Okay, so there are obviously many different mental illnesses. And given that everyone has different symptoms and experiences it’s not surprising.

My aim for this post is to help people get a better understanding of what varying types of mental illness are and how they affect people in different ways.

For me mental illness is a lot scarier than having a physical illness, for the fact that often times you can’t see it. There are a lot of people (myself included) who have what is called “high functioning” mental illnesses. This means they appear to be completely healthy, they go about their day, they go to work and socialise, like nothing is wrong. On the other hand, there are lots of people who can’t function at all. Whether that’s due to the severity of their illness, or their inability to get help, I’m not sure. But either way, both sides of it are scary.

So, see below for some very useful information and hopefully there is something in there can be helpful in your own lives, in terms of dealing with your own issues, or understanding what a loved one is possibly going through.

Also, this is going to be quite a lengthy post so please feel free to scroll the relevant parts you wish to read.

Anxiety

Anxiety along with depression is probably the most well known mental illness. Whilst people who don’t suffer from an anxiety disorder won’t fully understand how scary it can be, everyone has anxiety at some point in their lives. It’s that nervous feeling of “I can’t do this”. It’s that ball in the pit of your stomach when you feel like something might go wrong.

However, for people who suffer from anxiety disorders, these feelings soar into overdrive and can feel like they are out of control.

So, what exactly is anxiety?

According to the dictionary, anxiety is:

a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease about something with an uncertain outcome

An anxiety disorder is when you have no control of those feelings and your body goes into “fight or flight” mode over what may seem like trivial issues.

What causes anxiety?

Stress is the biggest contributing factor when it comes to anxiety. This can be stresses from that have happened in your life, or even the threat of things that haven’t happened yet.

What are the symptoms of anxiety?

I think one of the biggest symptoms of an anxiety disorder is panic attacks. A panic attack is when your body experiences an extreme rush of adrenaline out of nowhere with the following symptoms, as listed by the Anxiety and Depression Association of America.

Palpitations, pounding heart, or accelerated heart rate

Sweating

Trembling or shaking

Sensations of shortness of breath or smothering

Feelings of choking

Chest pain or discomfort

Nausea or abdominal distress

Feeling dizzy, unsteady, light-headed, or faint

Chills or heat sensations

Paresthesia (numbness or tingling sensations)

Derealization (feelings of unreality) or depersonalization (being detached from oneself)

Fear of losing control or “going crazy”

Fear of dying

Most people won’t experience all of these symptoms at the same time but a few together is very common.

Depression

Being the single most well known but single most misunderstood (in my opinion) mental illness, depression is seen as a somewhat taboo. I believe many more people suffer from this illness have gone undiagnosed, either through not knowing, or not receiving the correct help.

What is depression?

a mental condition characterized by feelings of severe despondency and dejection, typically also with feelings of inadequacy and guilt, often accompanied by lack of energy and disturbance of appetite and sleep.

Depression makes you feel like you have no hope. Many people with depression can function throughout the day perfectly normally, not showing any symptoms. When movies create characters that have depression, they are often depicted as being in bed all day, or staying at home in pyjamas. I guess, this can be true to a certain extent but depression is so much more than just not wanting to get out of bed.

What causes depression?

Put simply, depression is a chemical imbalance in yout brain. Either you have too much or too little of a certain chemical bein excreted into your brain. Many medications, along with good therapy can help sort this out.

There are of course other causes. Life experiences, severe stress or trauma and many other things can cause depression.

For me, my depression was brought on by my inability to be able to cope with my anxiety. This seems to be a common occurance for people who suffer from multiple mental illnesses.

What are the symptoms of depression?

WebMD lists the symptoms of depression as the following:

Trouble concentrating, remembering details, and making decisions

Fatigue

Feelings of guilt, worthlessness, and helplessness

Pessimism and hopelessness

Insomnia , early-morning wakefulness, or sleeping too much

Irritability

Restlessness

Loss of interest in things once pleasurable, including sex

Overeating, or appetite loss

Aches, pains, headaches , or cramps that won’t go away

Digestive problems that don’t get better, even with treatment

Persistent sad, anxious, or “empty” feelings

Suicidal thoughts or attempts

For me, I actually feel all of these symptoms at some point or other throughout my bad days. I think I struggle with this more than my anxiety as my anxiety gives me feelings of worry and I can calm myself down. But trying to make yourself happy when you feel helpless and worthless is the hardest thing to do.

Borderline Personality Disorder

BPD is very misunderstood. Unless you have it, or know someone who has it, most people think it’s the same as DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder). BPD has nothing to do with multiple personalities, so I believe it has been very badly named.

What is Borderline Personality Disorder?

