Personal Narrative: My Experience With Mental Illness

I will never forget that day. I was about 11 or 12, going into my last year of middle school. I remember the way my grandmother and my father sat me down in my grandmother’s lavishly decorated living room. The tenderness of their voices and the pointed looks they gave each other alerted me to the fact that something was just not right. After a few more minutes of mental preparation, they dropped the bomb on me that affects me even until this day: my mother, a longtime recovering drug addict, had relapsed.
That moment marked a huge transition in my life. It has been about 5 or 6 years since that fateful day, and I can personally say that having a parent that struggles with drug addiction is one of the most taxing experiences anyone can live through. It not only changes the relationship you have with that parent, but it also changes your perspective of the world. As my mother fell deeper into her addiction, she lost her job and began to shift between living on the streets for days and weeks at a time and sobering up on the couch in my room. Consequently, my 78 year old, retired grandmother became the main provider for our household. My eldest sister had to drop out of college due to a sheer lack of funds. Borrowing money from
The television show revolved around the lives of psychiatrists, their friends, and the patients they cared for. Even though the show depicted fictional (yet realistic) situations, the scenarios involving the psychiatric patients opened my eyes to the everyday realities those living with mental illness may actual endure. This, accompanied by inspiration from my familial struggles and my experiences with Georgia Artists with DisAbilities, has motivated me to pursue a career as a psychiatrist in hopes of increasing knowledge on mental illness and helping to improve the lives of mentally ill people across the