Incredible piece
During my freshman year of high school, I was a normal child. Sure, I was “weird” to some of my classmates, had a very small group of friends for someone who just entered high school and I tended to prefer being alone rather than dealing with people. Rarely did I attend the Friday night football games and you were more likely to find me in the agricultural education room than anywhere most days. However, I was carefree, and showed no signs of any mental illnesses.
Everything was fine until my sophomore year of high school. The way I reacted to things had changed, my mental state was more a negative than it used to be and I began having panic attacks. At first, these occurrences were just put off as “oh, well, I’m just changing as a person." Looking back now, this was the beginning of my anxiety disorder.
I’m not completely sure what the root cause of the anxiety is, or why it continued to get worse. All I know is that it did. Panic attacks were a common occurrence over the smallest of things, such as people not liking me because my teeth weren’t white enough. I would worry and stress over things that I had no control over, and ultimately it would interfere with my life. Insomnia was now a battle I had to fight. Even things as small as the constant tension in my shoulder muscles would later be associated with my anxiety.
With the anxiety came the depression. I didn’t want to go anywhere, I didn’t want to eat, any sense of motivation I had was gone, and I felt this overall sense of lack of purpose and need to be included in anyone’s life. These led to thoughts of suicide which at one point, within just the last year, became a daily occurrence.
To this day, I still struggle with anxiety and depression. Recently, I was told that I have Seasonal Affective Disorder, also known as S.A.D. This is a condition where my depression hits at a specific point during the year based on the seasons, and can be extremely bad. My senior year of high school – a time that is supposed to be filled with laughter, joy and a sense of accomplishment – was instead filled with depression, suicidal thoughts and crippling anxiety. The same happened during my freshman year of college, where I encountered some of the worst panic attacks I’ve ever had.
However, as someone who has these conditions, the one thing that bothers me more so than anything else is when people claim to have these conditions when, in fact, they remain generally uneducated and inexperienced in how these disorders truly manifest in a person.
When you have anxiety, the smallest thing could set you off. As I stated above, I had a panic attack about to go into my first year of college because my mind had gone to this horrible conclusion that I would be judged for not having good enough teeth, and no one would like me at my school. However, big things can set me off as well, like what happened this spring break. I was in a state I didn’t know, a town I didn’t know, in a house I didn’t know, with people I didn’t know, trying to make it through four days of “impress your boyfriend’s family enough so that they like you." I ended up hyperventilating for an hour in the basement trying to calm down.
So when you throw out the phrase, “I didn’t do [insert random topic such as doing homework] because I was anxious about [insert random reason]”, it seems to lessen how people view the anxiety. EVERYONE gets anxious at times. It’s completely normal. Being anxious occasionally does not mean you have an anxiety disorder. By the same token, when you laugh about “Oh my gosh, I am just SO O.C.D.!" when you don’t actually have the condition, you are speaking about a mental illness you have no idea about. You don’t understand the pain someone goes through when they deal with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
Don’t say you have depression every single time you get upset about something.
Don’t tell people about a mental illness you don’t have, that you’ve never experienced.
When you break down crying, don’t later tell people you had a panic attack if you haven’t actually had a panic attack.
If you do this – whether it is intentional or not – others look at you and get a connotation about the mental illness. That connotation is wrong. It really does hurt those of us who deal with these mental illnesses. You promote a negative view on mental health. Our lives are difficult with the consistent battles that we have to fight. Some of us suffer in silence, not wanting to tell anyone (like I did when I first became depressed), and others of us sit in a psychologist’s office every week trying to figure out coping mechanisms and the root cause of the illness.
As someone with a mental illness, I urge everyone to stop romanticizing our struggles. These illnesses are not something we choose to have. Stop speaking of something you have no full idea about. Be thankful that you don’t have to face our battles, and help promote the safe, effective. Promote mental health awareness.
