Blog Post #9- Emma Snyder

One thing that really gets under my skin is when people throw around words like depression and anxiety as if everyone has it. They’ll just say  “I’m so depressed, I wanna kill myself,” when they don’t genuinely have depression and they don’t mean that. For people who are actually diagnosed with illnesses like depression and do or have struggled with those kinds of thoughts, it can be extremely frustrating. It’s the same thing with anxiety- you can be anxious without actually having anxiety. Most people get nervous before public speaking or a big test, and things like that but that doesn’t mean you have anxiety. It’s much worse than that. People like to say they have anxiety, or ocd, or depression, or really any mental illness as if it’s like a “fun quirky” trait to have. IT’S NOT. Having a mental illness is NOT fun, it’s NOT cute, and it is most definitely NOT something you want. I think we need to teach children more of the differences between normal behaviours like feeling sad or nervous vs. being clinically depressed or having actual panic attacks. I mentioned this a bit in my last post, but ocd is another mental illness that has a HUGE stigma around it. People can be messy and unorganized and still have ocd. It’s not just “being neat.” It’s rituals and routines and being neat can be a part of it but I think we need to educate people that there’s much more to it than that. Nothing makes me more angry than people giving in to stereotypes about mental illness and acting like it’s something you want because you don’t.