I’ve had a lucky life. I grew up with wonderful parents and a caring sister (though it’s taken me a while to realize that). My family hasn’t really dealt with substantial money problems, and I was lucky enough to earn an academic scholarship to the University of Oklahoma. I have great friends who are there whenever I need them, and a girlfriend that treats me better than I possibly deserve. From the outside, I live a great life. And honestly, from the inside I live a great life.
But sometimes I’m not happy. Sometimes, no matter how great things are, I can only focus on the bad. Sometimes, all I want to do is lie in bed and pretend the world around me isn’t there.
It began in middle school. In 7th grade, my first significant relationship ended (as significant as a 7th grade relationship can be, I know). It sucked, and for the first few weeks I felt just like anyone else who loses that first special someone. But then it didn’t stop. First it was a few weeks, then it was a few months. My friends couldn’t understand. I couldn’t understand. All I knew was that no matter how many times people said “it will get better,” it didn’t.
Finally high school started, and by the end of freshman year things actually were better. I couldn’t figure out what had changed, but I had just woken up one morning and I was okay again. I would still go through weeklong periods of sadness in reaction to one small thing or another, but never as bad as that again. And so I wrote that sadness off to just being a kid—being a high schooler still figuring everything out. Then second semester of junior year happened.
I’ve always been very good at empathizing with others. One of my best strengths has always been my ability to put myself in another’s shoes—to understand what they’re going through. My junior year of high school, a classmate of mine killed himself. It was the second suicide in less than a year, and it hit me especially hard. I kept asking myself, what more could I have done? What more could I have done to make that boy feel valued and appreciated and worth keeping alive? Would that that one day be me? So I spiraled.
Depression looks different to everyone. Some people go through episodes of mania and depression, alternating between the incredibly high and the incredibly low. Others experience a constant, but manageable level of depression. My depression is usually like that, but with deep valleys that I can’t predict. For three months, I lived in that valley. I stayed up until at least 3:00AM every morning, watching The Office and dreading waking up the next day. At school, I put in headphones between classes and just stared at the wall during classes. I had one thought that I repeated over and over:
What difference did my grades and my test scores make if there were people all around me that needed my help right then and there?
I can’t fully explain that thought process. One fairly constant thing I’ve seen in the people I speak to with depression is the desire to be part of something bigger. Depression can cause you to feel as though none of what you’re doing really matters. To counter this, you try to make a difference in the lives of others. I may not have been able to make myself happy, but at least I could make others happy. That would have to be sufficient for a time. Helping others was the medicine I self-prescribed. It would be a while before I was ready to accept my mental illness and ask for help.
As a high school kid, asking for help is hard. Being a teenager means trying desperately to fit in. Wear the right clothes. Say the right things. Watch the right shows. Being different means separating yourself from that; it means making yourself vulnerable. And as a teenager, that vulnerability is terrifying.
Acknowledging mental illness means acknowledging inherent vulnerability. It means accepting that not only are you different, but you are different in a way that very few people will be able to understand. And, in many cases, you will always be different. That stigma is both societally imposed and self-imposed. Everything I had ever heard about mental illness led me to see it as a weakness. And this false self-perception of who I was, who I should be, stopped me from getting better for a very long time. The belief that mental illness makes you inherently weak was what led to me taking so long to acknowledge I struggled with it, and to taking so long to finally ask for help. Believing I was inherently broken was what kept me from taking steps towards finally putting the pieces back together. It was only when I made it past that fear and asked for help that I was able to start getting things back in place.
-Cooper Lund, OU Class of ’16
Open Heart, Open Mind 