Talking About Other’s Mental Health

While logically, I understand that there is a lot of stigma around mental illness and mental health struggles, I often emotionally forget this. These types of conversations were my bread and butter nearly from infancy. I grew up surrounded by mental illness, I experienced mental illness first hand, and I jumped right into an education and profession that dealt with it. So I frequently forget that for the majority of society, mental illness isn’t simply a fact of life that needs to be dealt with, like eating or finding transportation to work. For many people in society, mental illness, whether it is yours or someone else’s is this big, scary, taboo thing that you keep hidden in dark corners and hope no one notices it. It’s the elephant in the room that everyone has been taught to politely ignore.