I Don't Think You Need Them (UPDATED REPOST)

"I don't think you need them" A statement every mental health patient hates to hear while they have in their other ear a psychiatrist telling them that it is the one thing that can help them

You don't think I need these? Is it because you haven't seen me down and blue as much as other people you think actually "need these?" Perhaps you think anyone doesn't needs these because unlike some sort of physical illness you can't see it, so I don't need them

Perhaps you think I don't need these because you haven't seen that side of me because I'm better at hiding it than most because you’ve never seen or known me to write my depression on my wrist with a blade because I would never allow you to see me cry or scream and lose my mind to see the real me no you can't see that I need these because you never see anything but the lie

You never see what’s truly inside you never know what's truly inside you never know the pain you never know what it's like to take only two bites of something and say you're full or have your stomach an empty pit that you can never fill the hole never know what it's like to fail almost every single class and that you always come out last to feel like sleep is your only salvation and that you must keep forever in your dreamworld under your comforters because life is too hard to deal with or feel like that is the only thing you can't do and just spend endless nights wondering and thinking and not able to stop the thoughts never know what it's like to be distracted by every little thing or become so fixated and focused on only one that everything else passes you by

And then there's those people who walk the same or similar path of pain as I do and think there's is longer and more painful and have the gull to say that they don't think I need them either because obviously they know better because they've been treated and diagnosed longer because their experience on it was awful and they think they're doing me a favor by warding me off but in reality your experience is not mine our bodies are different and so are reactions your cure may not be mine and my cure may not be yours but you are not the one to decide that my body and mind is the only one to tell me wether or not I need them

People get stuck in their heads thinking there's a stigma behind these giving them the excuse to tell me I don't need these: "You'll lose who you are." "It's for people with serious problems." "If you need pills you must be insane." "You have an addiction problem." "You're weak." "Once you're on medication there's no getting off." "You'll never be the same again." "You seem fine without them." "You've made it this far without them." Willpower is not like a muscle: the more you use it the weaker it gets and sometimes we find ourselves at the end of our ropes...for some it's just metaphorically...others it's also literally...when pressure builds on pressure builds on pressure we know where it leads to and it won't be some rock that is a diamond deep in the earth no it's a pile of crushed hopes and dreams remnants of a person who can't pull any farther but is expected to pull themselves together

2016 became 2022 and now I’ve written my depression on my wrist, now I’ve let people see me scream and bellow like some banshee on the floor, now I’ve come so close to calling 9-1-1 on myself and researched every nearby psychiatric ward and checked if my insurance covers them

It has now been over half a decade since I wrote this, since I heard those words first ever spoken to me “I don’t think you need them” when now is the time I need them more than ever, and you know the real irony of it all? The first person to tell me that was myself and this conversation started long before someone said it aloud, but when I did hear it from outside my mind, I wanted to prove the world wrong, though I was still gaslit by myself to believe I was making it up out of stubbornness, making my chains seem longer and heavier than they might have actually been until they not only actually got that heavy and real but far exceeded what I ever expected and I could no longer escape or ever hope to without the one thing I was told I didn’t need, and I am not sorry to inform everyone else and myself that they were wrong! I’m only sorry that I believed those words so many times before breaking so many hearts, hurting so many I loved, giving up my world and giving up on myself, and maybe if I hadn’t ever heard that line spoken to me by someone else, I wouldn’t have let it all get this as twisted as it is now, maybe I would have stopped believing it

You don't think I need them but I don't think I need your opinion