When I look at the patients that I've cared for with mental illness, I know that many of them took years to come forward and tell somebody that they were in pain and that they needed help.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the challenging journey many individuals face in acknowledging their mental health struggles and seeking help.
Vivek Murthy reflects on the long and often difficult process that many individuals with mental illness go through before they feel comfortable reaching out for assistance. The quote highlights the stigma surrounding mental health that can prevent people from communicating their pain and the crucial importance of creating an open and supportive environment where individuals feel safe to seek help.
In practice
This quote could be used in a public health campaign to encourage people to talk about mental health issues.
I think sometimes in the focus on deep friendships and on romantic relationships, we can lose sight of how important the small connections we make are with strangers and with people that we may encounter for just a few seconds or a few minutes, whether it's the barista at our coffee shop or the stranger next to us on the subway.
Without strong communities, we cannot pull together during times of hardship. Our diversity turns from a source of strength to a source of conflict.
One of the things that happens in our regular lives is that when we're in moments of pain or feeling alone, we may hesitate to reach out to others because we may think - they're not going through the same experiences I am.
There's a tremendous sense of shame that people who are lonely feel. I say that as someone who felt ashamed of being lonely as a child and even at points during adulthood.
Our health care workers are the heroes of the Covid-19 response.
What you quickly realize once you commit to getting more sleep is it can increase your productivity, it can improve your mood. And that doesn't just help you at work, but it helps you be the kind of person you want to be with your family and your friends and that's ultimately what matters most.
You can't fix yourself out of a mental health issue. You can't wake up and say, 'Today I'm not being depressed!' It's a process to get well, but there is recovery.
There are peaks, there are valleys. But they're all kind of carved and smoothed out, and it feels like a low level of despair you live in. Where you're not getting any answers, but you're living OK. And you can smile at the office. You know? But it's a low level of despair. I was on Prozac for a long time. It may have helped me out of a jam for a little bit, but people stay on it forever. I had to get off at a certain point because I realized that, you know, everything's just OK.
... you looked around and saw everybody either married or busy and happy and thinking and being creative, and you felt scared, sick, lethargic, worst of all, not wanting to cope. You saw visions of yourself in a straightjacket, and a drain on the family, murdering your mother in actuality, killing the edifice of love and respect built up over the years in the hearts of other people.
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.
That's one of the peculiar things about bad moods - we often fool ourselves and create misery by telling ourselves things that simply are not true.
Just as our parents quieted us when we were noisy by putting us in front of the television set, maybe we're now learning to quiet our own adult noise with Prozac.
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