Just recently I've been riding a bit of a rollercoaster, starting early November when my partner of two years and I broke up. We had been living together but mid-year I went off both the anti-depressants and the anti-psychs and I kind of plunged into a depression that I found difficult to get myself out of. I realised a month or so later I shouldn't have gone off the anti-depressants at the very least (one tends to learn the hard way), and I went back on. But it was a bit late.
My partner (as much as I still care about her and we're still friends) found it difficult to cope with my lack of drive and motivation, particularly around the house and she ended the relationship.
Then, having gone back on the anti-depressants, things started to pick up. I managed to score a full-time job with a major call centre about 10 minutes down the road and started almost two weeks after I applied. It's a great environment with an excellent crowd and I'm really enjoying it. Considering I've never worked in a call centre before, it's a new experience and was a huge learning curve.
So anyway, there was that and then there was moving house - apparently one of life's most stressful events - up there in the top three anyway. Plus a close member of my family got sick (which I won't go into at this point). Because I had been advised after my second psychotic episode that I had to watch my stress levels, I was starting to worry that I might be headed for another one considering all that had been happening. I was very energetic to start with, which felt like borderline mania, couldn't sleep and was up at all hours. My head felt like I had plugged in to some sort of information download system and I was having trouble integrating everything that I was meant to.
Then, one day at work I thought I overheard a conversation taking place between my team leader and another team member that related directly to me. I still don't know whether the conversation actually took place, although evidence suggests that it did, but it freaked me out as it wasn't exactly positive. Essentially it went along the lines that the team member thought I was behaving erratically and that I might have been on drugs. My team leader suggested that perhaps I was but that they were legal ones. At that point, I got up, very nearly burst into tears and suggested the three of us go down for a cigarette.
Without giving too much information I informed them both of how stressed I had been and of some of the things that had been going on, and they both (thankfully) reacted really well and neither have treated me any differently since. Like I said, it's a good place to work. I've since gone back on the anti-psychotics as a preventative measure more than anything else, and I'll see where I'm at in a few months.
It hasn't always been the case that people have reacted well when I've discussed some of my mental issues, but I find that with honesty and openness, most people deal pretty well. I think so much of the stigma associated with mental illness comes from a lack of understanding and openness in talking about it and the media has a hell of a lot to answer to. Media representation of mental illness is getting better and films such as Proof (with Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins and Jake Gyllenhaal) doing much to dissolve some of the mysteriousness that hinders societal understanding of the experience.
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