My mother is mentally ill. My 15-year-old cousin committed suicide. Many of my relatives struggle with depression, although few use the word.
By all accounts, I should be mentally ill, right? It’s inherited — or contagious — isn’t it?
...I wasn’t crazy. But the effects of pretending nothing was wrong all those years were not healthy. In high school, I flirted with bulimia and cut myself once with a Gillette razor, not because I wanted to die but because pain was more familiar than peace. As soon as I got to college, I found myself a mentally unstable boyfriend. I thought I could fix him. Wrong. He grew up to die in a fiery car crash.
I craved adrenaline and conflict. I moved to Cambodia after college, stopped talking to my dad and sister, and picked fights with friends. I tested my gravity, riding the roofs of moving trains and praying my buddies weren’t too drunk to race their motorcycles with me on the back.
I was terrified that if I stopped doing, running, pushing against someone or something, the pain would swallow me. So I lived in a high-functioning state of chaos.
A therapist later would give me a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. I was numb, detached from the war that raised me yet vibrating with anxiety, and I had no idea it didn’t have to be that way.
Turns out this is pretty common. The advocacy group Mental Health America explains it this way: A family is a unit, so even if a mental health condition isn’t passed on genetically to a child, the environmental stress can traumatize the child’s nervous system, triggering unhealthy defense mechanisms. Toxic stress leads to toxic behaviors.
Mental illness, suicide, depression were in my family. But they didn’t have to be in me.
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