On anxiety and depression

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You’re having one of those days where it seems as if the whole world has teamed up to make your life miserable and revel in the aftermath. One of those Murphy’s Law days when everything and anything that could go wrong is going wrong.

On those days, it doesn’t take much to push you off the edge – a jerk’s offhand comment in the elevator, a long line for food, or loud people in lecture. For the approximately eight percent of adults that the Canadian Mental Health Association cites as suffering from depression, this is a daily reality – a lethargy that bleeds into weeks, months, even years. Depression is not one-size-fits-all. It is different for every person. Yet it is as if there is some indescribable shift – a gear changing cogs – that causes your brain and body to run on ten percent of what it used to.

Like depression, anxiety disorders don’t discriminate based on age, gender, race or religion. Both are very real problems, and ones that need to be talked about openly. Too many times people hide their disease. When a friend asks why your eyes are bloodshot or if the bruises under your eyes are an indication of how much sleep you have been getting, the answer is “I think I’m coming down with something.”

The reality is that you have been sick for a while, just in a way that somehow seems less acceptable to voice. This has to stop. When people have pneumonia, they get antibiotics that clear up their lungs and help them breathe again. While people are not generally shy to say they have pneumonia, they are much more reluctant to claim that they have depression or anxiety. Which means that pneumonia gets treated, and depression and anxiety do not.

The Canadian Mental Health Association cites that once recognized, treatment can make a difference for 80 percent of people suffering from depression, allowing them to resume their daily lives. Yet five bullet points down is another staggering statistic. Only one in five children who need mental health services get the appropriate care. This discrepancy is a huge warning alarm demanding to be addressed.

To tackle this issue, we must attack at the root, the perception of mental illnesses. The circulation of phrases like “yesterday was such a rough day, I was super depressed” and “your text gave me a panic attack” does two things. It diminishes the gravity of depression and anxiety disorders as mental illnesses. Reducing a serious illness to the same lines as a bad day discounts the daily struggle to do something as simple as getting out of bed. Secondly, by misusing the terminology of these disorder in colloquial speech, it makes people retreat further into their shells. It makes sense that nobody wants to come out and admit that they need help when the people they are confessing to are the same ones throwing around jokes.

We need a society where someone is comfortable responding to “what did you do last night?” with “I was at the therapist’s office.” It is hard not to go through something like that and not feel alienated from the world. There are surprising amounts of people that go to see therapists but mask it with trips to the mall or the library. The problem is not the visits to the therapist. Those visits are intrinsic to the healing process in the same way that Tylenol relieves a chronic headache. To the people who are seeing or have seen therapists, you are infinitely brave for taking that step. The road to recovery is long and arduous, but what matters is that you are on this road. The problem comes in this desire to mask these visits, and what it is that leads people to feel like they have to.

The signs for a forward movement are there. We are coming fresh off of a week where Bell Let’s Talk promoted a culture of open discussion about mental health. The important thing is to keep the momentum going past those 24 hours. Depression and anxiety last much longer than that.

We need a paradigm shift in the way that mental disorders are viewed. It starts with every person accepting personal responsibility for those around us. We are not islands cut off from others. Our actions affect those around us, even when we are not aware of it.

It starts with open and honest conversations, with acceptance and with the idea that we need to be mindful of others. Think twice before you mock someone for what they are wearing or for riding the elevator from the third floor, because to them it could be a big deal that they got dressed and onto that elevator at all.

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