
nobbyiscool
Brownlow Medallist
- Aug 11, 2006
- 13,880
- 15,599
- AFL Club
- West Coast
- Other Teams
- Raiders/TasTigers/MV/Iggles
My experience over the last few months has given me so much more insight to mental health after first being diagnosed with depression 20 years ago and anxiety 15 years ago.
We tell people to talk, to open up... but then what? We just don't have the resources to deal with mental health.
So after 20 years of different medications, different therapists, different treatments... I was finally referred to a psychiatrist late last year, who I was able to see for free under a government COVID program.
3 appointments with they psychiatrist and 3 appointments with the therapist at the same premises, and they diagnosed a personality disorder. The way they explain it my primary mental illness is the personality disorder - the anxiety and depression is secondary, it's a result of never being able to manage/deal with/identify the personality disorder.
It just seems such a failure of the system that you can go through the process in 3 different states (well, 2 states and 1 territory), to find out after 20 years that everything you'd done until now - all the money you'd spent, all the time you'd spent, all the personal and relationship poll of something you didn't know you had - it just feels like such a waste. It's like my life is nearly half over before I started figuring out how to live it.
We tell people to talk, to open up... but then what? We just don't have the resources to deal with mental health.
So after 20 years of different medications, different therapists, different treatments... I was finally referred to a psychiatrist late last year, who I was able to see for free under a government COVID program.
3 appointments with they psychiatrist and 3 appointments with the therapist at the same premises, and they diagnosed a personality disorder. The way they explain it my primary mental illness is the personality disorder - the anxiety and depression is secondary, it's a result of never being able to manage/deal with/identify the personality disorder.
It just seems such a failure of the system that you can go through the process in 3 different states (well, 2 states and 1 territory), to find out after 20 years that everything you'd done until now - all the money you'd spent, all the time you'd spent, all the personal and relationship poll of something you didn't know you had - it just feels like such a waste. It's like my life is nearly half over before I started figuring out how to live it.