“Mental Illness can damage the brain. You can’t just wait for it to go away. The longer you wait to get treatment, the worse it will get and the greater chance that prescription drugs won’t work.” That is a direct quote from a June 2012 Readers Digest article on “13 Things Your Therapist Won’t Tell You.” Okay, my first thought: good thing, I can still try illicit drugs for treatment then.

Notwithstanding the fact that if one does use liquor, pot or crack to self-medicate, one will no-doubt end in worst condition than just having a mental illness, could become an addict, too. Then you’re fighting a losing battle of your addition and not mental illness alone. Moral of the story…Don’t wait to get help and if you wait too long your recovery is going to be arduous with deep valleys of uncertainty and doom. (Don’t use illicit drugs.)

I personally, don’t fully agree with that anonymous therapist’s quote I stated at the outset of this post. It’s like he’s saying: I can write off people so easy and as a hopeless case cause you waited too long to get help….Mental illness is a cancer on our brain but it’s not cancer of the brain. There is always HOPE and some type of treatment – chemical or cognitive that will have some favorable results! Mind that I did not say “CURE”…rather favorable result! Cancer of the brain is a death sentence…Yet, there is still hope with radical treatment that it will go into remission or kill the tumor completely. If there is a glimmer of HOPE for that type of treatment, then there HAS TO and WILL BE a hope for the cancer that is mental illness.

What I do agree with is treatment, early or late into the onset of the “illness” there is still going to be improvement even if we go through a dozen or more medications till we find one that works well. Or if we radically change our diet and way of life just so we can have 7 minutes in heavenly clarity of mind. It’s worth the fight!

Living with bipolar disorder, major depression, self-injury and a host of other labels gets me down many days…I end up wallowing in self-doubt and at times I get lost…My days are not measured in hours but in seconds…because it only takes a second to feel hopeful, a second to boost my spirit, a second to remember the Man I was and a second to hope for the man I will be…In in those seconds, I find my strength to push ahead. Yes, even when every bit of my body and mind wants to give up and I want to toss in the towel. Those seconds tell me that this anonymous therapist has lost touch with the real human spirit…We don’t want to give up! We want to fight to live…even when our brain is telling us to give up.

It’s not the chemicals in the brain that forges ahead against all obstacles, trials and tribulations…no! It’s our heart. In our heart, we find the strength to move on. We find hope, and we find love. We just need to cultivate the desire to be, the will to live in recovery, push that deep into the heart and build on it.

We are more than just a pill, more than just a chemical imbalance. We are fighters of the agents of discontent that tear at us to give up and be the victims! NAY, I say, we will not go quietly into the darkness of mental disorder, have heart, have faith, have hope – we fight for our lives by the second and it all starts in our heart not with a pill. Best of all we can share our heart to build up other peers – let me share my strength with you. Have heart you will succeed!