So I'm Joseph.
I'm 22 and I'm from Ballinasloe.
Transitioning into secondary school
I started kind of going through anxiety.
It presented in loads of different forms.
The most obvious way was panic attacks
Anxiety kind of controlled my life
and stopped me doing a lot of things.
I was kind of isolating myself from people my own
age and I was afraid to talk to them.
At lunch time I'd be talking to the teachers
I wouldn't bother talking to the students
As young as 12
I was getting bullied for being gay.
So all my bullying was homophobic related.
And before I even knew I was gay
I was getting bullied for being gay.
The bullying was like
the thing to set the bomb off.
I went into a full kind of manic episode.
I just lost touch with reality.
It was kind of harmless at the beginning,
but then it kind of turned into everyone was coming
to hunt me down and I kind of started turning
on my family and turning on everyone.
People who had passed like loved ones,
I thought they were
talking to me and I thought God was talking to me.
I had to be admitted into
CAMHS in-patient services.
CAMHS is the Child Adolescent
Mental Health Service.
In there, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
I describe it as mood swings where you kind
of swing from a high to a low.
Now I know there can be different- there's different
definitions of it, but that's what it means for-
in my case.
I had to fight with
symptoms of suicidal thoughts.
So that was very dark
and for a long time, all I wanted was to die
and my life wasn't worth living and all
that negative kind of thought.
Till eventually the week of my
Junior Cert it led to
a suicidal attempt.
I kind of prayed to my God, and he did keep me alive
so there is a reason for it.
And it was kind of very beneficial for any time
I'm going to through
those thoughts again because
I see it in a different way now.
They were able to put me
on a different medication.
So that kind of calmed down from twelve episodes a year
to one episode a year.
A lot of people would see going into like,
a mental health hospital kind of bad.
But for me,
I kind of felt as if I wasn't alone.
I was sitting in hospital and I didn't think this
was going to get any better.
And it was kind of very hard to see that
there'd be any light at the end of the tunnel
cause it was a very dark place.
If you are going around
calling people 'psycho',
or calling people 'attention seekers'
or saying 'Oh, that person is crazy.'
If you had a child at home or if you had
someone that potentially could reach out to you,
but they see your attitude that way.
I almost believe your
locking that door, and that if I'm feeling
vulnerable, I'm not gonna turn to you if I think
you're going to say I'm an attention seeker.
So I think it's very
important that people
are mindful of that because
it can knock at your front door.
I'm Mark Smyth.
I'm a clinical psychologist working in the
Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services,
and I've been working as a psychologist
for about 19 years.
I think the most important thing around
our use of language around mental health is that
one, the recognition that it evolves over time.
But two, that it's also unique to the person.
So I think we
can improve our language around mental health
by listening.
And listening in a non-judgmental way
and listening in a way
that we hear not just the story,
but the pain behind those stories.
And I think that allows us to both connect
with people and also to hear the language
that they use to describe themselves.
You can use an umbrella term
like someone is depressed,
but each person who struggles
with depression will have their own unique
experience of what that feels like.
It'll give us a guide
to what they might have felt.
But the only way we truly know
is by listening to them.
And I think that's the most important
first step we can take.
When I started going to the mental health
services first, I was trying to get away
from them as quick as possible.
I was thinking some other poor young person could
need this space.
More or less I'm not important enough
or, like, my story isn't
important enough to be heard by these doctors.
They could be helping someone else.
No matter how big or small your issue is
there's someone there
to listen, like your family or your
friends and then your doctors.
And it's just easier
to talk about everything.
You know you watch like an action film
or a drama film,
and you kind of go through all the bumps
and that. I'm kind of get into the long boring part
where it's kind of everything's happy,
and you're kind of waiting for something
to go wrong, but it doesn't.
But I kind of realised
that bipolar is a condition
that's life long.
Like you'll have an asthma attack every
now and again, you're going to have
a bipolar episode, so it's just identifying it
and getting the proper help.
I'm trying to help others
with my story and to kind of
show them there is a way out
Like, am I bipolar or am I Joseph?
I am Joseph with bipolar.
So it doesn't define me.
It's just part of the many things
that makes make Joseph.