get to where you are, to keep your head up above the fray. I’m proud of all you have accomplished despite or rather through all your trials.
    Keep standing up, keep writing, keep being
    Shane whatever iteration you find yourself evolving into.
    I’m so lucky to have such a friend.
    Peace, love and firewood, Beth oxo

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