This is one I really struggled with in the beginning. If my son had cancer, I would be posting it all over the place, asking for prayers. My friends would organize meals, and call and text me all the time to check on us and see what they could do to help.

So why don’t we want to talk about it? Even in this day and age, there is a stigma associated with mental illness. It makes us think of horrible stereotypes of “insane asylums” or state hospitals. I can remember going to the state mental hospital as a teenager with my show choir. We would all joke about the crazy people and then be creeped out by them once we got there.

Only in the last few decades has this been the case. And only fairly recently do we have some understanding of it and far better medications than we ever have. 

“Historically, mental illness has not been treated like an illness. Even in this day and age, there is a stigma associated with mental illness.”

But the stigma is still there for sure. Many people think we’ve done something wrong as parents to “make” our child mentally ill.  I think that’s the biggest reason we don’t want to talk about it.  And many Christians and those of faith believe mental illness is a spiritual issue, not a medical one.

And people are truly ignorant about mental illness. I’ve had people tell me to “just pray about it”. I even had one woman ask me if there was a blood test we used to find out that our son was mentally ill. I can’t make that up.

So we continue to hide, pretend, whisper and not talk about what is actually going on.  Since my son decided to share his story publicly, hundreds of people have told him how courageous he is. Isn’t that sad? We would never say that someone was courageous for sharing that they have the flu or cancer. We would just acknowledge that it sucks, that our bodies, while truly miraculous creations, don’t always work correctly, and we would offer help and support. 

I hope I live long enough to see this happen with mental illness.