Let’s Stop Glamorizing Depression

Since when did being diagnosed with a mental illness become a trend? Why do we make it seem so beautifully tragic to want to die every day?

Here’s the truth about being diagnosed with depression: It sucks. Depression isn’t a beautiful young girl listening to sad music and wearing black every day. It’s not fighting with your parents or siblings from time to time, it’s not being tired because you got one night of bad sleep, and it definitely isn’t something anybody should be looking at as the new “in” thing.

Depression is lying in bed at night struggling to find the smallest bit of something good in your day. It’s hurting the people who love you most because you can’t see why anyone would love you if you can’t even love yourself. Its feeling like you’ll never be good enough for anyone and that no one would want you anyway. It’s feeling as though you’ll never get enough sleep to cure the type of tired you’re feeling.

Depression is manipulative; it tricks you into thinking things that are hard to shake. Depression is a thief that doesn’t just steal your happiness, but also your friends, family, your mind, and eventually it steals your life—if you let it.

I’ve struggled with depression, anxiety, and a mild eating disorder since I was about 12 years old, but I was not diagnosed until two and a half years ago. Although I am on the road to recovery, there are still nights like tonight, where I wish I would die.

Being a person who suffers from depression, it makes me sick that certain types of media glamorize being depressed. There is nothing about depression that is beautiful or poetic; it’s just painful and what a lot of people don’t realize is half the time you don’t feel anything, you’re numb, you want to feel something but you can’t. What a lot of people don’t tell you is that depression isn’t something that you take a pill for and you’re all better, this is something that I—just as many others—will have to deal with for the rest of our lives and although we have our good days, we still have bad days where we struggle to find the purpose in anything.

Getting help was the best thing I’ve done—don’t get me wrong—but there are still nights when I’m taking my medication and all I can think about is taking the whole bottle to make it all disappear.

Let’s stop romanticizing mental illnesses and start seeing them for what they really are: heartbreaking. Let’s start educating each other on what it really feels like when you’re at war with yourself every day instead of telling people that it’s “cool” or “edgy” if you’re suffering from depression. There is nothing edgy about it. 25 million Americans suffer from depression and over 50 percent of people who commit suicide suffer from major depressive disorder. So let’s start looking at the facts and start treating it as an illness instead of the latest fashion trend.