One in four college students struggles with mental health issues. Twenty-five percent. That means in a class full of one hundred people, twenty-five college students are struggling mentally. That's a lot of people, so why are we not talking about mental health issues more?

In a study conducted by the American Psychological Association, it was found that of these students with mental health issues, almost 42% of them struggled with anxiety. Anxiety was closely followed by depression, which accounts for 35.8% of the mental health issues on college campuses. Mental health issues in college are real and scary and they deserved to be talked about like the real problems that they are.

From the time we're children, we are taught that being sad isn't normal and that crying means you're weak. We're taught to keep our feelings to ourselves and to not bother others. We're taught that if we don't understand something, then that means it's abnormal and weird. We have created such a negative stigma around mental health issues and the people that struggle with them that people look down on others—they label them as fragile and weak and that's that.

We, as a society, are so afraid of what we look like to others that we will internalize every emotion we feel to be able to appear strong to the outside world. We, as a society, need to teach students that it's perfectly normal to feel the way that they feel and that there is always somebody who will listen. We, as a society, need to realize that needing help isn't weak and admitting that you are struggling is one of the strongest things that you can do.

Somebody once told me "you don't need to have gone through something to have empathy for someone who has," and it changed my perspective on everything.

We, as a society, need to start listening more. We need to start noticing more. We need to start empathizing more. We need to start being there and being present and allowing the people we love to be vulnerable enough to talk about how they feel. We need to start realizing that just because we aren't personally going through something, doesn't mean that we can't be there for the ones that are.

We need to start realizing that mental health issues are real and they're common and that they are normal.

We need to start talking about mental health more.