We Don’t Talk Enough About Mental Health
Sparking conversations during Mental Health Awareness Month
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One in five adults in the U.S. experiences mental illness in a given year. 18 percent of American adults live with anxiety disorders. Almost 7 percent live with depression. And 2.6 percent live with bipolar disorder. And we’re not counting children.
You probably know someone who has struggled with mental illness in the past — and if you don’t, it’s likely because we as a society have made depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues taboo. Mental illness is something we must keep a secret, sometimes even from ourselves.
We can change that stigma by talking honestly and openly about living with mental illness.
This week marks the beginning on National Mental Health Awareness Month, and we’d like to kick off a conversation on Medium about our experiences with mental health.
For the next few weeks, we’ll be curating and highlighting conversations around the platform on this topic. We welcome you to contribute by writing or responding using the mental health tag. You don’t need to have lived with a mental illness to join; we encourage all voices and opinions.
We’d like to keep this month-long conversation as community-driven as possible, so it’s really up to you all to tell us what you care about and what you’d like to read. We’ll be organizing a couple of structured conversations — either You Tell Me or Question and Answer format — so if you’re interested in participating at a more formal level, please fill out this Google form or respond to this post. We won’t be able to cover everything, of course, so if you are super-passionate about something, don’t wait for us — start something on your own. We’ll share the pertinent results from the Google form with the public so that you all can see what people want to talk about and add your voice to the conversation.
