Went to a funeral today, my friend had two brain injuries, no one ever acknowledged them, so she gave up the fight by committing suicide

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I've been wanting to write this for the last three weeks, but I did not know how to write it until today.

Family members spoke at the funeral remembering the life of this special person. She was really clever, very witty, was a computer scientist, excellent cake maker and had decided to go back to university a few years ago to study engineering because she liked to invent novel practical devices to use around the house and garden; and they worked.

However, during her return to university, she was knocked off her bike by a hit and run driver. The result was a head injury and post-concussion syndrome, she took a year out of university and wanted to go back but could not concentrate, was affected by fatigue, sensory overload, cognitive and memory issues, and struggled to live and do any work.

She had a cognitive test by the university disability team and her reading and math's age had reduced to that of a twelve year old.

She came back home and was diagnosed as having developed mental health issues following a head injury. She disagreed but no one listened to her.

A year later the car she was travelling in careered off the road at high speed and tumbled end over end down an embankment, while the driver walked away uninjured, she suffered a severe head injury, brain injury and broke her neck in multiple places.

After three months in hospital where she got her neck bolted together with plates and getting rehab to be able to communicate, eat and use the toilet she came back home.

Back home she went to a GP to get more rehab but he would not acknowledge that she had had a brain injury even though it was in her medical records. The official line was that all the rehab she needed was done in hospital and the symptoms she suffered now were caused by depression because she had suffered depression 10 years earlier and it must have resurfaced.

We used to have conversations about the effects of our brain injuries and she was not affected by depression at all, her symptoms were all the typical brain injury symptoms, but no one believed her.

Today in the funeral the family members kept saying over and over that their sister had developed severe depression after her accidents and could not accept she had depression or get over it and after living in denial for years took her own life.

I felt like shouting out that they had got it wrong, she was not depressed she simply could get no recognition of her brain injury symptoms, she was never seen by a neurologist after leaving hospital, her GP would not refer her to a neuropsychologist but instead would only refer her to the mental health team.

The mental health team toed the GP line and started screwing my friend's head up by saying that she was imagining she had had a brain injury, even though it's all in her medical records, this really messed her up.

For years she refused to see any Dr at all until the last year after her dad had an accident and was paralyzed from the neck down. She agreed to see an 'empathetic psychiatrist' who, to start off with, seemed to help but then got into her head by continuing what had happened before - that she had imagined that she had had a brain injury.

That was the tipping point, she locked herself away in her room and lived like a shadow for a few weeks until one day, three weeks ago, when her sister went into her room, she was dead.

She took an overdose of the medication the psychiatrist had given her.

In a suicide note she did not want anyone to feel bad about what had happened, it was her decision because no one ever believed what she was telling them, and she could not live like that anymore.

One after one the family members spoke out today and repeated that she killed herself because she was depressed because she was in denial that she had depression.

Even after her death they still did not believe her.

She had told me that I was the only one who understood her and the only person who ever believed her.

The message from all this is to make sure you get diagnosed properly, if your GP bangs on about your brain injury symptoms are caused by depression, go and find a different GP, get a neuropsychology assessment, complain, rattle some cages and fight for everyone, even family members, to believe you and to do the right thing.