BPD is a common mental illness. People affected have difficulty managing their emotions and impulses, relating to people and maintaining a stable self-image. BPD can be highly distressing for the person affected, and often for their family and friends too. It can be confusing and easily misunderstood, but BPD is a very treatable condition.

Someone very close to me recently got diagnosed with BPD and while being very open about it, people still just don’t understand it. I’m actually not surprised and I’ll admit when she told me she was diagnosed last year, I had heard of it but I had no idea what it was or how it affected anyone. Through talking to her and doing research of my own, I’m starting to understand more about it. I’ve even spoken to my own doctor about the possibility of myself having it. Many of the symptoms, which I’ll get into below, I see in myself.

Lots of people think of BPD and they think of James McAvoy’s character in the movie Split (awesome movie).

Anyway, the movie centres around the kidnapping of three teenage girls by a crazed lunatic – whom we find out later actually has 23 different personalities. Watch it. It’s a great movie.

But no, BPD is not the same thing!

BPD sufferers describe having emotions that are like “black and white”. They feel emotion deeper than others and often have highs and lows, similar to bi-polar but it happens at the flick of a switch and not over the course of days or weeks, like bi-polar does.

The main thing that sufferers say bothers them is the feeling of abandonment. They think the people they love are going to leave and constantly need reassurance that this isn’t going to happen.

What causes BPD?

BPD more often than not, stems from childhood.

As a child if you had an estranged relationship with a parent, or was abused, or spent a lot of time being afraid. Then these things develop into our brains creating coping strategies, like mood swings, in order to try and push people away so they can’t hurt you. It also stems from children not being taught how to deal with relationships (with any people, friends, romantic etc) in healthy ways. A lot of people end up in relationships that are abusive, where they are belittled. This is due to the fact that for many of them, this is all they have known.

Whilst it hasn’t been proven scientifically, it is thought that BPD could possibly be genetic. But more likely, it’s that families grow up in similar situations and are taught the same things, hence why many people with BPD will have children who will develop it later in life too. The brain adjusts to our environments and what we are taught. Similarly kids who come from homes were domestic violence has been prevalent, they will either accept this from a partner, or become the abuser themselves.

I think BPD is one of the most complex of the known mental illnesses, simply for the fact that it can’t be put into just one category. Many sufferers will be incorrectly diagnosed with something else – bi-polar mainly. And again, people just don’t understand it.

What are the symptoms of BPD?

Again, with any illness – physical or mental – symptoms vary from person to person. The critical ones are below:

Having an unstable or dysfunctional self-image or a distorted sense of self (how one feels about one’s self)

Feelings of isolation, boredom and emptiness

Difficulty feeling empathy for others

A history of unstable relationships that can change drastically from intense love and idealization to intense hate

A persistent fear of abandonment and rejection, including extreme emotional reactions to real and even perceived abandonment

Intense, highly changeable moods that can last for several days or for just a few hours

Strong feelings of anxiety, worry and depression

Impulsive, risky, self-destructive and dangerous behaviors, including reckless driving, drug or alcohol abuse and having unsafe sex

Hostility

Unstable career plans, goals and aspirations

Looking at this list, I can tick off at least 80% of them. This is why I’ve been discussing with my doctor the possibility of me being diagnosed with this disorder. Believe me, it’s not ideal and I hope it’s not but at least then there will be some reason and explanation for a lot of how I’ve been feeling. Going back to one of my previous blog posts “This is my story” and reading over it, I guess I can see traits of the causes of BPD throughout my childhood too.

Eating Disorders

I called this section “eating disorders” as there is actually more than one type of eating disorder. I actually didn’t even realise until I was doing my research for this post, just how many there actually are. The most obvious and most well known ones are anorexia and bulimia, however there are a couple more.

What is an eating disorder?

Eating Disorders describe illnesses that are characterized by irregular eating habits and severe distress or concern about body weight or shape.

I’ll make it clear that eating disorders also can include extreme exercise routines after eating too much, over eating in general and the most common, under eating.

The names of the eating disorders are:

Anorexia Nervosa – an emotional disorder characterized by an obsessive desire to lose weight by refusing to eat

Bulimia Nervosa – an emotional disorder characterized by a distorted body image and an obsessive desire to lose weight, in which bouts of extreme overeating are followed by fasting or self-induced vomiting or purging

Binge Eating Disorder – a severe, life-threatening and treatable eating disorder characterized by recurrent episodes of eating large quantities of food (often very quickly and to the point of discomfort)

Night Eating Syndrome – an eating disorder, characterized by a delayed circadian pattern of food intake. It differs from binge eating in that the amount of food consumed in the evening/night is not necessarily objectively large nor is a loss of control over food intake required

