Who can you talk to? | I'm Not Okay

Have you ever opened up to the wrong person?

Back around Christmas time, you may remember that I was going through a tough time. I hadn’t felt that low in almost 3 years.

I reached out to a ‘friend’, or at least someone who I had been very close to in the past.

I said I was scared. My exact utterance of distress was ‘I’m not okay.’

They told me I was okay. In a ‘your tests came back negative for cancer’ way, as if they knew for sure that I had been tested as ‘okay’. It was blunt. They shut down the conversation and never broached the subject with me again.

I’ve previously spoken about when I was a teenager, I questioned whether I might be bipolar. I was told I couldn’t be, and made me to feel like an idiot for even suggesting I could have something like that.

When I was 18 I was worried about my mood swings, my inability to feel happiness, and being ever increasingly on the verge of tears.

‘I think there’s something wrong with me. What if I have bipolar?’
‘No, you don’t.’

My obsession with bipolar grew from the term being one of only two mental illnesses I was aware of (the other being schizophrenia). Depression was an emotion you felt, not a state of mind.

That same month I broached the topic of suicide, and my longing for my torture to end.
That admission greeted the response ‘Ah sure everyone thinks, ‘Things would be better if I’m dead’ sometimes. It’ll go away.’

Today the Samaritans released research for their #TalkToUs campaign. They found that:

Radar - Suicide Prevention?

You've probably read about it already - The Samaritans, a great mental health charity who offer a 24 hour helpline, have launched a suicide prevention app called Radar.
You can use Radar to monitor the people you follow on Twitter to identify whether or not they might be suicidal. It scans through their tweets and flags any that use key words which suggest they might be feeling that way - e.g. 'hate myself', 'help me', 'depressed'.

In theory, the idea is that you receive an email when someone you follow tweets any of the 'key words' and you are then encouraged to follow up with it, either by Direct Message or offline.

In reality, this app presents a lot of problems and borders on actually being dangerous.