I’ve hit home runs, climbed mountains and regularly bring meals to the elderly. I love everyone I meet dearly. When I was 12, I received my black belt in Tae-Kwon-Do. My grades say I’m an above average student, and I’ve worked hard for everything I have. Yet most mornings, I struggle to get out of bed, struggle to breathe. It’s been like this for as long I can remember, no precursor, no trigger. Depression isn’t an animated black cloud in a commercial for Zoloft; it’s a very real thing for millions of people.
An estimated 1 in 4 American adults have diagnosable mental illness, but the stigmatization of this issue is still something that needs to be addressed. People are afraid to talk about it. When you bring mental illness up, many stay quiet, others offer quick fixes or their own half-hearted solutions. Nobody ever mentions medication. But what is so different about a sick brain versus a broken limb? Why is there stigma facing mental illness, whereas physical illness is treated with respect?
This topic is something that needs to be tackled. Too many people suffer each day for the problem to go unnoticed. With broken limbs, you can still find ways to move about. But with a broken brain, you may as well have a broken life. Simple tasks such as going to school or work, even showering, seem like life-or-death decisions. Having anxiety makes you feel like prey being hunted.
Often times you feel like you’re sinking, and no matter how hard you swim, there’s no surface. There is no way to turn these feelings off, no way to attempt to end them without serious determination and commitment. Sometimes medication doesn’t even help, it just masks the emotions — dampening them. You aren’t fully happy or sad. There’s a constant hollow feeling you can’t seem to shake. Always wanting to cry but the tears won’t come, because you aren’t completely yourself anymore. You don’t know who you are with or without medication; everything is strange.
When a person wears a cast, they recieve condolences and questions, sometimes kudos if the story is cool enough. But we teach people to hide mental illness, to be ashamed. Where casts are worn like badges of honor, medications are hidden, pushed to the back of the cabinet. We whisper about it, voices hushed. Those with mental illness feel isolated, when in reality, this condition is more common than cancer. Imagine if society treated the cancer patient how it treated people with these illnesses.
