I’ve suffered from bad anxiety pretty much my entire life, and crippling depression since the age of about 10. When I was 11 years old and in fifth grade, I didn’t know what I was feeling or how to deal with those dark feelings of starting to contemplate whether or not I wanted to live any longer. I felt isolated, trapped inside of my own mind. I thought that I was an outcast, that there had to be something seriously wrong with me, that I was insane or at the very least, a lesser being. How could I not be if I didn’t even like myself, right?

I was scared of my own warped thoughts and what might come of them. I desperately needed comfort and guidance, I needed someone to tell me that what I was going through was perfectly okay, and to reassure me that there was nothing wrong with me and I was just like all the other kids. That’s pretty much the exact opposite takeaway I ended up getting.

In my fifth grade class, I made a desperate cry for help. It came in the form of a note saying that I hated myself and sometimes wished I would just die to escape my feelings, which I handed to my teacher in place of an assignment one day. Naturally, I was sent to the social worker’s office the very next day, a day which would shape the way I viewed myself, as well as how others viewed me, for at least the next five years.

He asked me the normal questions, what I was feeling, why I handed in that note, how long I had been feeling that way, that kind of stuff. Then he asked me if I had planned to kill myself. I told him no, that I had thought about wanting to die before but that I never actually wanted to kill myself, nor did I have any plans to.

Obviously, as a scared eleven-year-old, I wasn’t quite as articulate when I said it to him as I am here, but the points that I made are the same and were something I was very clear about. He asked me if I was sure. I reaffirmed my statement. He asked me once more if I was positive, and again, I reaffirmed what I said.

Then he asked me how I would kill myself if I had to.

I again told him that I didn’t know, I hadn’t put any thought into it as I didn’t want to kill myself. He told me that if I had to pick a way, hypothetically, what would it be? I told him I didn’t know, something quick and easy I guessed. He asked me like what and told me I had to answer. I remember recently learning (from my older brother I think) that during an execution by hanging, the person actually dies rather quickly due to their neck snapping, and that they, in fact, do not die slowly from strangulation as it may appear to a small child. I told him that I guessed hanging myself then if I really had to choose.

He asked me if I had anywhere in my house that was high enough up that I could hang myself from if, hypothetically, of course, I had ever planned to. I told him that the top of my staircase was pretty high up, someone could probably do it from there if they really wanted to. His next question seemed kind of off topic to me, but I answered him anyway. He asked me if I was left home alone a lot. I told him sometimes I was, but not too often. He nodded and said okay, then made small talk for awhile until my parents arrived and were called into his office along with my teacher.

After everyone was situated, he proceeded to tell my parents that I had put a great deal of thought into killing myself lately.

He told them that I had confessed to him that I had a plan to hang myself, that I had decided on a spot in my house to do it (the banister above my staircase), and that the only reason that I hadn’t yet was because I had not been left alone for enough time lately. The entire time he spoke, I was sobbing off to the side and vigorously shaking my head no while looking at my mother, who kept staring back at me sensing something wasn’t quite right.

It was a blatant lie. It was a lie that he later even confessed to over the phone to both my mother and my principal after my mom called demanding answers the next day. Naturally, after making sure I was okay, of course, my mom asked me while we drove home why I had been shaking my head the whole time, and I told her the truth of the situation. I’d also like to point out that the very same social worker still holds his job at my old elementary school to this day. Anyway, whether it was a lie or not, it was enough to mandate that I get a full psychological evaluation stating that I was neither a danger to myself or others before I was allowed back in school.

After a quick stop home, I was off to the psychiatric ward of a local hospital.

I felt as if I were a prisoner there; as if I were a lesser being not to be trusted with everyday freedoms. In fact, had I not of been a minor I would have had to have been escorted into my room by two police officers, one holding each of my arms. Unfortunately, this was the reality for some of my family members who went through similar issues a little later in life than I did.

The doors were double thick metal and locked from the outside. I was stripped of my clothing as well as all of my possessions and forced to wear a hospital gown. There was a TV encased in plexiglass in the top left corner of the room. There was a bed in there as well, only it had restraints attached to it and marks in the paint on the wall above it, that eerily resembled scratch marks.

When I was told I may have to spend the night there without my parents, I turned ghostly white. I’ll never forget seeing the girl in the room next to me writhing and screaming, strapped down to her bed, her long jet black hair twirling around like a twister. Later, when I was eventually cleared and sent home, she was in her bed still restrained, but her body was now still. Her hair hung messily over her face, obscuring it, almost like the girl from the movie “The Ring.”

From that point on, my depression and anxiety only got worse over the years. Trouble was, I was too traumatized, too petrified, too utterly terrified of being treated like a subhuman again, shipped off to that place again for God knows how long this time, only to be released in a world that would be crueler to me for having gone in the first place. Oh yeah, that’s the fun of it, too.

When I got back to school, somehow everyone knew that I had been in the psych ward. I have my own major suspicions that the social worker himself may have come to my class to tell the students to “be kind” to me and that I may be “fragile” after explaining why I was pulled out of class and where I went, as he had been known to do when students went through trauma. I had witnessed a similar speech of his a year or two before when one of my classmates received word that her mother had passed away.

In any case, I became the school nutjob.

I was deemed “insane” by my peers. I was alienated, ostracized, and picked on by others for being “crazy.” Even my teacher started to treat me as if I would cut my wrist if he said a single word out of place to me. This reputation followed me even to my early days of high school. Unfortunately, so did my fear of speaking up about my illness.

I was 16 before I became medicated.

By that time, I truly had become suicidal. I had tied a noose out of a blanket in my closet and wrapped it around my neck, sobbing for a few minutes before deciding not to go through with it. I had a very small friend group as most people by that point had come to fear the “crazy kid.” I had also already begun my habit of cutting myself to cope.

So much damage was done because of how society deals with mental health issues. Even after the medication, it took years of therapy to undo all that damage. So my case might just be an isolated incident, a slip-up, a one-time thing that doesn’t usually happen, right? Dead wrong. The number of people with similar stories to mine that I have met in recent years both shocks and horrifies me. It seems that what happened to me is common practice, and has happened, and continues to happen, to countless others.

So now I ask you, can you really say wholeheartedly after hearing my story that how we deal with mental health in our society is acceptable and that there is nothing wrong with it?