>If you say you have "depression", they don't know if you'll take your week off to recover or actually need extensive professional follow up with a long term me

>If you say you have "depression", they don't know if you'll take your week off to recover or actually need extensive professional follow up with a long term medication. There is no common sense of how bad it is 'broken'. I think that's primarily because severe and enduring mental illness is still strongly stigmatised. The public conversation about mental health is dominated by what I call "the narrative". We see a succession of successful and healthy people talking about how they had depression or anxiety, they plucked up the courage to ask for help but now they're OK. Our conversations about mental health are dominated by brief episodes of illness in the past tense. That's not a terrible narrative and I'm sure it has encouraged a lot of people to seek treatment, but it's a very selective image of mental illness. We don't hear from people in the throes of severe illness. We don't hear from people who have struggled for years or decades and haven't found an effective treatment. We don't hear from people whose lives have been blighted by unmanaged schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. We don't hear from people who know they need treatment, but can't access it for financial reasons. "There are effective treatments and you don't have to suffer in silence" is an important message, but so is "some people can't access treatment, some people don't benefit from treatment, so we need to work as a society to improve the quality and availability of treatment and help people with unresolved mental illness to live fulfilling lives".