Mental Illness Awareness Day just passed. October 10th marks the day where celebrities and advocates for mental health wave their flag a little bit higher and a little bit longer, desperate to catch someone’s attention.
This flag-waving isn’t in vain but it's in this overwhelming desire for someone to see. It just seems like, during the other 364 days of the year, mental illness is absolutely glossed over. No one wants to talk about it. It’s too tender of a subject. Well, tough luck because at this point, it is imperative that we start talking about mental illness.
Let’s bring mental illness into normalcy. Let’s start to tell children that it’s okay to be sad sometimes. It’s okay to be sad all the time when you can’t even tell them why. It’s okay to hear and see things, and it’s okay to feel like different people squeezed into one vessel.
While some of these are allusions to serious mental illnesses, it makes normalizing them that much more important. Should these children have the symptoms, or develop these illnesses, the idea that it’s alright means they’re more likely to seek help.
Imagine the masses that currently are denying a possibility of being mentally ill because it’s weakness. But imagine how many of these people would seek help if “weak” never even crossed their mind. Even further, imagine that those who want to seek help, but don’t have the means to do so, were provided easier access to therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists. Imagine how many people wouldn’t be afraid to feel happy, or even content.
We need to normalize mental illness. As much as we need to educate children seeking help, we desperately need to normalize interacting with mentally ill people. If I introduced myself as “Hi, I’m Angelina and I have symptoms of anxiety and depression. How are you?”, do you really think I’d still have the same friends I do at this moment?
Why is it that when I ask, “Can you please not do that, it makes me really anxious?”, I get a laugh and have to ask multiple times to finally get them to stop? Shouldn’t the fact that I’m severely uncomfortable and don’t feel safe in the situation be enough to get them to stop? Apparently not, as I ask three or four times, my voice getting louder, angrier, and shriller every time.
Though I’m about a week late to wave my flag, I’ll wave it all year long. I long to be apart of a world that understands that perfect doesn’t exist. Normal doesn’t exist. I’ll wave my flag until mental illness is understood by the masses, and help is accessible to those who choose to reach out. I’ll wave my flag until we question why we were so ignorant to even need a Mental Illness Awareness Day.