Under Construction - MHWA Retreat

Do you ever struggle to differentiate your personality traits and the symptoms of your mental illness? e.g. Am I so emotional because I have empathetic and passionate personality traits, or am I so emotional because I have emotional instability due to a personality disorder?

Questions to think about:
At what point does an emotional characteristic cross over into mental illness symptom?

That is a very good question. I don't know if I can actually answer that. I believe that mental illness can create certain emotional characteristics, but who can say what is a natural emotional characteristic borne from environment or one borne from a mental illness? I was considering this the other day and I've begun to believe that in fact we all may live with mental illnesses at different levels.

What specific personality traits can you get confused with mental illness symptoms?

That's exactly my point in the above question, how can we tell if a trait is natural or not? But if I had to guess, I'd say Narcissism is a big one I think. Being a control freak can be confused as well. There's like 700 personality traits so it's hard to think of them all!

So many traits can be part of mental illness when in combination with other traits or even with other factors. It's really hard to tell.


How can someone tell the difference between a characteristic of their personality and a characteristic borne of a mental illness?


If I knew the answer to this it'd help me identify my own issues. There's lots of things about myself I blame on environment, upbringing, and bad experiences... but I wonder if they're all part of a bigger picture of mental illness. I'm just not sure. Plus they say that a lot of people can be mistaken for having mental illness these days. I guess it's how we cope with our personal issues on whether it needs to be defined as an actual mental illness or not.

How does all of this play into self-identity?

Well, that's the big question isn't it? When identified as having a mental illness it really kind of messes up self identity. We begin to wonder if we'd be different people if we didn't have our issues. I even wonder if I'd like who I'd be if I didn't have my mental issues. Either way, I know for some reason I'm ashamed of my mental issues because I feel they have a big impact on my overall negative aspects of my personality despite the fact that I think I like the positive aspects of my mental illness... which is mostly on my creativity. When on my medication and balanced emotionally, yes walking through life is a bit easier, but I didn't like that I was no longer creative. It felt like the best part of me was gone. So therefore my identity was in crisis.