Young people and ill mental health

Having a mental illness is a confusing thing, you find yourself asking many question like why me?, is this real? and how do I make it go away. From experience I believe that it is ok to ask yourself and others these questions, it is important to work to try and understand your mental illness and to help yourself work through things.  At any age a mental illness is a hard and confusing thing but when you are already experiencing a confusing time it is even harder. This already confusing time which I am talking about is adolescents.

During adolescents it is a time of experiments, finding yourself and learning new things. All of these things can be hard to manage and create many different questions but add a mental illness into that as your worlds is pretty much turned upside down, well thats how things were for me!

While I was going through a tough time with my depression and spent time in hospital there was something which helped me to work through things and put things into perspective. This thing was and still is a simple four letter word- Hope. Having hope made me realise that the hard times do not last forever and with every negative comes a positive. Hope allowed me to remain somewhat positive during that difficult time and work to ensure I got back on track and on my journey to recovery.

So for any young person reading this post thinking thats exactly how I feel just have hope. Despite being a small four letter word hope is something powerful and can mean the difference between life and death is some cases, for me hope prevented me from taking my own life in a particular terrifying and difficult time in my life. If hope can have such an impact on me and change my life to allow me to reach my full potential, share my story, reduce mental heath stigma and help others then there is no reason why it cannon do the same for you!

So while I know it can be hard dealing with a mental illness, especially when you are young I want people to take a positive away from this post and just remember that the hard times do not last and things can and do get better. While I am in no way qualified to suggest you may have a mental illness I do recommend you seek professional help if you feel you may have a mental illness or if you do have a mental illness. If you are looking for information about mental health two websites with some great information which is easy to understand and are jam packed with information can be a great help Spounout.ie and Reachout.ie are the places to go.

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