for those who just joined

For those of you who just joined, I'd like to explain a couple of things.

This blog was created to discuss frankly mental health issues by using my own life as an example. Initially, it was just one way of marketing for some memoirs I've written, however, now I have put those projects on the back burner and am concentrating on speaking and writing as a way to help people understand and inspire others. One of my long term goals is to be an inspirational/motivational speaker and writer who not only is effective as a "stigma buster". but who can live off of her craft.

I am very frank in my revelations through my mental health recovery process.

My nemesis is called schizo-affective disorder. It's basically the symptoms of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.The symptoms I have endured over a 31 year period are hearing voices, mood swings, extreme paranoia, delusions, depression, mania, anxiety and suicidal ideations. For 25 of these 31 years, I was medication intolerant, which means that my symptoms were not manageable and most days, I had one or more of these symptoms to live with.

I am inspired to share my journey, because no one ever hears about the "average Joe" who has a thought disorder. It is either an extremely successful person, a genius or someone who shoots people supposedly because of their illness. I want to dispel this myth. Mental illness cuts straight across the board and reaches all ethnicities, all socio-economic levels and all intelligence levels. Mostly, we are people in a bad situation trying to cope with it daily;  some, depending on how severe  it is maybe minute by minute. Minute by minute is how I coped for those 25 years.

Believing in the mythical Ghanaian bird, Sankofa, I am also looking back and writing for my own purposes. Now that for the last 7 years, I have had it somewhat under control until recently, my biggest fear is that I will go back to the state I was in for those 25 years and stay for the rest of my life. Sometimes, I cry about this. It scares me. It scares me since over the past 7 months I have had to visit the acute partial psychiatric program (when you only go daily, it's not in-patient)as I have been experiencing breaks with reality again. I have been reminded by the psychiatrist at the hospital that this will happen from time to time for the rest of my life. Scary right.Think about living with it. NO, REALLY THINK about it. That's what this blog is about.

This blog is written for the intolerant, the families of, the empathetic who are interested in and the actual bearers of mental illness.

By the way, you will see poetic entries from time to time. This is usually how I express myself to the world and I find that in trying to describe such a horrifyingly unreal and constant illness, this skill is a useful tool.

Please, be my guest, and read past blogs to understand where I am coming from. I have only scratched the surface with this entry. I recommend that you at least read the first 10 or so to get a background on the illness and how it initially affected my life.

I hope to be a force in eradicating stigma against people with a mental illness. We shouldn't have to suffer twice. For this reason, I do a lot of volunteer work speaking and writing within the  general and mental health community in hopes of being a blessing to this cause. I am at the grass roots level and am just laying groundwork for what I ultimately want to do.

If you don't believe it, watch me.