- For the longest time,
I believed that I was going to get better.
I tried everything from countless medications.
I tried therapy, I tried electroconvulsive therapy.
I worked on my nutrition.
I worked on exercise.
I tried everything I was told would make me feel better
and would help me overcome my mental illness,
but that hasn't panned out.
It hasn't worked out that way.
Despite everything that I've done,
I still deal with symptoms
and I still feel the weight and the loss
that has come with living with an illness
like schizoaffective disorder.
But before I get deeper into that,
I wanted to thank Health Storylines
for sponsoring this video.
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I couldn't believe how much easier it was
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It has also provided me with a lot more information
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Now back to the video.
- So, I'm sure some of you are familiar with my story.
If you're not, you can find out more here,
but basically what happened was I was struggling
with symptoms that I didn't really understand
for several years, and then at the age of 25,
I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder,
and you know, before this period,
before I was properly diagnosed,
it felt like
this period of darkness and despair
was going to go on forever,
and it felt like there was really no hope in sight,
but then when I was given the diagnosis
of schizoaffective disorder,
that felt really heavy in and of itself
because it felt like well wow, you know,
I don't know of really anyone
who is living well with an illness like schizophrenia
or schizoaffective disorder,
but at the same time,
it also felt like okay, I know what I have.
Maybe it's possible to treat it and get better now.
But as I said, you know,
that's just not the way it's panned out.
I've tried many different kinds of interventions
and treatments.
And I'm still not in a place
where I have overcome my schizoaffective disorder
and where I am free of symptoms and feeling better,
and I think that that is what I really wanna focus on
in this video,
is our understanding and our conception
of what recovery is.
I think that it's really important to
not fall into the trap, basically,
of viewing recovery as this final destination
that you find yourself in,
and not viewing recovery as this thing
that you work towards and you get there
and that's it, you're good.
You're recovered, you're over your chronic illness,
because that kind of misses the nature
of chronic mental illnesses.
I think that it's important to understand that
recovery is really more of
an ongoing kind of forever process.
It's something that is not linear at all.
You're going to go through periods of,
you know, feeling really awful
and feeling like there's no hope and whatnot
and feeling like recovery is never going to happen,
but then recovery is also going to entail periods
where you are feeling well,
and you are able to function at a level
that is more acceptable to you.
Relapses are going to be a part of the recovery process.
It's a chronic mental illness,
and so it's something that you are always
going to be dealing with,
and various stressors in life and whatnot
can instigate relapses,
and that's just something that's going to happen
and I think coming to a place of accepting that
and acknowledging that
is really where true recovery lies.
I have shared pretty publicly on this channel
about my periods of struggling,
or my periods of increased stability,
and so I think I've been clear
that I have gone through both of these kinds of periods
in recent history,
and you know, it's important to understand
that sometimes in the recovery journey,
you are going to experience prolonged periods of wellness.
Maybe for days or maybe for weeks
or maybe even for months or years,
but at the same time,
you are probably also going to experience periods where
you kind of have to take things day by day
or even hour by hour or minute by minute
because things feel too much
and the struggle is getting to be harder to manage.
And that's okay.
I think it was really hard for me
to come to a place of acceptance
about this notion of what recovery means,
but it was also really difficult for the people in my life
and for my friends and family to understand that
recovery, again, is not a final destination.
It's not a final endpoint that you get to
and then you're just all good.
I think maybe for friends and family
who are trying to support someone
who's living with a chronic mental illness,
it can be kind of difficult to understand
the difference between navigating a chronic mental illness
and navigating what we're typical exposed to
which is the more acute health issues.
So for example, if they understand that someone is in crisis
and breaks their arm, that's their crisis,
that's their health crisis.
They get a cast on it, it heals up in a few months,
and they're good as new again
and they can carry on living their lives
the way they did before they broke their arm.
