*Trigger warning: mentions of self-injury, suicide, and various mental illnesses and their symptoms*

On January 15, 2013, 3 days after the above photo was taken, I tried to kill myself.

I had cut my arms sixty-three times in the early hours of the morning prior to crawling into bed that evening. I was fourteen.

By 5 p.m. the following day, I was being processed through the local emergency room for admission to the hospital's children and teen behavioral health ward.

I didn't realize at the time that that's what I was doing, but looking back now, I know that I didn't mind if I lived or died. I was severely depressed, socially anxious, and taking each and every qualm of adolescence personally. I didn't believe I would allow myself to live to see eighteen years old.

These patterns of self-injury and personal abuse continued until I was seventeen years old. I am now twenty, and, while I am doing far better than in the past, my teenage mental illnesses still have strong grips on my existence.

You see, mental illnesses have an interesting way of never really truly completely disappearing. You can treat the symptoms to make the affliction easier to handle, but a "cure" for these diseases don't exist. This is a reality we have to face if we want to work for the betterment and stability of our mental health.

Nobody talks about the effects that mental illnesses as a teenager have on your adult development.

We aren't told about how strange it is to suddenly be in our early and mid-twenties when we didn't think we'd live past eighteen.

We aren't told about how difficult it is to adjust to being an adult when we spent our teenage years exhausting all of our efforts not to kill ourselves. We didn't have time to develop and explore our identities and personalities because we were so preoccupied with our mental health.

We aren't told about the smallest triggers that may set off our warning bells, even though we're supposed to be "better."

We aren't told about how easily we may still be triggered despite being "better," because sometimes we can't help but think of how our "younger self" would handle things and thus, we revert back to that.

We aren't told about how difficult it is to unlearn the unhealthy coping mechanisms we spent years utilizing, because "adults don't do that."

We aren't told about how to be a functioning adult after living as a teenager with mental illnesses.

We need to talk about what it's like to recover from mental illnesses in addition to the journey through them. It is very rare to wake up and suddenly no longer be depressed, anxious, bipolar, etc. as is often portrayed, accentuating the necessity to continue talking about mental health in all stages of our lives, not just our emotional teenage years.