Psychology students are urged by professors, advisers, and textbooks not to diagnose others and especially not yourself, although it’s really easy to fall into the trap. I haven’t yet bought a DSM-5 (the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual," used for diagnosing mental disorders, with guidelines concerning future research) for this very reason -- I think I’d end up with about 100 disorders after flipping through it just once.

Something they don’t prepare you with is finding an illness you’ve been diagnosed with is in the DSM, when you had absolutely no idea that it was. I made this startling discovery when studying for my Abnormal Psychology class, lying in bed one second and sitting bolt upright the next, finding Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder staring me in the face. I had two thoughts: what in the world is that doing there, and why is the paragraph exceptionally short? I had been diagnosed by my gynecologist; gynecologists do not diagnose mental disorders. That would be crazy. Psychiatrists and psychologists diagnose mental disorders -- they’re brain doctors, that’s their job. Not the job of gynecologists.

And so the same rambling went on in my head, on and on, until it began to sink in that not only was I diagnosed with a mental illness, I had been for years and no one had bothered to tell me. All these years, I had been focusing on the physiological symptoms, with the laundry list of my symptoms; I didn’t associate any psychological symptoms with my diagnosis.

As a psychiatric disorder, PMDD comes with many psychological symptoms and anxiety is a common one. I never thought much about it before -- it’s something I have to deal with and it’s a struggle, but I deal with it pretty well most of the time. Now -- knowing it’s a part of my illness and not something separate -- I’ve become much more accepting of my anxiety, knowing it’s just one part of a very complex hormonal imbalance.

Women with PMDD tend to be on a cocktail of medications, and although I’m only on one form of medication now, I’m aware of the fact that there are other things I should try to get more of my symptoms under control. It’s scary, but I’m ready.

For years, I didn’t know about a huge part of my illness. I feel like I’m having to go through this backwards; I’ve known for a long time that I’m sick, but not what that meant. And now I worry -- what if employers find out? What do doctors think of me when they read my file? What does all of this mean?

It means I have a mental illness, like 26 percent of adult Americans. It means I have a stigma to fight -- both with others and within myself -- so that I can get better. And with this, I feel I have a responsibility to show people that mental illness doesn’t look like straight jackets and tranquilizers; it can look like a 19-year-old college student working on her bachelor’s degree with way too many responsibilities. It looks like me. It looks like you. It looks like all of us. So let’s do this together.