“Suck it up. Others have it way worse and you have absolutely no reason to be sad, so just get over it already.” This is the most common thing people with mental illnesses hear when sharing their experiences with others. Often times this scares them out of sharing how they feel with others in fear of isolation, judgment, and losing friends. People sometimes treat mental illness as a contagious disease, which leads them to avoid someone who is living with a mental disorder, because they don’t want to be “influenced” by the illness or “catch it”. A friend of mine who suffers from MDD and OCD tells me how he experienced that “People don’t take it as seriously as they would a physical illness. Throughout my life, my condition was shamed and hushed rather than praised. For example, being a suicide attempt survivor made me a freak, but being a cancer survivor makes someone else a hero.”
Others are likely frightened because they cannot see mental disorders and therefore can’t see that it’s a real thing. People tend to have a fear of the unknown, but mental illness is not as scary as it may seem, and it can be treated and lived with.
My friend told one of his friends about his mental disorders and was told, “you’re being ridiculous, you can’t just have depression and OCD- and if you do you shouldn’t talk about it, ever, because no one cares and it’s really weird.” These rude and ignorant remarks are so common and make people afraid to share and express the dark thoughts that fester in their minds every minute of every day. Often times, with no one to reach out to, their condition worsens due to their loneliness and their inability to convey their thoughts with someone who will encourage them or listen. With this kind of shaming of mental illnesses, more and more people try to stay under the radar by not talking to anyone about how they are feeling. Most people would tell their doctor if they broke their leg, but surprisingly, most wouldn’t tell if they were experiencing symptoms of depression, anxiety, or even psychosis.
A girl who suffers with anxiety and depression told me that it annoyed and upset her when a friend told others that her condition was all an act. She says, “She kinda saw what it’s like, but she was not there when I cried for hours in my room because it’s all too much. It made me feel like I’m crazy or something. It also made me never want to talk about it with anyone again, because maybe they will think the same.” The fear instilled in patients about trusting another individual with mental illness-related thoughts and feelings proves the stigma attached to these mental conditions. Another friend struggling with anxiety and depression recalls a time when she “couldn’t even go inside the school because I was sitting in my car crying out of panic and nobody gets it, the feelings of panic like that.” People with mental illness want to be able to reach out to and relate to someone rather than be hushed or dismissed by their peers.
The stigma surrounding conditions like depression, anxiety, and OCD is very prominent. One girl explained to me how it makes people “see you as broken or weak, or they think it’s fake and not a real illness. Even at times I question myself about it: am I really sick? Do I really have an illness?” The fact that mental illnesses occur inside your head absolutely do not make them less of a condition than physical ones. Mental illness patients often get handed anti-depressants with terrible side effects and have to rely on their medications to help them get through the day. My friend goes on to say that sometimes her psychiatrist won’t treat her anxiety because she thinks she just wants the Xanax. The doctor tells her, “I’m not in the business of making drug addicts.” It’s not that simple–you can’t just tell your brain to stop being paranoid, angry, or depressed. Often times people choose to be ignorant and believe that mental illness patients are in control because their condition exists solely in their brains. People will label mental illness as taboo and dismiss their peers as “crybabies” who just want attention.
Even telling your friends about your condition make many convulse with panic. A friend of mine who has social anxiety and an eating disorder told me that when a group of her friends saw her bandaged arms they would ask about it- “not in a concerned way, more of a like selfish way: like they wanna know to fulfill their situation and they want to use it against me or make jokes about it.” One person even saw her cuts and loudly announced to everyone that she was a cutter, pointing out her marks for the whole class to see. These experiences made my friend extremely traumatized, suspicious, and fearful, which are feelings she deals with to this very day. One girl tells me how she feels that, “People nowadays just look for cuts on people’s arms, or something to just see how they really are and then they go and tell everyone about it either saying how they’re doing it for attention or they’re messed up in the head.”
This makes me wonder how can people be so cruel and disregard someone’s obvious distress and suffering instead of trying to support them and encourage them to be happy and stay motivated. People can always use another friend in their support system. You don’t need to just help people with physical disabilities or diseases to make a difference. You can be just as good of a person by sticking by a friend, family member or classmate who deals with psychological terror daily.
Social situations at lunch do little to help people with eating disorders. I asked a friend of mine how she feels during lunchtime in her new school. When she was at an outpatient treatment, she was forced to eat lunch and breakfast and talk about how it made her feel. Although this was especially hard for her, going back to school proved to be worse. The safe place she had to eat those challenging meals from her mandatory meal plan was a huge contrast to going back to school and having to eat them on her own. “I dread it every single day… even if I make friends, I don’t know if I could eat lunch with them because it’s really tough… I just want to have a normal experience and don’t wanna feel so disconnected from everyone.”
A friend with depression tells me that often times adults are her hardest critics. A parent of her classmate told my friend’s mom that she doesn’t want her daughter hanging around a girl who cuts or has depression. They treated it as some freakish thing to stay away from rather than offering support and comfort to someone who was seriously struggling. Her parents also always accuse her of crying for attention and even asking her if she “is done with this cutting thing yet” as if it is some sort of phase or trend. Many are even in fear of telling their psychiatrist about how they really feel because they are afraid the doctor will tell their parents about what they said.
Our society is ridden with stigmas and phobias about mental illness that are truly sad, untrue, and disappointing. As our generation gradually becomes more accepting of different types of people, I hope that the reach of acceptance comes to victims of mental illness. The goal is for society to accept these conditions with open arms, love and understanding for these conditions rather than manipulating, hurting, judging, or trashing someone for their illness. People with mental illness deserve the right to be treated as someone with a physical disability- with support, kindness, patience and affection. Just because you can’t always see them struggling or fighting with their minds internally doesn’t mean that they aren’t.
Please reach out to those close to you who suffer and let them know they they’re forever in your heart and that you will be there to listen to them — no matter what. Your voice matters and is important and it will never be hushed or dealt with as if it isn’t a real problem simply because there might be bigger issues in the world. Your issues don’t need to be hidden and you should not feel ashamed because you do matter.
