mental illness – Life with Charli

Mental Illness Does Not Equal Violence

A little while ago, my father and I watched a documentary together about a man called Theodore Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber. For almost two decades between 1979 and 1996, Kaczynski sent bombs to airlines and universities, hence the nickname. Three people were killed by his actions and around two dozen others were injured.

When Kaczynski was finally caught in 1996, the prosecutors wanted to push for the death penalty. Kaczynski’s defense team wanted to plea not guilty by reason of insanity. After a psychiatric evaluation ruled that Kaczynski had paranoid schizophrenia, the prosecutors dropped the death penalty. Kaczynski was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, and he wasn’t allowed to appeal the decision of the case. He took his own life in 2023. Towards the end of his life, he was diagnosed with cancer, and seemed to be going through depression around that time.

Watching the documentary on Theodore Kaczynski made me think about violence and mental illness. It is true that Kaczynski was diagnosed with schizophrenia and depression, and he committed crimes. It is also true, however, that mental illness doesn’t have to lead to violence. Theodore Kaczynski’s case was years ago. Mental health advocacy has helped to break the stigma on mental illness. However, there is still a ways to go. Just last year in 2025, the vice president of the United States JD Vance stated there is a mental health crisis in the United States when addressing the concern of gun violence in the country.

“We really do have, I think, a mental health crisis in the United States of America. We take way more psychiatric medication than any other nation on Earth, and I think it’s time for us to start asking some very hard questions about the root causes of this violence,” the U.S. vice president said.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. , who is the Health and Human Services Secretary said the National Institutes of Health are “launching studies on the potential contribution of some of the SSRI drugs and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence”

JD Vance and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seem to be assuming that mental illness causes violence. The truth is, only around 3 to 5 percent of violent acts are committed by people with severe mental illnesses. Also, only around 1 percent of gun related deaths are caused by people with severe mental illnesses. People with mental illnesses are actually more likely to be victims of a crime than perpetrators. For instance, Schizophrenia is a very stigmatized mental illness. In one research study, around 2.3 percent of people diagnosed with schizophrenia had been charged for a crime, while 34% of people with the condition had been victims of a crime around the same time of the study.

I have long been under the impression that mental illness is not an excuse for evil deeds. An evil person is just evil, whether that person is living with mental illness or not. I have a family member who works with children with disabilities. Sometimes the parents coddle their children. Sometimes if the parents are told that their child is biting or scratching the teacher and other children, the parents might say “my child does that sometimes”. Wrong response. The child should not be not be attacking the teacher or other children any time. Disability does not need to lead to bad behavior. Same with mental illness. Society should not immediately point to mental illness as the reason a person committed a crime. That only leads to stigma around mental illness, and many people believing that having a mental illness equals violent. That can cause a person with mental illness to avoid getting help because they don’t want the label. I used to be one of those people.

More and more people are reaching out for help with mental illness. More and more advocates are speaking out. I love seeing it. Unfortunately, stigma still exists, so there is still work to do. If you are dealing with mental illness, know that there is nothing to be ashamed of. Know that your mental illness does not make you a bad person.

Thankyou for reading, and see you in the next post!

Fighting Mental Illness Stigma: Still Further to Go

Picture taken From Unsplas

I recently read in the news that a television personality named John Brenkus passed away by suicide on May 31st of this year. He was 54 years old. He was a well known figure in the sports world. I have talked about my journey with mental illness many times on here on my blog. One of the hardest but best decisions I’ve ever made was seeking help. I have been suffering from mental illness from the time I was a child. Stigma kept me from reaching out for help for a very long time. As I read through the comments on the article about John Brenkus’s passing, I realized that even though we have come a long way with fighting stigma on mental illness we still have a long way to go.

