Give a Girl a Mental Illness....and she'll spend years thinking she's damaged. That something is wrong with her. That the terrible, awful, horrible things that happen in her life are because she is less than those with stable mental health.
She will constantly question whether taking her meds actually helps, or whether it just further alienates her from her peers. She will wonder what the point of therapy is if she constantly spirals into dark days of depression and finds herself paralyzed by crippling anxiety.
Give a girl a mental illness and you give her the opportunity to ruin her life. To allow the chemical imbalances of her brain to dictate her self-worth and self-perceived societal value. You open her up to a life full of endless questions and secrets. To accusations of being selfish, dramatic, lazy, stubborn, crazy, and all other manners of things.
If you give a girl a mental illness, you can ruin her life...but if you give the right girl a mental illness, you can change and save lives.
If you give a mental illness to a girl that is not afraid of the negative stigma or the risk of sharing her story, you can empower her, and help her to empower others.
You can give her the opportunity to use whatever platform she deems best to share her story. To tell the raw, painful truth about mental illness, while accompanying it with her promise that it gets better.
Mental illness doesn't go away, it stays with you. In your heart and in your soul, you will carry your scars, always. But those scars don't have to define you.
I am the girl that was given a mental illness (or rather a list of them), but I want to be the girl that changes that from a negative to a positive. I want to stand up and say, yes, my mental illnesses destroyed my life. For years, I drowned in depression, was crippled by anxiety, found myself enslaved by OCD, and to this day my brain is warped with PTSD, but on this day, I am one simple thing: proud. Because I got fought to get my life back, and it's better than ever.
I am proud of my scars, both the mental and the physical. Because they don't tell the story of a girl who gave up. They are no longer cuts, they are scars, and as such, they are a testament to the fact that I healed. That I overcame my demons. That my mental illness does not define me, and neither does yours.
So, going forward, don't be the girl (or guy) that is crushed under the weight of a thousand secrets--be the girl that stands up and makes a change.
Fight the stigma, not for yourself, but for the millions of others that are too scared to get help, simply because they fear judgment.
The sooner you stop treating your mental illness like a dirty little secret, the sooner it won't be one.