Mental Health

Today on the TV, I saw an advert about mental health and how it's time to talk about mental health problems more openly.
It really got me thinking about my own experiences with mental health. I've had a lot of problems over my teenage years and now as an adult they still exist; some I have been able to slowly overcome and some I'm working on getting under control. I had a fair amount of support from my parents and sibling, but I never really wanted to talk about what was wrong with me which made it hard for my parents to understand why I was so reclusive, so withdrawn. I finally opened up about many - but not all - of my issues to my family last year. It was very difficult for me to talk about what was happening to me, to try to explain what was going on with my emotions and why I acted the ways I did.
My mum also has experienced mental health difficulties, which makes it harder for me to open up as you feel you are burdening people anyway sometimes, but having a mental health problem myself I know just how little a thing can be enough to tip you right over. So I often felt like if I told her just how bad things were for me, she'd feel really bad about things and herself. And I didn't want to put her through that.
Some people might say that because my mum has mental health problems, that I am more prone to have them too. But I think it's not as simple as that. I believe that no matter how "tough" a person you might be, I think we all go through a period in our lives where we struggle with mental health, but I think that if you have the right support you can pull through it.
But then, mental health also needs not to be a joke within society, and the time has come to ensure that we are all doing our bit to combat the way people with mental health problems are treated. We are not any less of a person, we are not trying to depress you - we just need someone to talk to about how we feel as a lack of support could make us feel worse about things. Even if we don't talk about what's going on, just knowing you're there in case we hit a low point is amazing enough.
Schools especially need to combat the bullying that involves telling people to kill themselves, telling people to cut themselves, and the name calling and whispers that accompany the discovery of a young person with a mental health problem. And things need to be done about young people joking about suicide and self harm. It's not a joke, it's not attention-seeking.

The stigma around mental health has to end. And soon.
If you're on Twitter, please take a minute to follow @TimeToChange, and show the world that you too believe that stigma around mental health has to come to an end.