My Mental Health Journey
A record kept in public, because silence never helped anyone
I was diagnosed with ADHD, depression, and Bipolar I disorder in my late thirties, living in La Réunion. By that point I had spent four decades not knowing why I worked brilliantly in a crisis and fell apart in ordinary life — why I could manage a multilingual team of fifteen in a luxury casino and yet could not finish a degree in seven years.
The diagnoses did not arrive as a verdict. They arrived as a map. Looking at my diagnosis today, I know exactly why — why the sprints and the collapses, why the humour that turns on when I am most stressed, why authority felt like a threat even when it was neutral, why I had spent my whole life being the person who absorbed everything so the room would not break apart.
Why I Write About It Here
I grew up in a family and a culture where mental health was not named, was not discussed, and was treated as weakness or shameful secret. The practical result of that silence was decades of unmanaged illness — my own, and patterns passed from one generation to the next.
I have a daughter. My primary commitment, before any career goal, is that she inherits skills and love from me — and not the unprocessed pain I inherited. Writing about this publicly is part of that commitment. If one person reads something here and recognises themselves and feels less alone, the vulnerability was worth it.
What Living With It Actually Looks Like
Bipolar I does not mean perpetual drama. For most of the time it means managing energy — protecting sleep, keeping a fixed rhythm, doing the boring maintenance work that prevents the extremes. My psychiatrist and GP have built a framework with me. I follow it on my best days and lean on it hard on the worst ones.
ADHD means that my relationship with structured, long-horizon tasks is genuinely different — not laziness, not lack of intelligence, but a brain that needs external scaffolding that most people build internally. I externalise everything: written lists, fixed routines, time-blocked work, a published log. This website is part of that scaffolding.
Complex PTSD means I am, slowly, learning to stop running the survival strategies that made sense in childhood and make very little sense now. That is the hardest work of my life, and it is not finished.
What Helps
- Medication — taken consistently, reviewed regularly with my doctor
- A fixed daily rhythm: same wake time, same meals, same wind-down
- Therapy — and the willingness to feel the things I spent decades avoiding
- Writing — making the internal visible so it loses some of its power
- Teaching — which turns out to be one of the most stabilising things I do
- My wife and daughter, who give the whole project a reason
A Note If You Are Struggling
If you are reading this because you recognise something in it — the high-functioning surface over an exhausted interior, the way a diagnosis can feel like a betrayal and a relief at the same time — I want to say clearly: you are not alone, and it does get more manageable. Not easier. More manageable.
The map is not the territory. But having a map is better than navigating in the dark.
Feel free to reach me at sourovdeb.is@gmail.com.