Mental Health, Facts, Figures and Personal Experience

 

Mental Health: The Facts Are Alarming. The Experience Is Worse.

Let’s start with the numbers—since people love stats more than stories:

• 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. experience mental illness each year.
• Suicide is the second leading cause of death for people aged 10–34.
• The average delay between symptom onset and treatment? 11 years.
• And globally? Depression is the leading cause of disability.

But let’s be honest: numbers don’t bleed. People do.

Because behind every tidy percentage is someone sitting in their car for 40 minutes after work just to avoid walking into their own house.

Someone calling out “sick” for the third time this month and lying about the reason.

Someone “high-functioning” on the outside and barely hanging on inside.

Here’s what the facts don’t show:

• The shame of asking for help and being told to “try yoga.”
• The broken trust of opening up to a doctor who Googles your condition mid-appointment.
• The waiting list that’s six months long—but your panic attacks won’t wait six minutes.
• The “wellness plans” from employers that read like PR, not support.

Mental health is treated like a marketing checkbox, not a human priority.

We talk about it once a year in May, post some infographics, then go right back to overworking, underfunding, and gaslighting people into silence.

Personal experience? It doesn’t always look like TV.

It looks like:

• Waking up and negotiating with yourself to stay alive through breakfast.
• Showing up to work while dissociating through meetings because bills don’t wait for breakdowns.
• Having to “prove” you’re sick enough to deserve help, but not so sick that they lock you up.
• Getting labeled “difficult” instead of “in pain.”

And it’s worse for anyone not white, not rich, not neurotypical, not cis, not straight.

Because bias doesn’t stop at the therapist’s door—it walks in first.

We don’t need more awareness. We need structural change.

• Mental health care that’s accessible without jumping through flaming bureaucratic hoops.
• Workplaces that accommodate brains, not just bodies.
• School systems that stop punishing kids for trauma responses.
• Community support that doesn’t require insurance codes or clean diagnostic labels.

And we need to normalize the messy middle—the people who aren’t “better” but are still trying. Still functioning. Still here.

Here’s what I know, personally:

Mental illness doesn’t always come with a trigger warning.

Sometimes it’s loud. Sometimes it’s subtle. Sometimes it looks like success.

But it’s always real. And it’s always worth taking seriously.

You can’t mindset your way out of a chemical imbalance.

You can’t affirmation your way out of generational trauma.

You can’t deep-breathe through a system that is actively failing you.

So yeah—mental health is more than a hashtag.

It’s life or death, every day, for millions of people.

Including me. Maybe including you.

And until the system catches up with the truth, we have to do what we’ve always done:

Speak up. Show up. And refuse to disappear.