With time and new discoveries in science, we’ve come to find that illnesses don’t just come in physical forms. Illness can affect any part of your body. It can be on the inside or outside, or it could be something that you feel and can’t see or describe.

So, yes, mental illnesses do exist. Just like someone with a physical ailment, such as diabetes or lupus can’t control their diagnosis, neither can someone who has a mental illness, like depression or schizophrenia, no matter how prevalent it is. Cracking jokes about someone with any kind of mental illness is just as bad as making fun of someone with a physical one.

I hear a lot of jokes about mental illness and people putting their (ignorant) two cents in where it’s not needed. They say things like if you suffer from depression, you’re just sad and need to find something to cheer you up; people use mental illness as an excuse to take drugs; any girl who fights with her boyfriend must be bipolar; addiction is a choice; you'll get over it (to a victim or soldier with PTSD); you’re only pretending to be crazy to get attention; I think the worst I’ve seen was a comment on a friend’s Facebook post: “If you’re so depressed, why don’t you just go and kill yourself?”

Something like that is never a joke and just because you don’t necessarily understand what that person is feeling, doesn’t mean that the words you meant to be funny won’t cause that person to act on them. When I hear these things or see them on social media, it makes me cringe and it makes me angry, because I know there’s a very good chance that person or those people have no idea what the illness feels like, or what it is.

For those who don’t know and are wondering or want to understand, and especially the people who think mental illness makes a great punchline, here is some clarification:

Having a mental illness can be excruciating at times. Sometimes you know from the first 30 seconds of your day that it’s going to be an especially hard one. Most days are hard, and that can be true for anyone, but until you’ve experienced mental illness, you don’t know just how hard life can be without even leaving your own thoughts.

I know this from my own experiences, both personal and as a psychology major, and the experiences of family and friends: nothing about mental illness is easy. There’s constant worry that you’ll be judged for missing school or work because you can’t bring yourself to get out of bed or force yourself to stop crying, or maybe because you got so focused on something else that it completely slipped your mind.

That worry comes from those people who say you’re not really sick if you have a mental illness; you may not be throwing up or running a fever, but sometimes there is legitimately nothing you can do other than lay in bed or sit at your desk and stare at the wall for hours on end.

What’s worse is that after you drag yourself out of it, you either feel guilty because you missed something important or completely fine like there was never anything wrong, which is just confusing.

Those aren’t even the bad times. The bad times are when you’re up late at night thinking about anything and everything because your anxiety won’t let your brain shut down to go to sleep. When you can only think about how you feel completely alone, or that nobody would notice if you just disappeared, there’s no way you can fall asleep.

It’s a bad time when you can’t stop yourself from taking that fourth drink, even though you swore to yourself and your loved ones that you would never take another sip.

It’s a bad time when your thoughts are racing a thousand miles every second, so it feels like you’re literally about to lose your mind, or when you can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what your brain is telling you. What’s really hard is when you’re in class or helping a customer at work and your choices are get up and leave or try to pretend like nothing is happening. You make that choice knowing whichever one you make is going to hurt you.

It may not be the worst thing in the world, but what really sucks is the heartbreak you feel when you have to miss the one important thing that you were looking forward to because you can’t bear to be around other people at the time.

The bad times are when your meds stop working; if that happens, you might lose your sense of who you are and it can take months or years to get that back.

The worst times...those are when you get up for the day and leave your house wondering whether or not you’ll make it back.

I know a lot of people who suffer from mental illness. Some of those people have lost the battle, or come very close to it.

So, the next time you’re about to say someone is faking, or make a joke about it, call someone schizo because they’re having a bad day, OCD because your friend doesn’t want to share a drink with you, bipolar because your sister gets mad at you, or an addict because someone has a few beers or a glass of wine every night...think about what I’ve just told you and keep the joke to yourself because it’s not funny.