Stigmas.

It's time to bring in the other topic of this blog - psychology. Specifically today, mental illnesses and the stigma relating to them.

It's hard enough to delve into the depths of depression; to live without a light of hope, without the ability to pull yourself out of the darkness that you've succumbed to. It's hard to fight the chemicals in your brain, an unseen enemy that hides, lying in wait until you lay bare before the world, naked and vulnerable, sobbing on the floor and screaming to the sky.

And then it pounces.

It's as if you fall down a well, and your choices are to follow the paths of the sewers, filthy with muck and the terrible stench of fear, or to try to climb, risking falling again and again, over and over back into the tepid water, drenching yourself in the filth once more. Depression is one of the more common mental illnesses, and yet we throw around the term as if it were nothing.

What if it was not a momentary funk? What if this feeling lasted for weeks, months, years? And yet we do not reach out to help those that are mentally ill - in fact, being declared as such can make you lose your job. Your home. Your children. You can be declared incompetent, unfit to parent and to live your own life, because of something that you have very little control over. It's akin to blaming the cancer patient for developing a malignancy.

You can't fight what you don't know, and you can't battle it alone. Education about your illness, arming yourself with all of the knowledge that you can is the only thing that can stand between you and it. Knowing what you're fighting - or what your mother, your boss, your coworker, your child is fighting - can make it a lot less scary, and can arm you with enough resources that you can fight back.

Instead of claiming that those who are mentally ill are burdens on society, why not learn a little bit about it? Try to put yourself in their shoes. They're just normal people, sometimes with haywire chemicals in their brains, sometimes not. They are people like any other - and you never know when "those crazy people" might move into your life. Your brother, your father, your best friend, or even you might face these challenges one day.

Arm yourself now with knowledge, instead of fear.