"people experiencing depression, anxiety, and many other mental illnesses often look exactly like somebody who isn't, as we found when we gathered stories and pictures from times when people have been suffering these conditions"
http://www.buzzfeed.com/laurasilver/this-is-what-depression-really-looks-like?bffb&utm_term=4ldqpgp#4ldqpgp
This is only something you become aware of when people feel comfortable talking about their mental health problems - I attended a high school with a really mentally toxic environment, and an incredibly stressful college; both places had a high level of stigma around mental health issues, and it was really only in my later years of college when I started to have conversations with classmates and former high school classmates and I would learn that they were in counseling, or taking medication, or had taken that year off because of such and such problem. These were people who I always thought of as dynamic and energized and high functioning - and they were, they just also were dealing with some mental health problems that they should never had felt so ashamed of.
And it's these conversations that made me finally comfortable with dealing directly with my mental health. Why couldn't we have been talking about this all along?
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