Mental health is very taboo. It’s getting better nowadays and the conversation is starting to be pried open, but it’s still often hard to talk about. 

Here’s the thing: we all have mental health issues. And by ‘issues,’ I don’t necessarily mean we’re all diagnosable, but we all definitely check off our fair share of boxes. 

So from that we can conclude it’s not taboo because nobody experiences it, it’s taboo because nobody talks about it. 

We have got to open up the conversation. It has got to become more socially acceptable to experience these issues and to talk about them. 

School sounds like a good place to start, but the more immediate response would be to open the conversation with your friends or family or whoever you have a good exchange with. If someone has seemed a bit off, then reach out, simple as that. 

But if we attach labels to those people, like “oh so and so has been so bi-polar,” then the whole ordeal comes off as some sort of problem that needs to be solved, and that message definitely gets conveyed to the other person. The truth is that not everything has to be solved via a label or diagnosis, and the best approach is to just be willing to talk, person to person. 

It is very easy to get caught up in labels. So often people want to categorize themselves and others, but that usually just results in one or the other getting sectioned off. This may be part of the reason mental health is so taboo. We feel like we have to stick labels on everyone, and then we end up marginalizing said people, ironically so. 

I have seen so many commercials on medication for schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder. Not even one percent of the population is bi-polar. Only 1.1 percent of the population is schizophrenic. But by the amount of commercials and pills that are being peddled, you’d think that the percentage is through the roof. In extremes, I have legitimately seen this to lead people into believing that just because someone has a problem that vaguely resembles something they saw on a commercial for Seroquel, they must be diagnosable. It is human nature to categorize things, but oftentimes the line between ‘categorize’ and ‘generalize’ become blurred. 

I know some people do deserve a label. I have people in my life with those disorders, some of my very close relations are even bi-polar, but even so they do not deserve to be treated as those labels. As a society, we need to open up the conversation on mental health and treat people as people, not problems to be solved or as labels to be made.