Hello Michael: Thanks for sharing your perspective. I'll share a bit of my own history with you. I don't know what my diagnosis would be. Over the course of the past 18 or so years, through two hospitalizations following suicide attempts, none of the mental health professionals I've seen have ever offered a diagnosis. And each one seems to have had a little different perspective with regard to what's going on with me. (I'm an older person now. And it no longer really matters anyway.)

I was an only child. So I didn't have any siblings to abuse me. But I was a punching bag throughout pretty-much all of junior & senior high school. (Everyone knew what was happening. But no one cared, including my parents.) I was able to hold myself together psychologically, more-or-less, for the first 50 years of my life. It often wasn't pretty. But I was a master of denial. Where & when I grew up, any hint of mental illness was something shameful to be hidden at all cost. Then, at around the age of 50 I had a not-too-serious bout with cancer and I began to unravel. I've been slowly disassembling ever since.

My secret mental health problems began so early in life that I have no memory of how, or why they began. I only know that my very earliest memories involve things that relate to my secret mental health problems. It is all a gnarled ball of wire that will never be untwisted. I do recall my parents telling me that, when I was still an infant & being bottle fed, apparently there had been news reports of a number of infants who had been put in their cribs with bottles & who had suffocated as a result of having curdled milk block their airways. One evening, as I was later told, I was in my crib with a bottle, my parents heard me let out a short cry & then stop. They rushed in & found me not breathing. My father, as I was later told, picked me up by the legs, & hit me backwards against the wall which dislodged two balls of curdled milk from my nose. I've sometimes wondered if, in that moment, they perhaps both saved me & doomed me at the same time...

I moved far away from my parents at a still fairly young age & rarely went back, much to my mother's consternation, in particular. My parents have both been gone now for many years. They weren't around to witness my devolution into mental illness. I'm thankful for that. On the other hand, since I managed to hide my mental health struggles for so many years, I'm quite certain my parents both died thinking I was the most ungrateful SOB that ever walked the face of the earth. I don't know... maybe they were right.