Orthorexia – an obsession with eating foods that one considers healthy

Pica – an eating disorder typically defined as the persistent ingestion of nonnutritive substances for at least 1 month at an age for which this behavior is developmentally inappropriate

Prader-Willi Syndrome – a complex genetic condition that affects many parts of the body. In infancy, this condition is characterized by weak muscle tone (hypotonia), feeding difficulties, poor growth, and delayed development

Nocturnal Sleep-Related Eating Disorder – characterized by abnormal eating patterns during the night. Although it is not as common as sleepwalking, nocturnal sleep-related eating disorder (NS-RED) can occur during sleepwalking. People with this disorder eat while they are asleep

Given that food plays such a huge part in our survival as people – we literally need food for our bodies to function – it’s pretty scary that people use food in order to control their lives. Eating disorders are very much a non-voluntary way of controlling certain things. It may be controlling how you look, or it may stem from always being controlled in life by parents or people in authority. I’ve heard people saying that “food intake is the only thing they can control in their lives”. Coming from that perspective I totally get it. I understand that food is a way of control, whether it be due to wanting to be thin, or binge eating or whatever.

I won’t go into too much about what causes these disorders as I think it is blatantly obvious. A lot of the time young people develop anorexia if they are bullied at school – being told you are fat every day by the people you are seeking acceptance from is very hurtful. I understand that it can change people’s brain chemistry to make them think “I’m fat” when in actuality they only weight 50kgs.

Learning more about this illness has made me feel very sad for the sufferers. Food is made to be enjoyed, yet for many people it is the worst thing they can think of.

What are the symptoms of an eating disorder?

There are many, many symptoms of eating disorders and obviously each one has slightly different symptoms. So I’ve found some warning signs, as opposed to symptoms. I found these on a variety of websites.

Constant adherence to increasingly strict diets, regardless of weight

Habitual trips to the bathroom immediately after eating

Secretly bingeing on large amounts of food

Hoarding large amounts of food

Increase in consumption of laxatives, diuretics or diet pills

Exercising compulsively, often several hours per day

Withdrawal from friends and family, particularly following questions about her disease or visible physical/medical side effects

Avoidance of meals or situations where food may be present

Preoccupation with weight, body size and shape, or specific aspects of one’s appearance

Obsessing over calorie intake and calories burned via exercise, even as one may be losing significant amounts of weight

I will admit there have been times when I’ve binged on food. But it’s not excessive and definitely not to the point of developing an illness.

Schizophrenia

This is probably the most horrible and terrifying of all the mental illnesses in my opinion. It’s the one you see on movies that causes people get locked up in a padded cell, in a straight jacket. The reason I want to get my mental health sorted at a young age is so it doesn’t develop further into something like schizophrenia. See, there is my anxiety – worrying about something that is likely not to happen!

What is Schizophrenia?

Schizophrenia is an illness that disrupts the functioning of the human mind. It causes intense episodes of psychosis involving delusions and hallucinations, and longer periods of reduced expression, motivation and functioning.

I just can’t imagine.

I’m going to write a post in the future about how mental health was handled hundreds of years ago so I won’t go into detail. 200 years ago, people who had schizophrenia were locked in mental institutions and had holes drilled into their heads “to release the devil”. It’s just horrifying. I’m so glad that we had doctors who understand better and that science has advanced enough to be able to help these people.

As the picture above shows, people who who suffer from schizophrenia are often thought of as dangerous and crazy. You think of serial killers as having schizophrenia – when more often than not they are just very disturbed people.

Or we think of Brad Pitt in Twelve Monkeys, “Wackos everywhere. A plague of madness”.

What causes Schizophrenia?

Like most mental illnesses, schizophrenia is caused, probably by a combination of environmental factors and brain chemical imbalances. Whilst it hasn’t been scientifically proven this is the case, it is apparently very clear to see the differences in a schizophrenic brain than that of a normal functioning brain, on a brain scan.

For me, I just can’t imagine what it would be like to feel like you aren’t safe in your own head. Sometimes my thoughts scare me but I never have delusions or hear things that aren’t there. That for me is just terrifying.

What are the symptoms of Schizophrenia?

According to SANE Australia, the most common psychosis symptoms are:

delusions — false beliefs that can’t be changed by evidence

hallucinations — hearing voices or otherwise sensing things that aren’t real

disordered thinking — muddled, disrupted thoughts and speech

disordered behaviour — unusual, inappropriate or extreme actions

I am in now way claiming to be an expert in any of these fields and I gained a lot of this information from varies websites that I discovered in my research.

I feel that it’s just very important to keep an eye on how you are feeling and if something doesn’t feel right, go and see your doctor. Talk to someone. It can really help to calm the situation down and make you see clarity.