“You are crying for no reason.” “You are such an attention-seeker.” These words were not new to me. In the eyes of people around me, my extreme mood swings made me a drama queen. Hearing these remarks about myself day in and out, I gradually stopped retaliating and started believing them. The negativity kept piling up until there came a day when I gave up. I was 20.
It was November 2014. I walked out of the house hoping to come back lifeless, but something stopped me: a phone call. Calling my father then was the toughest and the best decision I made.
My name is Sangeetha Param and I am a fighter. Every day, I am in battle with my moods. I have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder. There were a lot of factors that led upto this — I was bullied as a child, other kids would refuse to play with me, deepening my insecurities. My grandmother was schizophrenic. My brain is now programmed to work differently, but I am not ashamed of it.
After that fateful day, I accepted that I needed help. My parents cajoled me into seeing a counsellor, and I didn’t resist. The first time I met my therapist, I did not speak for the first 15 minutes. Neither did he. No questions were thrown at me, no demands for an explanation. He gave me the space I needed to open up. That’s how I knew he could help me. He recommended a psychiatrist, who made the diagnosis.
Having a mental illness is a challenge. Identifying it is a bigger one. So when I heard the diagnosis, I was relieved. It meant that everything I felt had a reason and I could put a name to it. It was the neurotransmitters in my brain that did not function properly.
I learnt to turn this disorder into my strength and started discovering new facets of my personality. I found that the haze of feelings and thoughts in my head that I couldn’t translate into words while speaking to someone, would make sense when I penned them down.
I had never kept a journal before, but I began to realise how therapeutic writing could be, how it could give way to healing. Every thought, emotion, pain, I wrote. I transformed the intangible into words. Since then, I have published two books, Key to Acceptance and Echoes in my Attic , where I speak about my dark side. In the process of learning how not to be affected by others’ judgement of me, I also learnt not to judge others.
It is very important to have a healthy first circle, a support system. For me, that’s my family: my parents and my sister, and friends. My father is an inspiration to me; his motto ‘Hope, Faith and Trust’ keeps me going every day. Being a cancer survivor himself, he taught me never to give up hope, put my faith in either a higher power, or in myself, and to trust my doctors, caregivers and family. I may not have inherited his looks, but I did inherit his will power.
I would accompany my father to all the cancer programmes that we went to — I still do. I saw how his testimony would inspire other people in the same predicament. I thought to myself, ‘Why don’t I do the same on mental health?’Which is why, today, I give talks on bipolar and depression in various cities from Bengaluru and Chennai, to Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram.
I remember how, after one of my talks, a participant walked up to me and said, “Why do you only talk about these negative things? You should be more optimistic.”
When people are depressed, all of the negativity inside sucks them in. It drains their energy and statements like ‘Get over it; move on; let it go;’ never help. There are times when my family will tell me proudly, “You have come a long way.” But during the lows, even that doesn’t cheer me up. And it’s not like the mood stabilisers and antidepressants I take are a one-shot cure. They are not magic pills. It’s just something that helps me help myself. Therapy and psychiatric treatment go hand-in-hand. I never say ‘I am fully healed’, instead I always say, ‘I am in the process of being healed’.
It is very important to get help at the initial stage. I waited until I cracked. If I’d had the courage to seek help when I needed it, I wouldn’t have suffered all those years, right from Class VIII. The transition between childhood to adolescence can be tough, so my parents assumed I just had the teenage blues, but it was actually depression.
Like I always mention in my talks, “If you or anyone you know is depressed, please seek help. Do not be afraid of what anyone will think. If you have the courage to hold on, you will also have the courage to face it and not run away from it.”
Sangeetha can be reached at sanju_param@yahoo.co.in. She will be speaking at TEDx, Sikkim Manipal University, on October 7.
(As told to Sweta Akundi)
