The Negative Side Of Hearing Voices - Mental Health Problems

by Cheryl
(Preston)

Mental health problems, people treat you differently - one minute when you're fine, but the next minute when you're not, they don't. Voices in your head can cause so much damage, and can change so much about not only you as a person - how you think, how you are, how you act - but also change the people that you thought very highly of.

The word 'mental health' to some people that don't understand is like an evil disease. People think bipolar is just being depressed. "Everybody's depressed", they say.

You can feel perfectly on top of the world one-minute, having such an indescribable feeling of happiness that you feel you could take over the world, and within the space of an hour, a day a week you just want to commit suicide.

Within a year you have felt like you have been on a huge rollercoaster ride full of peaks and valleys, and the second you feel you’re stable again…whoosh you plummet again either into a depression where you hate life and don’t want to move out of bed, or you’re in a complete high where you just want to drink and exercise at a silly hour in the morning. Well, that’s how I feel.

I listened to the man at the hearing voices convention say that his voices never go, he has them 24/7. Having them - the voices - that say your name over and over again, replaying your arguments, your faults and falls.

You’re doing your best to get rid of them by telling yourself to ignore it. But they go on and on and on. You try to keep yourself busy - you put headphones on and listen to music, and it’s like a head ache with all the noise at once.

The only way I can describe it, - it's like being possessed by the devil. You’re not able to feel like yourself, and people judge you by calling you crazy, saying you’re a freak. They’re not understanding how or why somebody can hear voices in the head.

Regarding family - how can you have so many people around you and yet you feel so alone? Your family members don’t want anything to do with you because you’re “crazy ", or they say “you’re making it up for attention".

How is it that you can be so close to them one minute, and the next they don’t want anything to do with you?

If someone breaks a leg or arm, they say, “Poor them, get well soon,” but if it’s voices in your head and people can’t see it, it’s like having leprosy. How can they blame you for something that you know you could never be capable of doing because you’re "Tapped in the head?” – (or so I say supposing?)

It can’t possibly be any "normal person", because no normal person would steal from someone. Even though they know you all your life and know that you have never done anything of the sort, but because you have mental health issues, (they say) “ IT MUST BE YOU.”

I like to pretend I’m "normal" and I don’t hear voices and the tablets get rid of them, but they don’t. I can have them at least once a day if I’m lucky. The worse the day is the worse the voices are. It scares me when I think about the future, is this my life?

What employer wants someone working for them who’s volatile?

I want to do cabin crew, but who wants an air hostess` losing the plot thousands of feet up when they are looking after people. Who wants a wife who one minute loves you to death and then next planning how to kill you?

And children - do I want to ruin a child’s life because I’m selfish? What child wants a mother who’s mental and might not be able to give a stable family home?

I feel fine one minute. But who knows what events may happen in life that could make me worse. And this could affect the life of a child - having the illness. Having a child who may also go through something as horrible and scary as hearing "VOICES", and being so paranoid you hid in your wardrobe, or you think that people on the bus are laughing at you because they are having an affair with your boyfriend.

People can laugh at some of the things that you believe when you’re ill. How you can believe you can read peoples minds and they can read yours? How you can be at a friend’s party and being kicked out because you’re a "slag" because you feel a little flirtatious?

You could be harmlessly walking your drunken cousin home when you can get into an argument, instead of getting the power to chill out and look at the issues and sort it out. The voices within you start and pickle your head until you don’t know what you’re thinking or what you’re doing. And before you know it, you feel like it’s taken over your body and you’re taking your anger out.

Really, you don’t want to hurt the person. You want to take it out on the voices, but your head is so mixed up that your only way to relieve yourself is to take it out on someone, as in my case punching someone.

I hate it.