Here’s What Those Who Live With Diagnosed Mental Illnesses Need You To Understand

People who suffer from any kind of mental illness knows how it feels when someone tries to tell you that you are overreacting about a situation or when someone says just get over it. It’s not that easy and nobody will understand that unless they are in your position. The ones who have never been diagnosed are the ones to always judge you on the way you react or feel about a certain situation.

People tell you all the time that it will pass, you will feel better, stop being so dramatic; yet they have no clue how you are feeling. You think to yourself that maybe talking to someone will help you feel better and then when you do you get comments back from them that don’t help but make you feel worse because they don’t stop to think how hard it may be.

Mental illness is not something people chose to suffer from. People don’t wake up on morning and say to themselves, “I want to be depressed the rest of my life.”

It doesn’t work like that. So trying to tell someone who is suffering to just get over it and to stop thinking about it doesn’t help. Because we can’t just stop, we can’t just turn a switch a feel good again. We can try and work towards feeling better but we can’t switch how we feel off because you told us to.

You go through every day hearing people say, “I’m so depressed,” or, “My anxiety is through the roof,” or, “I can’t take this I’m going to kill myself.” They say it because they think whatever situation they are in and the way the feel is how it really feels to be depressed or anxious. They say they are going to kill themselves as a joke because they don’t want to deal with whatever situation they are in.

They don’t know what it’s really like, they don’t know who around them are suffering.

Being diagnosed with a mental illness will change you and the way you see certain situations. You come to the realization that when others say they are depressed or anxious it’s not what they are. And hearing that is like being stabbed in the back, because you live it everyday, you wake up knowing that at any point throughout your day your mood can change and you can become a different person. They don’t understand how much it really hurts or how painful living a life with a mental illness can be.

You sit there hearing others say are depressed or anxious while they are just upset or nervous for a certain amount of time, so they don’t really know what it’s like. You aren’t just upset or nervous for a certain amount of time, you can be nervous 24/7 and you can feel like never leaving your bed ever; that’s what it’s like to have a mental illness. You wish you didn’t have to hear others use the words “depressed” or “anxious” on a daily basis because they don’t know how it really feels.

We need to stop the stigma of mental illness, because it is not a joke.

When people constantly stigmatize mental illness it continues to lessen how serious someone who really is suffering may feel. It becomes a joke to some people and just other words for them to use on a daily basis. It’s not right and people need to understand that when they use certain words they don’t know who is around them and they don’t know how it can affect someone else.