Break the Silence, Break the Stigma

I don’t remember having conversations about mental health when I was in school as a child/teen. It just wasn’t something that was openly talked about. In college, it was only really discussed if you took a specific class on Psychology. It wasn’t until my adult years, that my family and I sat down to talk about how mental illness has touched our family-both extended and immediate. It was a game-changing experience to be able to be honest and brutally open with the more difficult topics that were always hushed away.

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. experiences mental illness in a given year. This statistic doesn’t account for all the people who suffer in silence–too afraid or ashamed to speak up and reach out. While we are usually open and honest about positively promoting our physical health, when it comes to our mental health, there is still a lot of stigma that clouds the topic. What needs to be recognized more fully is that our body is our vessel and caring for it includes caring for our physical, mental, and emotional well-being. Each piece weaves in and out of the other in a myriad of ways.

When I injured my shoulder, I could not be as physically active as I was used to being. The longer I remained sedentary, I noticed my energy decrease and then my motivation decrease. Feelings and thoughts that I had thought I had worked through started to creep back into my life. It became harder for me to get up and out and my thoughts became more negative and self-loathing. It was a familiar darkness that fortunately, through my own personal journey, I was able to recognize and reach out for help. Just because it is something that we can’t necessarily see does not make it less important. And just as something like having diabetes does not define us, neither does having some form of mental health condition. In fact, it just makes us human. As we continue to have open and honest conversations about mental health, we begin to challenge the deeply rooted conception that mental illness is a weakness and instead bring to light that it is absolutely okay to not be okay and to ask for help.

In the media, we are seeing more and more celebrities use their platform to talk about their own mental health journeys. This goes a long way in raising public awareness that we are more alike than we are different. People like Dwayne Johnson (“The Rock”), Lady Gaga, Carrie Fisher, and Princess Diana have all talked openly about their personal struggles with anxiety and depression and the treatments that they have sought out. Life is a rollercoaster ride of struggles and successes. We can share in our common humanity that the struggles are just as normal and important as the successes. By continuing to have the conversations, we can change the narrative and reduce the stigma surrounding mental health. We can break the silence by listening to others, sharing our own stories, continuing to educate ourselves and others about problematic language, and spreading messages of acceptance, encouragement and inclusion.

For other personal stories, go to https://notalone.nami.org/