My mother struggled immensely with mental illness, and so did I. She grew up bipolar, but it was never diagnosed nor recognized. It was shrugged off like a 'symptom' of being female - of her being weak. I also experienced this growing up: I felt that the great pain I experienced was a dramatisation.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the struggles of mental illness and the societal stigma surrounding it, particularly for women.
Petra Collins discusses the challenges of living with mental illness, both in her own life and in the life of her mother, highlighting how societal expectations and misunderstandings can lead to the trivialization of significant struggles. The quote underscores the need for recognition and proper diagnosis of mental health issues rather than dismissing them as mere weaknesses or misconceptions about gender.
In practice
In a mental health awareness campaign to emphasize the importance of understanding mental illnesses.
Pain or not, I would most likely walk around in a suicidal reverie the rest of my life, never actually doing anything about it. Was there a psychological term for that? Was there a disease that involved an intense desire to die, but no will to go through with it? Couldn't talk and thoughts of suicide be considered a whole malady of their own, a special subcategory of depression in which the loss of a will to live has not quite been displaced by a determination to die?
Depression is a prison where you are both the suffering prisoner and the cruel jailer.
I am unable to describe exactly what is the matter with me; now and then there are horrible fits of anxiety, apparently without cause, or otherwise a feeling of emptiness and fatigue in the head.
I never felt like that before. Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand how you suffer now when you're depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time, if not alone then my means of the mood organ. But when you get that depressed you don't care. Apathy, because you've lose a sense of worth. It doesn't matter whether you feel better because you have no worth.
How come every other organ in your body can get sick and you get sympathy, except the brain?
I think it's always been normal for humans to compare themselves to each other, but we're so hyper-connected all the time now that it's driving us insane.
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