It serves everyone being more knowledgeable about what it means to suffer from mental health issues. All of us should learn to show compassion and offer support when we can. When we understand one another, we create stronger communities. We need to listen to one another and shed our judgements and preconceived notions. The statistics on people who suffer from mental illness are staggering. If it isn’t you, you know someone. There’s no question. You can recover and you can help others recover. This is my story.

I was a “sensitive kid.” That’s what we were called—kids like me—”sensitive.” And it’s true. I was. Unfortunately, sensitive was often a euphemism. It was a label which explained things away—hid genuine problems. In the 1980s in suburban American, it was okay to be a sensitive kid. It wasn’t a label you wanted, but it was okay. It wasn’t okay to have mental health issues. And that’s what it meant.

I wouldn’t understand that for a decade, and I wouldn’t really grasp the implications for a decade more. I was a sensitive teen, too; “emotional.” It was probably hormones, or just the challenges of being an adolescent. Maybe I suffered from seasonal depression. That meant it was the season’s fault. Nothing was wrong with me. But if seasonal depression comes on in the gray days of winter, why did I feel the same way in the spring? When did the season start in the fall and end in the summer? If it was hormones and adolescence, why didn’t I grow out of it?

Early in my twenties, I decided I’d had enough. I was “down” too much. I felt alone, lacked motivation, worried all the time, and struggled every day to find a reason to put one foot in front of the other. So, I took to the books. It didn’t take more than a title or two from the self-improvement section to see the truth. I wasn’t a sensitive kid or an emotional teenager. It wasn’t seasonal affective disorder. I was depressed, and I had been since I was in elementary school.

I know now, even in an era of reduced stigma and greater acceptance, there are readers whose first thought was, “You can’t be depressed in elementary school,” or “What does a kid have to be depressed about—especially one from a stable middle-class home where he has parents who love him?”

People who ask those questions do not understand mental illness, nor are they part of the solution.

I’ll never forget going to my doctor that first time and explaining what I was experiencing. He asked all the questions he was supposed to; poking around the edges of what the issue might be. It only took a few minutes before he looked me in the eye and said, “You know what the problem is.”

It wasn’t a question. “You’ve studied. You’ve tried the things people skip.” And it was true. I’d looked at my diet and physical activity. I looked at the stressors in my life. I’d journaled and tried simple mediation. There were no answers there for me there.

“This is depression. How do you want to proceed?” That was my first prescription for a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, and it was 21 years ago.

Since that time, I’ve only been off of them a handful of months here and there. Now, it took me a few weeks from filling that prescription to actually taking the first dose. The bottle sat on the kitchen windowsill and then in the medicine cabinet, and then it travelled with me in the glove box while I commuted to the jobs I hated.

What did it say about me if I took them? Was I weak? Wasn’t this something I should be able to handle on my own? Was I going to be on these pills for life? Were they going to change who I was? The truth was, I was miserable, and change could only be for the better. Eventually, I decided I had to look at depression like any other illness and treat it with medicine.

And it changed my life.

There is still some discussion about whether things like depression and anxiety are truly “illnesses,” but treating them that way makes them far easier to manage and simpler to discuss. Those first pills, like all the ones that followed, didn’t fix everything. There were issues to deal with and there was work to do. And over the years, there would be changes in those medications. There would be other doctors.

And there would be times it didn’t work; dark times.

As a teen, I’d become adept at hiding, at wearing masks, at showing people only what I wanted them to see, but I was suffering. I’d thought about taking my own life. I never got so far as to have a plan. But I got close. What stopped me was considering what it would do to my already fracturing family. I didn’t talk about it to anyone. I held on and hoped that one day I’d just get better.

Three years after starting a course of medication, three years of being under treatment, and a couple of visits to a psychiatrist who changed my diagnosis and medication plan, I reached the first crossroads.

That time, I had a plan. A serendipitous text from a friend interrupted it. He knew I was in trouble, but didn’t know how deeply. It was a near thing.

I moved to Florida a few months after that, and things leveled out again. Another new doctor. A different prescription. A counselor who found the misadventures of my life entertaining. I was good at telling stories and perhaps even then struggling with the idea that something was wrong with me. I asked myself the same questions about medication I had in the beginning—even took a break from taking them. It didn’t last. I came to understand quickly that whatever being on medication “said” about me, it was keeping me alive and able to function something like “normal.”

A year later, another dark patch; project expiration date. I had hit bottom. There was still not a lot of acceptance. There was still enough stigma it wasn’t something one talked about openly. My father understood. He suffered from depression, but we weren’t close in those days—not so I could openly talk to him about it. And he was someone who wanted to find solutions, answers where there weren’t straightforward answers to be had. My brother was supportive but hundreds of miles away and starting his own life. My mother couldn’t accept something was wrong with one of her sons and suggested I just needed to join a bookclub or make some friends.

I made it through that patch, too.

Fast forward. The doctors changed the diagnosis again, changed it back, added to it, then changed it again over the next 10 years. They added, removed, changed, increased, and decreased medications. It wasn’t constant change, and everyone involved meant well. Most of the time, it was for the better.

I saw another counselor for a while and have not, to this day, returned to as dark a place as I was at those stops along the way.

Here I am, 21 years from stepping thorough the door of that first doctor’s office to talk about depression, fully “in recovery.” I’m on the executive committee of my county’s mental health and addiction recovery board. I advocate for others suffering from mental illness. I’ve entertained the idea of becoming a therapist. I take two daily medications and two more when I need them. They don’t scare me. They don’t bother me anymore. I am not ashamed, and I am still myself.

I don’t announce my depression and anxiety, or bi-polar disorder—depending on who you ask—to everyone I meet. I don’t advertise it, but I don’t hide it. It’s a part of me. Learning to live with it, learning to understand the way it can shape my experiences in the world, has been transformative.

Battling with mental illness and usually coming out on top put me in a position to help others do the same. I will fight the stigmas and educate in the face of misunderstanding for as long as I have breath to do so. My fight isn’t over, but I’ve gotten strong enough I can lend strength to others.

The world has changed since I was a sensitive kid on that elementary school playground. It’s becoming okay to talk about not being okay. It’s okay to not be okay. We’ve learned to see sensitive kids and try to understand. We guide them to talk about it and we help.

Teenagers no longer have to struggle alone the way I did. Men don’t always have to be stoic and strong.

There is still a long way to go. We make mistakes along the way. There are communities and demographics where “toughing it out” and sweeping it under the rug are still the way to address the problems. But we have a come a long way.

I have scars that may never heal. Once in a while, something bubbles to the surface that threatens the stability I’ve found. For me, the road ahead—though not easy—is “simple.” Be open. Be honest with myself, those I care about, and those who care about me.

Stay the course.

But it goes beyond that. My journey has left its scars, but it’s taught its lessons, too. And if I can share any of those, if I can write about or speak to, or perform any kind of service for people who have not made it to where I have, it is incumbent upon me to do so. I share goals with others in the mental health community of offering support and advocacy, of building relationships and fighting the stigma. There is hope. There is recovery.

And through education, compassion, and love for your fellow man, you can be part of the solution.

National Alliance on Mental Health, NoStigmas, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, National Institues of Mental Health, National Suicide Prevention Line

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