The reality of mental health

BY AMBER BEATTIE | Guest Contributor | You might have heard about the Zika virus wreaking havoc in South America.  Maybe you remember the days of the Swine Flu or Ebola whipping the media into a frenzy. But there’s an epidemic that you might not have heard about, one that rarely gets mentioned on the news or anywhere for that matter.  

This epidemic is the third leading cause of death for 10 to 24-year-olds, and second most deadly among college students, according to the CDC. But the stigma surrounding--you guessed it--suicide and mental illness cuts so deep that many of us are dangerously unaware of the actual problem.

When I say “depression,” you might think of the commercials for antidepressants that were so popular a few years ago.  They always seem to include a woman in a large sweater holding a cup of coffee, looking longingly out the window where her dog sits sadly with nobody to play fetch with him.

As for other mental illnesses like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, it’s probably a very different, much more violent story.  These are the dangerous ones, according to almost every media outlet ever.  These are the criminals, the killers, the “Criminal Minds” episodes just waiting to happen.  

Except, they’re not. They, we, are people, human beings with a very particular kind of war inside us.  One that we can’t talk about, because society does not often lend its ear to struggle.  Struggle doesn’t sell.

Now, before I get up on my soapbox, let me reassure you that I was once a “normal” person, too.  I hadn’t experienced mental illness, so I didn’t know how to react to it. All I had seen were the James Holmes’s of the world, so of course I was afraid.  I didn’t know any better.  

But now I do.  Everything I learned came the hard way, through personal experience and more hours of therapy than anybody would care to count.  Yes, it is my personal experience, but I can’t imagine that it is unique.  These are widespread misjudgements and fears, along with a stigma that is growing ever more widespread despite the efforts of many people to stop it.

My negative experience started small, with an offhand comment made during class.  We were discussing neurotransmitters, the chemicals released in your brain when you experience a positive emotion, or when as my professor put it, “When you take your happy pills.”

When you make a comment like this, when you joke about any serious topic, for that matter, you are discounting the experience of every person who has gone through it.  What’s more, you are creating an excuse for the people around you to do it, too.  

It might seem like a small comment.  You might even say that it’s innocent.  And it would be, if it happened once.  It if was an isolated incident.  You and I both know that it’s not, though.  Walking the halls, I hear it every day: “You’re so bipolar!” “What a schizo…” “Somebody needs to take her pills, jeez!”

We should know better than to joke about groups of people like this.  We should know better than to stereotype.  But we’re doing it anyway, every time we call our emotional friend bipolar.  Every time we make a joke, in front of class, about taking our happy pills.

It’s okay, right? Because it’s not like we’re out-and-out saying it.  “It’s all in good fun!” We might think.

I wonder, though, what these conversations would sound like if we said what we really meant:

Depression is funny to me, even though suicide kills thousands and thousands of people each year!”

“Everybody with bipolar disorder is a raving maniac!”

Schizophrenia makes you a psycho killer!” Doesn’t seem so funny now, does it?

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