Op-Ed: Mainstream Mental Health Awareness Can Hurt People With 

Mental Illness

Someone who doesn’t have a mental illness can develop poor mental health due to stress, sleep deprivation, a breakup, losing a job, negative life circumstances, or losing a loved one. On the flip side, a person with a mental illness can go into remission and have good mental health by going to therapy, taking medication, and minimizing stress. Yet, they are still mentally ill. There is no cure for mental illness. The underlying pathology (brain abnormality) of the illness remains, meaning there is always a very high risk of relapse, especially if the person is untreated. They will need to manage their illness for the rest of their lives. This is what makes a medical illness different from merely experiencing a few of its symptoms due to life circumstances. This is not to say that poor mental health due to life circumstances can't be debilitating or even deadly, but that we need to make a clearer distinction between conditions that can be “cured” and chronic, neurological illnesses that can’t.  

“Mental health problems, sadness, moodiness, apprehension, and cleanliness” are used interchangeably with “mental illness, depression, bipolar, anxiety, and OCD.” If you are apprehensive about a test, you can listen to music and try to calm down. However, if you use “apprehension” and “anxiety” interchangeably, you expect the same thing from a person with clinical anxiety. You expect the person to stop being anxious by doing the same, simple, easy things you do to help with apprehension and uneasiness, which is unrealistic and even dismissive of how much the person is suffering. Oftentimes, people try to give “advice” to people with mental illness but end up sounding uninformed and insensitive instead. Someone is not depressed because they have gone through a breakup. They are grieving. That is normal and healthy, albeit painful. Just because going to the gym can help distract someone from a breakup, doesn’t mean it will help, or is even remotely possible, for someone who is depressed. Someone is not bipolar for feeling happier when they see their friends and being upset about missing their bus. That is normal and healthy. Someone doesn't have ADHD for being unfocused in an uninteresting geometry class. That is normal and healthy. We need to start addressing mental illnesses like the disabling, medical illnesses they are, instead of simply as an exaggerated adjective to describe normal (albeit oftentimes uncomfortable) emotional states that every human being will experience.

All of the “normalization” and “honesty” we are working toward has backfired; difficult and misunderstood illnesses are often taken out of context and used as a “quirky” descriptor, belittling the struggles and experiences of many mentally ill people. In extreme cases, it can prevent people from seeking support, because they fear society’s stigma or believe that others won’t take them seriously after years of seeing their private struggles made into a public joke.