Hi, Family. Let Me Tell You About My Mental Illness.
It can be scary and challenging. How to have the conversation, and what to expect.
When Hanah, a 28-year-old woman living in east coast Canada, was 23 years old, her life finally began to make sense to her. After years of being diagnosed with depression and generalized anxiety disorder, labels that didn’t really seem like an accurate description of the extreme emotions and destructive behaviors that had drawn her to therapy in the first place, she finally received a diagnosis that felt like it fit: borderline personality disorder (BPD). “When someone finally put a name to it my immediate response was relief,” she says. “I wasn’t going crazy and there was actually something behind how I was feeling.”
Getting this clarity was exciting for Hanah, and she wanted to share the news with her loved ones — specifically her mom, who she’d long been close to. “She knew I’d been struggling with my mental health so when I finally had a diagnosis I was really excited to tell her,” Hanah says. “She’d been with me the whole way so she was the very first person I told.”
But instead of being supportive and sharing in Hanah’s excitement at finally finding a diagnosis that fit, her mother responded with confusion and denial. Her first reaction was to dismiss the…
