How I Understand Mental Illness

 What is mental illness? As I understand it. I can only ever explain something as I see it and if I've experienced it. The answer to what is mental illness might be an obvious answer to some, but not everyone. There's mental illness and then there's chronic mental illness too.

First off, health is not just physical. It's mind, body, spirit. If one is out of balance then, at some point, another part will be affected. All three are equally as important. NB: With spirit I mean your go-juice, what makes you happy, what gets you out of bed in the morning, your thirst for being. 

For me to best explain mental illness as I understand it then I must start with physical and genetic disorders. It all starts before you're even born. From the moment of conception you're already set up for predisposition. You're predisposed if your family history has cancer, stroke, heart disease, fibromyalgia, diabetes, alzheimers, blood clots, and the list goes on.

Not everything is purely down to genes. I have a prothrombin 20210 gene mutation. One of my parents has it and there was a 50% chance I would get it. I didn't find out I had it until I had a blood clot (pulmonary embolism) when I was 29. My chances are up because I am predisposed to developing clots, but why did I go 29 years without developing a clot?

Introducing the environmental factors. At the time I had pulmonary embolism I was quite unwell. I was underweight, suffering from muscle weakness, I had anaemia, and when I went christmas shopping I ended up spending two whole days in bed. I wasn't moving and I was probably dehydrated. So I got some clots.

I've changed my environmental factors now. The predisposition is still there, and higher, but now I move around, I am not anaemic, I am not underweight, and I am hydrated.

Replace clotting factors with something like type 1 diabetes or fibromyalgia. You can alter them with changing environmental factors, but once you get them, you can not shake them. You don't always know why you get something, you just know you're predisposed to developing something.  I am predisposed to auto-immune diseases hence the diabetes. And the environmental factor to developing T1D? It was probably the chicken pox. Not my lifestyle (that's type 2).

• Blood clots: Acute or a short-lived experience
• T1D and FMS: Chronic or a long-term to life-long experience

Now replace all physical ailments I mentioned with mental. Instead of cancer, stroke, heart disease, let's say anxiety/OCD, agoraphobia, and depression. All three run in my family. Unfortunately not everyone is diagnosed and treated, but I can follow them all back down the genetic line.

From conception I was predisposed to develop anxiety/OCD, agoraphobia, and depression. It wasn't necessarily definite I was going to develop those conditions, but I did. It's a combination of genetics and environment. For me it is chronic. 

In this sense, when I say chronic for mental illness, I mean over years and coming and going. Acute in this case I would say you have a case of it, but then no repeats. Acute can still be months and years. Acute vs Chronic doesn't mean one is less intense or less serious then the other, they're both as serious as each other. Chronic means I can lessen the conditions with environmental factors, but I keep developing them and I struggle to shake them.

In my case, with CPTSD, it is a chronic illness I have developed. I am predisposed to develop mental illness and my environmental factor is years of trauma. The way I can lessen the condition is by literally changing environments, altering my lifestyle, cutting out abusers, a combination of therapies, and medication.

I hope this both makes sense and helps either you or someone you know who may struggle to understand mental illness 💗