Many of the comments fit into two groups. The first group are those who downplayed the seriousness depression, such as the examples below:

The second was those who thought suicide is a cowardly or selfish act, such as those below:

However, I did find comments that showed understanding and compassion:

Depression is a serious mental illness, and someone who loses his or her battle with the illness was not weak or a coward. As someone who is dealing with depression myself, I can say it is not an easy condition to live with, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. It’s hard to understand unless one is actually dealing with the illness his or herself, but compassion is not hard. I have had the pleasure of meeting many wonderful people online during my time as a blogger, but it is the truth that the internet can also bring out the ugly side side of humanity. The way to fight to fight the stigma of mental illness is through compassion. Compassion leads us to seeing each other as fellow human being worthy of love and understanding. So let’s try to be more loving and compassionate.

For those of you who are struggling with mental illness, please reach out for help if you have not done so already. If you are or someone you know is ever in a crisis, please reach out to your country’s crisis hotline. The hotline in the United States, where I, live is 988.

Thankyou for reading, and I’ll see guys in the next post!

Be informed about your psychiatric medications

Picture taken from Pixabay

Hi all! Welcome back to my blog! As some of you may know, I deal with mental illness. I have depression and borderline personality disorder. For a long time, I was hesitant to reach out for help with my mental health, but I finally starting going to therapy in 2019. Even though I decided to get help with my mental health, I was still very hesitant to take medication. I’m usually hesitant about taking new medication, but I was even more reluctant to take psychiatric medication. I am now on an antidepressant and an antipsychotic. According to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 16.5 percent of American adults were taking medication for mental illness in 2020. A combination of therapy and medication is the most effective way to manage mental illness.

The different types of psychiatric medications are antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications, stimulants, antipsychotics, and mood stabilizers. Antidepressants are mainly used to treat depression, although they can also be used to treat anxiety, pain, and insomnia as well. Anti-anxiety medications are used to treat anxiety, although antidepressants can also be used for anxiety and are usually prescribed initially before anti-anxiety medication. Stimulants are used to treat Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). It can also treat narcolepsy. Stimulants can improve alertness and focus. Antipsychotics are used to treat psychosis. Conditions that involve psychosis are bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and severe psychotic depression. Mood stabilizers are often used to treat bipolar disorder, but can be used to help with mood regulation in other mental illnesses as well. Psychiatric medication can be very helpful, but they have their cons as well. This is why there are those who warn against taking psychiatric medication, including members of the British royal family.

Thomas Kingston, a member of the British royal family through marriage, died by suicide in February last year in 2024. His family was left devastated, and are now advocating for better communication between doctors and patients about the serious side effects of psychiatric medications. The coroner who handled looking into the cause of Mr. Kingston’s death also warned about the side effects of psychiatric medications. Psychiatric medications do have some serious side effects. With antidepressants, some side effects are upset stomach, headache, or sexual dysfunction. In young people under the age of 25, antidepressants can cause suicidal thoughts. Some children on stimulants feel unlike their usual selves. Antipsychotics can cause stroke or death in older adults. Older first generation antipsychotics, often called typical antipsychotics, can lead a condition called Tardive dyskinesia, which is when muscles in the body move uncontrollably. People on newer generation antipsychotics, or atypical antipsychotics, generally need to have their weight, glucose levels, and lipid levels monitored by their doctor. One very commonly used mood stabilizer is lithium. Those who take lithium need to have their lithium levels routinely checked, as overdosing on lithium can cause serious side effects. Also, stopping any psychiatric medication abruptly can lead to withdrawal symptoms. Hopefully, Mr. Thomas Kingston was informed about the side effects of the particular medication he was prescribed.

One of the medications Kingston was at first prescribed was sertraline. After returning to his doctor and reporting that the medication was not working, he was put on citalopram. At the time of his death, Kingston had stopped taking the antidepressants. As mentioned previously, stopping psychiatric medication can lead to withdrawal symptoms. It is very imperative that mental health professionals are transparent about the side effects of psychiatric drugs, but it is also very important that patients closely follow the instructions of the doctor.

