When someone suffers from life-threatening disease, a broken bone or any other type of physical ailment, it’s taken seriously and treated as soon as possible. However, that’s not the case with mental illnesses, where those affected are told to suck it up, stop complaining and stop making things up.
A stigma is defined as a mark of disgrace associated with a particular circumstance, quality, or person. I wasn’t completely sure what stigma meant a couple years ago but, after hearing about a mental illness stigma, I decided to look it up. As if the definition was frightening enough to me, I saw the related words were those of shame, humiliation, disgrace — things I’d felt before.
During my junior year of high school I was diagnosed with depression, but I’d been suffering from it before that. I had felt something had been wrong with mind for a while, but because of this shame I felt I never spoke up. And, when I finally did, it was one of the hardest conversations I have ever had with my mom.
Those of us suffering from mental illness are treated as a joke. The amount of times I have had to sit and watch people use the term depression for when they are feeling sad is almost unbearable. Depression is not an extreme sadness — it is much more. It is emptiness and loss of enjoyment in things that I once enjoyed. It is a bleakness as I stare at my ceiling for hours wondering what the point even is anymore. It is sleepless nights of tears and frustration at myself for being defective.
I’ve had friends and family all around treat the subject as a joke or a punchline. I will no longer be a punchline. I can’t handle my friends saying they’re going to slit their wrists because of one trivial event, as I sit there in an awkward silence. I can’t handle my friends joking about suicide when I have had to stay up all night convincing a friend to throw up the bottle of pills she swallowed.
Not only is mental illness the butt of many jokes, but those of us suffering are the topic of almost every single teen and young adult novel out there. We are romanticized, turned into something beautiful. How can it be beautiful to watch your loved ones waste away into nothingness, their disease destroying them? What is beautiful about that?
So why is it that we can’t simply treat mental and physical illness the same? To me, there is no difference. Both take lives all the time. Both hurt us and those around us. We feel pain in mental illness, just as real as anything else. Just because it can’t be seen does not mean it’s not justified. We are people just like you, your friends, your loved ones. We are not freaks. We are not crazy. We are not psycho. Treat us like the human beings we are, not a walking mental illness.
The stigma surrounding mental illness needs to end. I want kids to be able to tell their friends and loved ones about their depression without fearing they will be treated differently. I want kids in school to be able to have a mental health day and not be shamed into making up excuses, like I once did. Now that I have decided to stop being ashamed for something uncontrollable, a chemical imbalance in the brain, I try to be an advocate of all mental illness, especially depression. By joining clubs, joining the Project Semicolon, or talking about mental illness in general, you can be an advocate.
It’s a common belief that one’s mental illnesses can go away if he/she wants it to. I wish that were true with every fiber of my being. I wish I could stop this, so that I can not only end my suffering, but also of those around me. Even with medication, though, mental illness does not fully go away. And, it’s okay to think of yourself and take care of you. Mental health problems occur in one out of four people, so please speak up.
Call The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1 (800) 273-8255 or Pitt’s Counseling Center at (412) 648-7930.