Transcriber: Stanislava Moskalets Reviewer: Denise RQ
Ladies and gentlemen, I welcome you here today.
I'm going to share an idea with you.
In order to share that idea with you,
I'm going to talk to you about a very personal experience of mine.
It was a bright sunny day in June.
I'm twenty one years old,
and I'm sitting on the edge of my bed.
A bottle of pills - in my left hand, and a bottle of Kahlua - in my right.
From the ceiling light hangs poorly constructed noose,
and my computer stands open with an elaborate goodbye letter.
I'm going to commit suicide.
There is something so unexplainably heavy
pushing down on me,
something that I feel can only be relieved with death.
This broken record keeps playing the same old familiar song in my head,
and the lyrics go something like,
"Nobody loves you. Nobody needs you.
Existence is futile. You are worthless."
The pain is too much for me and too much for my family to bear,
and this is why I'm committing suicide.
I'm not just doing it for me.
I'm doing it for my mother, for my father, for my friends, and my family.
They will understand that the world is so much better off without me.
They will understand that committing suicide is good for all of us.
That is what I was thinking,
that is what I believed at that time,
and that is the ridiculous truth
and ultimately, the taboo of depression.
Does that sound like something a healthy person would say?
Does that sound like something
a person of a sound mind and body would think?
What I'm asking you, basically, is what is health and being healthy?
Is health just about eating right and exercising,
being able to run a marathon,
and looking skinny enough to wear a bikini?
Or is health something more?
What if I was able to do all those things
and still suffered from cancer or diabetes?
You wouldn't go and say, "Yeah, she's in full health."
Probably not.
But what if I was able to run a marathon, but still suffered from depression,
would that make me healthy in theory?
Just think about it.
And why is that?
In the vast world of modern social media
I constantly raised awareness
that the issue of mental health still somehow stays under the covers.
Why is it, when I open my Facebook page,
I scroll through endless pictures of flexed muscles,
and a constant stream of healthy recipes,
people boasting and bragging about
how far they ran or how much they benched.
But nobody ever texts to Facebook to tell the world
they are in a good mental health,
that they are stable and taking care of themselves.
Why is it we never see check-ins from therapists' offices,
or selfies from psychiatric clinics,
status updates about the latest cognitive behaviour treatments and therapy crisis?
Why is it so easy for us to admit
that we can heal our broken bones
but not our broken souls?
When talking about depression and feeling depressed,
I am not referring to the gloomy feeling of a tired Monday morning.
I'm talking about the medical factor, like a broken leg.
So let's use the metaphor.
Let's say my leg is broken, and it hurts really bad.
In fact, it hurts so much that it's on the verge of killing me.
But what I do is I tape it together myself,
and I just walk on it broken, gradually just breaking it more.
And when people tell me,
"You know, there is something wrong with your leg,"
"Oh no, it's fine. It's not broken. It's just a little bit crooked today.
I'm fine."
For three years I walked around on that broken leg,
lying to people and lying to myself that everything is fine,
everything is OK, nothing is wrong with me.
Every time I think about calling the doctor or seeing someone,
I can't; because the shame washes over me,
and I start thinking that I can't call the doctor
because people will know that I can't heal my own broken leg.
This is the survival of the fittest.
They will know you can't do it yourself, and they will cast you out.
Doesn't that scenario sound completely ridiculous to you?
It does, doesn't it?
So why is it that we are so easily ready to admit
that we can fix our bodies but not our souls?
Being depressed is not easy.
It's something that you have to battle with your whole entire life.
When I've given lectures to teenagers about depression,
I always start off by asking them,
"What is the first thing that comes to your mind
when I say the word 'depressed'?"
And they most frequently say things like, "You're sad,"
"You're lonely", "You hate yourself,"
"You feel really bad, AND you don't know why."
I tell them in response, "You all are absolutely right. That's all correct."
But I'm always holding my heart out for this one kid
to raise his or her hand and say, "It's an illness."
Because that is exactly what it is.
The social taboo surrounding depression crystallizes
in the way people talk about it.
Admit it: everyone in here has either said something or heard people say,
"Oh, yeah, he is on crazy pills,"
or "Yeah, I heard she is seeing a psychiatrist"
like it's something bad,
like it's something you should be ashamed of
and the reason that I walked around on broken legs for so many years
- and so many people still do -
is because society still doesn't fully grasp
the concept of mental illness being an illness not a choice.
Because I can assure you I didn't wake up one morning and think,
"Oh, yeah, that depression thing! I heard that's cool. I'm going to try out.
I'm going to do that."
Much like a cancer patient, I didn't stroll up to the hospital
and just sign up for chemotherapy and struggle.
It's an illness.
It's something that I cannot control.
Because what happens when talking about depression
is that I'm talking about the medical factor
like the broken leg.
But in my case, my legs are completely fine;
It's my mind that's broken.
My broken brain doesn't produce
the right amount of happy hormones into my body,
and that's what's wrong with me.
So it's those hormones, or lack thereof,
what would make me think
that I'm useless, worthless, pathetic, and small.
It's what makes me twist every single word, every glance,
every comment, every mistake into something catastrophically bad.
It is what makes me unable to move out of bed in the morning,
and it is what makes
the automatic task of breathing an uphill mountain climb.
So, what do we have to do to change this? What do we have to do?
We have to talk about it.
We have to talk about everything that happens to us,
everything that goes on in our lives,
everything that happens to us as human beings;
whether we like it or not, good or bad, is going to affect us.
Our feelings are the most purest form of expression,
and we should never have to hide them.
When I first started telling people that I was depressed,
their reactions completely baffled me,
because, all of a sudden, everyone was a doctor,
everyone kept telling me,
"There is no way you can be depressed because you're always so happy.
