Truth

       There are movies, books, television shows about it. People think they understand it; they think it's simple to explain. But no one expects to experience it first hand. As part of our society that's hidden, quieted, and subjected to silent suppression, I had no idea what I was going to face entering the mental hospital as a patient and completely unprepared for the thick permanent smoke of emotions that filled the buildings.
       The rooms are nice, overly nice since it's a private hospital, and the people are kind and attentive, constantly observant to how the events of moving in will affect the new patient, ready for the fits of anxiety or even rage. I was easy going on my first day compared to others, as this was the first time I did not have to hide or explain in depth what I was going through.
       "What are you in for?" The question of the day.
       "Depression, anxiety."
       "That's what most of us are, too, but some have extras added on." This small, spunky, very loud girl is talking, Emily. She's only twelve but seems aged and worn. She's in a neon pink shirt, polka dot pajama pants, and pink furry slippers, the only fashion I came to know her in during the following weeks.
       "I've got depression, anxiety, borderline personality disorder, and PTSD for being raped by my dad." She rattles this off nonchalantly, without any hint of discomfort, and although it hits me like ten arrows through my lungs I acknowledge her problems as she did mine, with an understanding nod and an unspoken promise to attempt to relate and listen to her story.
       This meeting with Emily mirrored my first encounters with the others in the adolescent unit. Emily's condition was extreme compared to theirs, though. Most were like me, dealing with depression and anxiety. Some turned to cutting or drinking or drugs, some had attempted suicide, and we each had our own stories.
       How weird it was getting to know these people. Society had taught me that mental illness was something that defined a person's life. It's easy to separate the person from the problem when it's physical but when it changes your personality and how you act day to day that line becomes blurred and makes it hard for others to recognize you. I realized in my weeks at the unit how to see people for who they were, not what they were going through and I still have trouble imagining that my friends there really were suffering so much simply because they seemed normal to me 90 percent of the day. Yes, there were the anxiety attacks, outbursts of anger, violent refusals to take medication, but after everything calmed down we would check on each other, apologize if necessary, and put it behind us, continuing the meal or game or group discussion. We laughed at each other, with each other. There was gossip and bullying that follows all teenagers. It seemed like the unit was the only place we felt we could live as close to a normal childhood as we could; we couldn't be different in a sea of different. Emily, Charles, Leah, Mariana, Allie, Kacie, James, June, Sammy: we are all just kids but we are the kids that society hides from embarrassment because we represent a handful of results from the faults of the world. Our illnesses are results from unstable homes, the every growing stress on teens to seek academic perfection, the readily available alcohol and drugs as coping skills, and most of all the inability of our society to supply resources for universal mental health.
       The kids in the unit are my family in the sense that they are the only ones who know the feeling of having depression but not being able to describe it, the extreme mood swings brought on by medications with no idea how to cope with them, how brief distraction as simple as books or games or drawing can pull the darkest of thought away. They know the rollercoaster of emotion that can be felt in a thirty-minute group therapy session and the euphoria when a goal as simple as taking a shower or saying good morning to five people is completed after days or weeks of struggle.
       We will always be a long way from tackling mental illness even if doctors were to make hundreds of new discoveries today, because with out public understanding there will never be true entry back into the regular population after a battle with mental illness. All patients will always be looked down upon, pitied, or denied because of the general fear that mental illness changes a person permanently, that it is impossible to dig yourself out of that hole and that the illness has somehow been merged with our DNA, forever within us and forever a threat to those around us. We are not our disorders; we are human beings, struggling against a wind created by the imperfect world around us, intensified by the assumptions of those who don't understand.