What is mental illness?

Mental illness; the unspoken; the unheard; the stigmatized; the dark shroud smothering ones personality and perception of life.

We ARE the face of mental illness. Over 850,000 children and adolescents across the United Kingdom live with some form of mental illness. That is more than the amount of children living with cancer. Sometimes, I wish that I could swap my mental illness for something physical. Mental illness doesn’t show up on a blood test. An x-ray can’t confirm a broken mind like it can a broken arm. They can’t take a biopsy of your brain and conclude “Yep, that’s some mental illness right there”. There is no magic cure. We can’t have a course of chemotherapy, or surgery to take away the shadows cloaking our minds.

It is deemed as wrong, as attention seeking to speak out about what is happening inside of our heads. We’re not strong for battling our own minds; we are seen as weak. People assume that we simply can’t deal with the troubles occurring in day-to-day life.

“Toughen up!”
“There’s nothing wrong with you!”
“You are so ungrateful!”
“You have a roof over your head, food, water, a warm bed, clothes; why are you complaining? Some people have nothing.”

It’d be wrong for me to say that I sometimes want them to walk a day in my shoes, to wake up to voices and the evil screaming in your ear, because why should anybody wish that upon another human being?

“You aren’t good enough.”
“Nobody likes you, let alone loves you.”
“You’re a burden.”
“You should just kill yourself, everyone else will be so much happier.”

The reality is, we are so full of love and life beneath the mentally unwell part of us. All we want to do is to care for others and make the world a better place. Some of us have been through things that no other should have to endure, and we want to ensure that nobody else ever has to suffer the way that we have. We’ve seen the world in a different light.

We don’t want your attention, we don’t want your sympathy. We simply want somebody to understand, we want somebody to help us to live happily. We aren’t all like the stigma portrays us. We aren’t all manipulative, nasty, unpredictable and dangerous. Some of us are just having a hard time.

All that we really want is your understanding.