An Introduction

Welcome to Periods of Sanity! I am Briana and I will be the voice of this blog.

A little about me, I'm a nurse at a psychiatric hospital in Canada and I am a long term supporter of people with mental illness. My interest in this area started when I was a teenager; I had a friend who, one day, turned to me and asked me what should have been a very simple question:

"Do you know what it's like to wake up every morning next to a beautiful woman who you know isn't real?"

My friend had just been diagnosed with schizophrenia - an illness that, at the time, I knew virtually nothing about.

Over the course of many years, I met several more people with mental illness - men, women, older, younger, of many races and of many socioeconomic levels. I met people with "scary" illnesses (like schizophrenia and psychosis), I met others with more "mundane" illnesses (like depression, anxiety and substance abuse) and I met a myriad of others with a wide assortment of diagnoses. Despite the uniqueness leant to each individual, each diagnosis, the one thing that seems to bind everyone with a mental health diagnosis is stigma.

For people with a mental health diagnosis, stigma is like a stretch of barbed wire wrapped around their body. At first, the barbed wire rests against their skin - they know that it is there, waiting to draw blood. These people need to watch what they say, watch how they act, because they know that stigma is there and a slip of the tongue will lash the wire tighter and cause the barbs to bite into their skin. These people don't confide in others because they can't - they know the connotations that exist around having a mental illness diagnosis - so they suffer in silence until they break. 

It is in this state that I receive them into care - scared of their diagnosis, ashamed that their friends and family fear them, unable to take care of themselves. These patients outwardly look fine, they look like you or I, but their minds are broken and, because we cannot see the mind, we disregard their pain and illness - we cannot fathom what it must be like to see things that aren't really there or to feel so utterly hopeless that suicide seems the only logical escape. The walls of stigma and shame hold my patients firmer than any walls we could put into place. I heard several interesting statistics recently...

In the mentally ill population,

49% of people have no close relationship;

35% have had no sexual contact in the last 12 months;

13% haven't been touched by another human being in the last 12 months.

This blog is about mental illness, mental health, dispelling myths and advocating for the rights of those with mental illness. It's about the people behind the diagnoses - the highs, the lows, the laughs and the tears. It's about opening minds and showing the world that people with mental illness aren't scary. There will be news and research updates, facts and tidbits, and commentaries on the way that people with mental illnesses are treated.

Everyone is welcome here. I look forward to your comments but be advised that spamming and trolling will not be tolerated on this blog.

I hope you enjoy my Periods of Sanity. 

Fun fact: This blog is green because the awareness ribbon for mental illness is also green