“You don’t look depressed at all!”
Maybe the world exclaims this with good intention upon seeing me, but it feels an awful lot like a trivialisation of my mental illness to my ears. Regardless, this is a common reaction people have when you tell them that you, a physically “normal-looking” person, have an ugly mental illness, like depression. After all, it’s not like I’m sitting down at a dinner party bawling and slitting my wrists. I am dressed like other people, talking like other people, and not doing anything weird or alarming. So how can I have depression? How can I be “crazy?”
You see, the image we have been fed of mental illness is very uni-dimensional. It is an exaggerated picture of a mad woman in white, with dishevelled hair, and bandaged wrists. She throws things, gets violent, and screams. They fight help, and they yell in indignation and denial when “accused” of being mentally unsound. Obviously, there are people with mental health issues as severe and difficult to treat as that. I know them myself, and I know their agony often has no solution. But when you take a look at me, and think my high-functioning depression is as good as being mentally balanced, you are actually setting back my healing. What you are doing, is holding my self-consciousness, and desire for getting better, against me. You are punishing me for being self-aware enough to admit I am sick, and ask for help.
Mental illness is anyway a taboo subject in society. Acknowledging that you have it sometimes takes years, let alone the actual treatment with medication or therapy. To add to that conflict, if you go to a mentally ill person who is struggling with the legitimacy of their intangible condition internally as it is, and tell them they are fine, how are they going to get better? If you think that your very kind but stupid oversimplification through the words, “There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re fine,” will make someone mentally healthy, you have a little too much confidence in yourself.
Mental illness is not easy. It is not easy to diagnose. It is not easy to treat. And it is not easy to live with, because everyone is always trying to deny its existence, in fear that the madwoman stereotype will be unleashed if we admit that someone is, indeed mentally ill. Anyone who suffers from mental health issues themselves, of course, doesn’t trivialise mental illness like this. They know that someone with “less” anxiety, or “less” depression, are also suffering. They suffer the same, so they are smart enough to know what it is like to have a mind afflicted thus. Just because I pop two pills and you pop one, doesn’t mean I will question your condition, and gloss over your pain.
Most people you come across are probably suffering in ways you cannot imagine. They will not carry visible markers of illness on their bodies for you to see. That is why it is called a mental illness in the first place. From OCD to anxiety, there are a host of mental health conditions that plague nearly everyone. Trivialising that is what frustrates a mentally ill person. They cannot even talk about their issues without being talked over, and then they are criticised for their condition by those who question its validity, making them feel even crazier, like they have been deluded sick by their messed-up mind.
Is it fair, then, to blame someone for pulling themselves through each day, despite their mental health issues, by saying they don’t seem sick? Where is the safe space they need to seek help? Are we really so cruel, that we think someone’s internal torture is an attention-seeking gimmick, and not a cry for help? Or would we rather be blind to the pain of others, because everything is easier when we pretend mental illness doesn’t exist?
