“I wish people would stop treating me like my diagnosis is the only thing to me.”

When I turned eight years old, I started experiencing chronic suicidality, hearing voices inside my head and experiencing this all-consuming depression and despair. My mother was the one to realise that something wasn’t quite right because when I was nine years old, I told her that I wanted to die. And when I was 12, the school got me referred into CAMHS because I started to badly hallucinate. I had imaginary friends as well.

Many years before those mental health symptoms, it was suspected that I was autistic with ADHD because I had no remorse, I couldn’t concentrate and I had bad emotional regulation. I’m diagnosed now with BPD and DID.

I got in at CAMHS after around three months of waiting, in part because of my mother’s job and the fact that the people who worked there knew her. Meanwhile my school sent me to a school counsellor and gave me allowances to leave the classroom when I needed. Some teachers didn’t follow this though.

There was a large chunk of the staff who didn’t understand the fact that one of their students were suffering from a pretty chronic mental illness. Some staff even accused me of only being autistic and making the rest up. They didn’t have much awareness based around these mental illnesses and it made me feel isolated.

My family were very supportive. They really tried their best with me. However a many of my friends weren’t, including my peers. They didn’t understand and I lost a lot of friends due to my mental health because they thought I was weird.

Eventually I left mainstream school and entered alternative provision. It was a state run private school and it had tiers for the kind of mental illnesses they accepted. I went there part time at first and then I became full time after a few months. It was great. They were well trained to deal with children who suffered as a result of abuse, from mental illnesses, neurological disorders and physical health issues.

During the time I was in school, I was classified as a person with a mystery illness that they couldn’t figure out. They had given me so many assessments for conditions because I was chronically ill growing up, but there were no conclusive diagnoses. However when I left school, I joined college and I was diagnosed with the DID while in my first year of college. And during the COVID pandemic, I was diagnosed with the BPD.

The DID diagnosis was a strange story. When I was 16, I started to experience these blackouts where I wouldn’t know what I was doing. It was like being drunk, having an idea of what happened but not fully remembering. Sometimes it was a complete memory block. People around me started to tell me that during these blackouts, I’d have an accent. Some people told me that I claimed to be a much younger person with a different gender and name.

I also heard voices from the time that I was eight. Some of these voices would threaten to cut me, rape me, burn me, etc. So I spoke to someone and they told me that at one point I got on all fours and barked like a dog when I was 15. And I knew whatever I was going through was getting worse. I started to talk about the voices inside of my head and speak with them. Around 16, I ended up getting raped and I had to start intensive trauma therapy. This therapy went on for 9 months and I started to talk about it more.

When I was in therapy, the therapist had spotted switches that were subtle and eventually, managed to grab names of alters that I wasn’t aware existed (I knew them as ‘the voices’ and ‘these people I claim to be’). During the end of the intensive therapy, she sent a letter to CAMHS that contained the names that she picked up, their information and that I matched the criteria of a condition known as Dissociative Identity Disorder.

It also contained in the letter her trauma based findings that I wasn’t aware of and much more information. This letter was sent when I was 17 years old. They diagnosed me just based on that including many of the other accounts that came from family members of me acting like an animal, stuff like that.

After the diagnosis, I did completely ignore the condition hoping it would go away, but the condition got worse because those voices that would threaten me started to do everything that they were threatening to do to my body. It was terrifying.

With the DID, it affected me a lot because people around me wouldn’t understand why I’d suddenly start claiming to be a butterfly or a cat. People couldn’t understand. My college just didn’t know what to do about it because they had never seen an actual case of diagnosed Dissociative Identity Disorder before. In fact they’d never seen anyone with DID, ever. And it affected my education because I was watched like a hawk in college. I couldn’t do specific things because, “What if I switch out and go missing?” which honestly was a fair concern.

It was also really difficult to remember things in college as well. In school, not so much because the DID gets worse as you mature rather than get better. I really struggled with going completely mute, going deaf and experiencing blindness because of conversion disorder which was connected to the fact I had DID.

To be completely honest, it affected friendships too because people would view me as this severely traumatised person when I’m just someone with a mental condition. I’m not crazy. My alters aren’t alter egos. I’m not schizophrenic. I’m professionally recognised and diagnosed with this condition. I wish people would stop treating me like my diagnosis is the only thing to me including my trauma. Yes, my trauma was bad, but the future is what you make it.

In relation to Borderline Personality Disorder, I entered adult mental health services after being discharged from CAMHS. I didn’t immediately get referred however that changed when a year afterwards, I started cutting myself again, experiencing flashbacks of repressed memories and experiencing chronic dysphoria based on my gender, race and who I was. The fact I was even alive basically.

I had barely left the house at that point in years because I was so depressed. I was also suicidal and honestly, I had planned multiple suicide attempts beforehand that friends talked me out of. I was so unstable that all I could do was hurt myself. I was so aggressive to my family as well.

I just found life difficult in general and it impacted everything because I’d be overly clingy, extremely toxic, aggressive and argumentative. I struggle with thinking I’m better than everyone else as well, which doesn’t help with my extremely low self esteem.

When I went for an assessment, they diagnosed me with Borderline Personality Disorder after 30 minutes which matched like two Lego pieces. The BPD made it very difficult for me to have normal friendships because everything is ten times more intense. My condition made it harder to control my emotions when it came to receiving criticism and because I had/still have a grandiose sense of self. It would make me feel worthless and I would crash. It would make me suicidal to receive criticism. I was that bad emotionally.

I also had issues with feeling empathy and remorse. I would take advantage of people as well and lie about the sort of things that I could do just so that I could feel like I was worth something, which affected my relationships and education. Especially when I couldn’t actually do the things I claimed to be able to do which in turn, made me suicidal.

It was quite an odd cycle of behaviour really. And obviously, I chalked it all up to BPD but I never brought this up with my psychiatrist, because I assumed it was me being a bad person. But I know I’m not a bad person because of the diagnosis, and I’ll never be one.