Check On Your Strong Friends

What’s something most people don’t understand?

As someone who tries to be as open as possible about my struggles with mental health issues, I feel that there is a lot that people don’t understand about people with mental illness. Helping to end the stigma around it is a big goal of mine. My objective right now is to simply talk about it as openly and as honestly as I can because many people really don’t understand. I always wondered what I could give a TedTalk on and really I think that could be it.

In lieu of an entire presentation on the topic of what people don’t understand about mental illness, I will simply illustrate one point that I have seen mentioned a lot on Threads lately. And it is this: People with mental illnesses don’t fake being sick, they fake being well. Read that again. It is 100% accurate.

When I was in college and told people I was taking a semester off so I could have ECT treatments, they were surprised. They didn’t know how bad my mental state was because I faked it really well in public. I wore a smile and engaged in friendly conversations. I also wore long sleeved shirts in the southern summer heat and humidity so they wouldn’t see the bright red cuts all down my arms.

When I told my school community that I was not returning as the principal or even staying on as a teacher, people were again very surprised. I have told a few people recently the real reason I left. People from there that I’m still friends with on social media have private messaged me to ask. One of them said they had no idea because I hid it well. I absolutely did. You can’t effectively lead a school if you show people how much you are suffering internally.

There’s a lot that can be said about people who commit suicide and how happy they appear to be just before they do it. That’s for an entirely different reason. They are sometimes genuinely happy because they know their suffering is about to end.

With all of this said, please check on your friends that appear to be emotionally strong. There’s a good chance that they’re really not. Check on them.