"It's easy to put depression into a box of symptoms, and though we as a society are constantly told mental illness comes in all shapes and sizes, we are stuck with a mental health stock image in our heads that many people don’t match. When we see depression and anxiety in adolescents, we see teens struggling to get by in their day-to-day lives. We see grades dropping. We see involvement replaced by isolation. People slip through the cracks.
We don’t see the student with the 4.0 GPA. We don’t see the student who’s active in choir and theater or a member of the National Honor Society. We don’t see the student who takes on leadership roles in a religious youth group. No matter how many times we are reminded that mental illness doesn’t discriminate, we revert back to a narrow idea of how it should manifest, and that is dangerous."
I grew up in a school district full of teens like this; I /was/ a teen like this. And I've been very aware of the invisibility of the struggles of high functioning people; I still have a hard time feeling like I deserve care or attention for my problems. At the same time, I am frustrated by how many of my friends and family can't seem to see my needs for support.
My mother recently apologized to me about a day I don't even remember, when I was a junior in high school and I called her because I thought I was having a panic attack. She told me that, even though my symptoms matched a panic attack, she just didn't think of me as the kind of person who would have anxiety so she told me that I was probably fine. I probably hung up, tries to breathe slowly and stop crying, and then slipped into class late.
There is a degree to which people almost don't seem to believe me about my mental health problems, like one of the required symptoms is to have visible shortcomings. Sometimes it makes me want to fail spectacularly and irreparably at something, so that for once I can tell someone about a problem I have and they won't respond with "Oh, well, I'm sure you'll figure it out!" or "Why are you being so stressed about this? You're being too sensitive/high-strung".
I think that I piled my life full of classes and activities as a coping mechanism, so that I didn't have to be alone with my thoughts for too long, so that when my focus wavered on one thing I had another productive activity to switch to, so that I had socially appropriate excuses for my exhaustion and neuroticisms. This is not a pleasant way of living, this is not a life that doesn't have the need for support (...)
Related: We need a new definition of depression; ADHD different for women
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