You're the life of every party.
You have friends and family. You do well at school.
You're the head of the drama club. You're part of the debate team."
And somehow, a depressed person
isn't supposed to have and be able to do all those things,
and still be depressed.
That is the misunderstanding
that constantly feeds on the taboo of depression
because we don't talk about it.
The misunderstanding is
that not all mentally-ill persons are strapped down in straight jackets,
locked away in asylums.
This actually happens to "normal people."
It's happened to someone in this room.
It is going to happen to someone in this room or someone that you know.
I'm here to tell you things are going to get better;
because I'm here talking about it,
you're going out, and you're going to talk about it,
and things are going to get better.
So, as I said, when I first started telling people that I was depressed,
the reaction I received was ridiculous.
But after three years of struggling with myself,
struggling with my self-identity,
smoking too much, drinking too much,
eating too much,
one night standing and parting my way out the of pain
to try to make people think that I was happy,
to try to look happy on the outside,
putting on this huge, heavy mask for all this time,
so people wouldn't realize that my leg was in smithereens.
And then I woke up one day, and I thought:
"This is not the person that I want to be.
This is not who I was born on this Earth to be."
So I picked up the phone, and I called the therapist,
and that was the hardest thing I've ever done.
In my first session, my therapist told me, "You know what?
You are going to feel a lot worse when you leave the session
because you are ripping off a band-aid
that has been sitting on your soul for I don't even know how many years."
But I ripped off that band-aid, and I'm proud of myself for doing so.
I ripped it off,
and I gradually started working out my problems.
Then, after several months of treatment and help from the people closest to me,
I was able to put my problems behind me.
For the first time, in such a long time,
I was happy -happy!
A feeling that I had completely put off,
a feeling that I thought was reserved for some exclusive country club upstate,
something I was never going to be able to feel again.
I was, in all essentials, happy;
healthy and happy.
So, let's go back to that day I was talking about earlier.
Let's go back to that bright, sunny day in June 2013.
I'm 21 years old,
I have my whole life ahead of me,
but, alas, the pill bottle now occupies my stomach,
and so does the Kahlua.
The pain that I'm experiencing
I will never be able to explain.
If you've never truly experienced depression
and actually wanting to take you own life,
I sincerely hope you never will.
This is a feeling I wouldn't wish upon my worst enemies.
All of sudden, this little voice,
this devil that's been sitting on my shoulders, starts talking,
"You know what? You are going to mess this up.
You are going to fail like you failed everything else in your life.
You're going to fall from the noose and break your spine,
damage your kidneys, and wake up a miserable vegetable,
and you are a loser that can't even do this right.
You can't even kill yourself right."
And that was the thought that made me reach for the phone.
I wish I could say it was the image of my parents weeping at my coffin,
or the thought of a happier life in the future, but it wasn't.
It was this thought, the thought that I was a failure.
And I didn't want to fail this.
So, in some kind of a frenzy, I pick up the phone,
I dial my best friend's number,
and from that point on everything becomes a haze.
I am rushed into an ambulance, they're pushing me around in gurneys,
they're pumping the drugs out of me,
and much like a patient with broken legs or infected gums
I am at the hospital to get help.
And there are professional people here to take care of me.
I understand why people that have never really experienced this
and don't know what depression is,
tend to say that suicide is a selfish act.
But I'm here to tell you that it's not.
You couldn't have told me
simply just to suck it up or change my attitude
because I was way too far gone, I am sick, and I need help.
By saying things like this, by saying, "Just suck it up!
or "Change your attitude",
you are constantly contributing to the taboo.
You would never say this about any other patient.
You would never call cancer patients weak, pathetic people for being sick
because you know they didn't choose to be.
They just got unlucky.
What if I just got unlucky too?
I'm at the hospital. I'm here to get help.
I was reluctant at first,
but I realized that I was just like a cancer patient;
I was just like a person with a broken leg,
and this was the place I was supposed to be.
Here are people to take care of me.
So, a second battle in my life begins.
I start struggling with myself again, trying to get out of the psych ward
to just live a normal life with this burden on my back.
But I was able to do so.
The social taboo surrounding depression, as I said, crystallizes
in the way people talk about it.
I decided, when I came out of the psych ward,
that I was not going to be one of those people.
I was going to be the person who will change the world.
I was going to use this to help other people.
What we need to do is
we need to deconstruct these padded walls surrounding mental illness,
and we need to do it together.
We need to climb these walls whether our legs are broken or not.
I believe that we can do that.
I stand here before you today so thankful that my friend picked up the phone;
I'm so thankful for all the help that I received,
and ultimately, I am thankful for being depressed
because it's a part of me,
just as much as my ten toes
or the freckles I get on my nose during the summer.
This is me. This is who I am.
I encourage you to walk out of here today
and break this social taboo that surrounds mental illness
because we need to grasp the concept
that mental illness is an illness not a choice.
I also stand here before you today to tell you
if you're feeling depressed, things are going to get better.
Things always get better.
Talk to the people around you, talk to your friends, your family.
Our feelings are our most purest form of expression.
We should never hide them.
I'm not going to lie to you:
being depressed and feeling suicidal is the worst.
This is a lifelong battle, an endless struggle,
a daily war you wage against yourself.
But the secret is
that it is a war where anyone can prove to be a hero.
It is a war where anyone can stand up and be a winner.
Much like a cancer patient who has fought and struggled his or her entire life,
depressed people can do that too,
and we can come out on the winning side.
What I want for all of us to walk out of here today with
is that I want us to walk into a world
where there is no difference made between physical health and mental health,
where those things are just as important.
And I want us to live in a world
where there is no social distinction made
between calling your doctor and calling your psychiatrist.
I believe that together we can make that happen.
Thank you.
(Applause)