Making the choice of whether or not to take psychiatric medication is a serious decision to make. It is important to know that everyone’s body reacts differently to medication. Some people may suffer bad side effects. However, there are many people who experience minimal side effects or none at all and find psychiatric medications to be life saving. Whether or not a person should take medication or not doesn’t have an easy answer. However, being informed can make the decision to take medication and dealing with medication easier.

Mental Health: Stigma, Misconceptions, and Research

I started mental health treatment in 2020, and it has been a very interesting journey. I began therapy for my depression and was quickly diagnosed with major depressive disorder, however, I was soon also diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder after spending some time in treatment (I go into a bit more detail about my my experience with receiving the diagnosis and what borderline personality disorder is in a previous post). My first time hearing about BPD was when I joined the blogging community, but when I received my diagnosis, I still didn’t know much about the condition. I decided to do a little research on it and learned a lot. Some of the information was useful and interesting, others not so much.

One interesting fact I learned is that BPD and bipolar disorder are similar in some ways. In fact, sometimes a person with BPD might be misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder and vice versa. One similarity between BPD and bipolar disorder is that people with the condition have a lot of mood swings, sometimes severe mood swings. I’m sure a lot of people have heard statements like “she/he is so bipolar today” before. That of course is a huge misconception that many people have of bipolar disorder. I can’t speak for people with the condition, because I don’t have it, but I do know that people with bipolar disorder don’t flip from being happy to being angry or sad in matter of seconds.

Bipolar disorder is characterized by swings between extreme highs and lows. The moments of extreme highs are called manic episodes and the moments of extreme lows are depressive episodes. In order for a person to be diagnosed with with bipolar disorder, they need to have experienced at least one manic episode, and the episode needs to have lasted at least a week. A depressive episode needs to have lasted at least two weeks. There is also bipolar disorder with mixed episodes (when a depressive episode and a manic episode occur at the same time) and bipolar disorder with rapid cycling (when a person has four or more manic episodes in a year), but these forms of bipolar disorder are also very different from how the general public understands the condition. Changes in mood happen much more swiftly with BPD. A person with BPD can switch from being stable to being completely sad to happy within hours. This is due to the fact that BPD mood swings tend to be influenced by events more than bipolar mood swings are. Bipolar mood swings can happen suddenly with seemingly no trigger. With all this in mind, it would probably be more accurate to say “that person is so Borderline right now”, although it would, of course, still be very wrong to say this too. There are a number of symptoms a person has to be showing before a diagnosis of bipolar disorder can be made, and the same goes for borderline personality disorder. Also, throwing the name of a diagnosis around and making statements such as “I’m so bipolar right now” minimizes the experiences of people who really have the condition.

Another important piece of information I found during my research on borderline personality disorder is that the condition is very stigmatized, even amongst mental health professionals. When it comes to BPD, I think many people fit into two categories: they either don’t know about the condition, or they do and have negative views on it. Although, thanks to the recent Johnny Depp v Amber Heard trial, it is very likely that a lot of people who didn’t know about borderline personality disorder know about it now. The mention of BPD during the trial definitely did not help with the stigma associated with the disorder, only seeming to reinforce the idea that people with BPD are manipulative and should be avoided. In the past, even some mental health professionals would try to avoid people with BPD, considering them too difficult to work with. I even came across a recent article warning people about getting into a relationship with someone who has BPD.

The truth is that mental illness and a borderline personality diagnosis does not equal abusive or vice versa. If a person does happen to have BPD or any other mental illness and is also abusive, their mental illness is not an excuse for abusive behavior. An abusive person is just that: an abusive person. Also, a person with BPD is not a hopeless case. There is a particular type of therapy treatment just for people with the disorder called Dialectal Behavioral Therapy. With treatment and support, a person with BPD can develop the skills they need to live productive lives.

All in all, one big take away from my research on borderline personality disorder is that views on mental illness are still pretty warped. We’re much more open to discussing mental illness now, however, there is still a lot of misconceptions and stigma around.