Meredith knows all about the challenges of getting the right mental health diagnosis. She was in high school when she first began struggling. “I struggled in school, with friends. Emotionally it was hard,” she says. It wasn’t until her fifth hospitalization that she was finally diagnosed with PMDD, premenstrual dysmorphic disorder.
Even with a diagnosis, Meredith still found life challenging. Going away to college meant giving up the support systems that had helped her navigate high school. “All that unknown threw me into a spin and another hospitalization with depression, anxiety and all that.” Not having adequate support made it easier to tailspin into depression and give in to negative behaviors and negative coping skills, she says.
Things really nosedived, though, when a professor in one of her social work classes — social work was her major — told her she was unfit to be a social worker because she was too emotionally and mentally unstable. Meredith was shocked. She had chosen social work in part because of being inspired by a social worker during a hospitalization. “[Her help] pushed me to want to help people like me who struggled and be there for them because she was there for me and helped me,” she says.
Rather than give up when she was given this news, Meredith became determined to prove them wrong. This past spring Meredith graduated with a master’s in social work.
Some kind of writing has always been part of Meredith’s life. As a journaler, she was intrigued when she saw an email about MHC’s Write On!. “I like sharing my story with others and bringing people awareness about other types of mental health and illness,” she says. “You might not have just one diagnosis. You can have multiple. It makes it hard to get diagnosed. Different symptoms can cross over to the different diagnoses.”
“Write On! allowed me to learn to write in different ways. I would always just journal about my life. With Write On!, I would start taking a subject and turning it into something that was more indirect rather than a list kind of thing about my day.”
And she’s using what she learned in her social work. “If someone is anxious and their thoughts are all over the place, I’ll ask them, ‘Have you tried journaling? Sometimes getting it out of your head and on paper helps it make more sense. You can read and analyze your thoughts on paper rather than running around in circles in your head.’”
Thank you for sharing your story Meredith!
Here’s what Meredith shared in her final project with Write On!
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