Mental illness has a horrible misconception, and in some cases is even glorified. But what no one ever talks about is actually living with it. A lot of people have experienced depression or anxiety, but it is totally different to live with these feelings every day. People say depression is just a phase or that everyone has anxiety sometimes, you know they haven’t lived through it. They don’t wake up every morning hoping for an okay day, where you don’t have an anxiety attack over an event that has only happened in your head. Mental illnesses consume you entirely and control everything you do (or don’t do). Luckily for me, I’m doing better than ever, but I’ve been down a dark road. It’s not easy to talk about, but it needs to be done. I’ve been severely depressed myself, and it is an absolutely miserable place to be. Most people have never seen me in such a dismal state, but feelings like that aren’t exactly things that are easy to talk about. Firstly, people say that the person doesn’t feel needed or wanted by others, but this isn’t always true. I knew I was loved, that I have great friends and family that are always there for me, thus increasing the difficulty to talk about the subject because you don’t want to be treated any differently. I’m not a fragile piece of glass, and I just wanted to be treated like anyone who wasn’t thinking “what if I wasn’t here?” I didn’t want to be shied away from like I had some contagious disease because I don’t, and I was terrified to lose friends (I know now that this makes no sense, but in my state of mind, it was totally logical.) I carried on day to day like nothing was wrong, and while a few people knew I wasn’t really happy, almost nobody knew how serious it really was. A good example of how bad of a state I was in: I have only ever called into work twice. Once when my grandma died, and once when I was crying so hard that I was almost throwing up, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone what things were really running through my mind, so I just said I was sick.
There was a point where I took medication to help relieve the nonsense that existed in my brain, but I couldn’t bear to stay on it. The first medication I was on made everything significantly worse, so I was switched to another one. That one helped, but it made me feel like a robot. I was emotionless. It was nice not to feel depressed anymore, but I was never happy either. I stopped taking the medication and now I manage everything myself. Sure, I have some really bad days once in a while, but I’m also able to have great days where I have fun and enjoy life. Everyone is different. Medication isn’t a bad thing and really helps some people. For me personally, I just don’t like it.
Everyone has different variations of mental illness, ranging from anxiety to depression to the much more severe diseases, and different things work for different people. In the same sense, we are all individuals who see the world differently. Mental illness isn’t something you can put a label on or say “someone with depression feels _____” because you don’t know how others are affected. We all have our own demons. Mental illness is something extremely important that affects a massive amount of people. It cannot be made into some generic claim or brushed off into something that doesn’t even matter.
