February 15, 2024 By Gurleen
YouAlberta is written by students for students.
My name is Gurleen Kaur (she/her). I am a third-year student in the Bachelor of Arts, Psychology Honors program at the U of A. I like to spend my free time productively working or studying. You can sometimes find me hanging out and studying with friends. I like to explore cafes or do yoga (my favourite mindfulness activity!).
This YouAlberta series is a new project I am undertaking as part of the National Standard for Mental Health and Well-Being on our campuses to bring stories of students living with mental illness (and much more) to life. I am hoping to normalize talking about mental illness and mental health so that students are more open to understanding that mental illness, just like any other physical illness, can be a natural part of life for some people. Through open-mindedness and empathy, we can reduce barriers for those needing help during crucial times and build a supportive community for everyone.
I am a student majoring in psychology at the U of A. In my free time, I watch The Office TV show, love working with kids and am recently in the process of learning how to draw! I also love playing volleyball in the summertime and cannot put down a good book when I find it — my favourite right now is FURIOUSLY HAPPY by Jenny Lawson.
I immigrated to Canada when I was 12 years old. I struggled to fit in and faced discrimination, which intensified my anxieties around fitting in this new place that I now call home. I tried my best to assimilate and blend in with people in academic and non-academic spaces, which did not help when I started to lose a sense of my identity. Not too long after high school, I started to experience psychosis - a state of being that many people know as “a break in reality” if they have taken any traditional psychology course.
Many websites, textbooks and papers will describe psychosis as losing touch with reality. Telling people I might have (or experienced) psychosis lets them know that I might be a person without common sense, or as many people in our society like to use stigmatized words such as “psychotic” or “crazy.” Nothing I say after that comes across as believable because who is to believe in the words of someone who has “lost touch with reality,” eh? The fact of the matter is that I am not crazy or lost in reality at all; I live a fairly healthy life. Instead, it is the lack of knowledge about people’s actual experiences and lack of understanding that psychosis or any mental illness is something people can naturally live with that creates shame, feelings of isolation and barriers for people wanting to seek help.
It is important to talk about such topics as psychosis and people living with mental illnesses to let people know that they are not alone in their struggles and it is okay to seek help when needed.
There were many struggles with managing psychosis, especially because symptoms would sometimes come and go. There were good times and bad times, but once I better understood the pattern of these symptoms, I could use my little box of toolkits to better manage it (for example, using the TIPP skill when I was facing distress).
For the longest time, I felt isolated and alone and did not share my psychosis with anyone as I was doing school. I felt that nobody understood or would understand my struggles, and I was also too ashamed to share my struggles. I had also lost important relationships in my life because psychosis wasn’t just confusing and a burden on me but on others as well. I faced academic strains such as not being able to focus or concentrate for more than a few minutes without getting severe headaches and sometimes started to disassociate during really stressful exam times. Furthermore, my speech was debilitated; when I tried to speak, it would not make sense to people.
All this is to say that even though I struggled, I did not struggle completely alone. I relied on those who did try to understand me - my biggest supporters were: (1) the U of A Wellness Supports social worker who helped me understand I deserved support just like anybody else who would be struggling; (2) my team at Alberta Health Services who continued to support me even when I was starting to give up on myself and (3) the staff at the U of A Academic Success Centre who were very patient and helped me throughout the accommodations process. I didn’t have many friends, but I had many supportive professionals who never gave up on me.
Support from family, friends and professors, using medications and being willing to accept change also helped in my journey.
I know it is tough seeking help, do it anyway because you deserve to feel better. I am living a not-so-perfect PERFECT life where I continue to manage psychosis daily, and it has gotten much easier with time. I want the same for anyone else struggling.
If you are interested in being featured in our next article of this Healthy, happy… series for YouAlberta, reach out to natstand@ualberta.ca
The National Standard for Mental Health and Well-being of Post-Secondary Students is a Canada and university-wide initiative aiming to improve student well-being on campus and trying to make mental health a priority. It focuses on all areas of mental health, such as crisis intervention, mental health supports, accessibility and much more. Through various engagement activities with all campuses, the National Standard team has collected feedback on how students want their mental health and services to be improved. What we heard report and Action Plan are in the works and will be released soon.
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