I think that this mentality and this mindset
gets carried over into having these types of expectations
around mental health as well,
and so if someone finds themself in a crisis,
a mental health crisis,
it's kind of expected by a lot of people
around them sometimes
that they are going to be able to
take a bit of time to recover from this crisis
and then carry on as they would have
before any of these mental health issues arised.
But that's just not really the case with mental health
and especially with chronic mental illnesses
like schizophrenia.
I think there's also the added difficulties
of you know, people in your life not understanding
that it is a chronic struggle,
and feeling like you are looking for attention
by sharing symptoms or that kind of thing.
I think that's something that comes up a lot
for people who are living with chronic mental illnesses,
and so to kind of work around this, essentially,
stigma that's permeating the relationship
in terms of their understanding of their mental health,
I think some things that can help are
helping them to increase their knowledge and awareness
about what it means to live with a mental health issue
like you are.
If you are one of these people
who doesn't quite know how to support someone
who's managing a mental illness like schizophrenia,
some ways that you can kind of better support them
are really just to ask, you know,
how can I best support you?
What do you need from me, how can I help?
And that might take the form of
going with them to medical appointments
and kind of understanding more about their daily life
with the illness through that
or just supporting them through that.
Something that's been helpful in the past for me
and my loved ones is bringing them to support groups
and having them understand and hear from other people
besides just me, about what it feels like
to live with this illness and to manage it daily.
And so, you know, that's an important component
of all this is having your loved ones
understand what it means to navigate the chronic nature
of a mental health issue like schizophrenia.
But I think the most important thing I want to express
in this video is the importance of self acceptance.
That has been,
and continues to be,
kind of an excruciating journey for me.
I think for a long time,
I didn't want to accept the realities
of what it means to live with and manage my illness.
I had an idea in my head of
what I expected from my life,
and what I expected my capacity to be,
you know, from the times of pre-mental health issues,
and it was really hard to let go of this
and to kind of recalibrate my expectations of myself
and my expectations of what my life encompassed
and looks like.
I think that starting this channel actually
has been incredibly instrumental
in terms of bringing me to a period,
or to a place of self-acceptance.
And I'm absolutely not saying you need to go out
and start your own YouTube channel
to find the self-acceptance for yourself.
I think it's an ongoing journey too.
But more so, some of the things that I think
made this happen with my YouTube channel
were learning more about my illness,
and having a deeper insight and knowledge
about what it means, what the illness encompasses,
what it means for me.
Doing a lot of self-reflection about
what my experience of this illness is like
and what it means to me to live well with it.
I think there's absolutely a correlation between,
you know, coming to a place of more self-acceptance,
and like I said, it's an ongoing journey.
It's going to be something I'm working on
for the rest of my life,
but I think there's a correlation between
coming to a better place with self-acceptance,
and my reduced rate of relapse.
You know, important to note that I do still have relapses.
I do still have difficult periods.
I just went to the hospital the other week.
But I'm learning better how to not let
those dips in my mental health completely derail me
or completely derail my life,
because I am learning more about myself
and learning more about what I need to manage it
and to live well with it.
So I think it's really, really important
to just get rid of the conceptions of recovery
as a place that you get to
and as a state that you get to,
where everything is good
and you live your life the way you would have pre-diagnosis.
That's just not a reality, that's not going to happen.
And that can be a really hard pill to swallow, I know,
but I think that that's a really critical step
in terms of moving forward in your recovery journey
is understanding that it is going to be
an ongoing process, an ongoing struggle,
but also an ongoing triumph.
You know, being able to learn more about yourself,
learn more about what you need is a really beautiful thing
and can be...
I've grown a lot in this process
and I hope that you find the same kind of comfort
in your recovery journey as well.
So thank you so much for watching this video.
I would love to hear from you as well,
what has been instrumental in terms of moving you
along your own recovery journey or process.
If you wanna share that, I would love to hear from you
in the comments below.
Thank you so much for watching and as always,
wishing you and your loved ones good health.
We'll see you in the next video, bye.