Assignment 16- Swazey S

Depression, anxiety, autism, schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. While listing off these Mental “Disorders” as some people would call them, many of you, if not all of you, probably already have some very specific opinions and images about this topic and the disorders that I’ve listed. This speech is not addressing the illnesses themselves, for that topic has been addressed plenty of times. Instead, I’m going to address something a bit more personal to us as peers and as a youth growing up in a world where older culture has set the standard. The Stigmatization. Specifically depression, for this speech.
Let me ask you all a question, and feel free to raise your hand if this applies to you. We’ve seen the Kentucky Suicide Prevention presentation for around 5 years now; now how many of you, like me, find that presentation to be outdated and completely irrelevant in our mental climate? To be honest I find it almost laughable at the kind of behavior they are presenting to us as the normals for depressed individuals. Whether it be directly, indirectly, or SUPER directly, depression has affected us all. And on very few occasions do depressed individuals publicly and blatantly show it. While yes, these conversations of feeling worthless, or alone, may pop up in the midnight confessionals of our dms, hardly ever have they appeared in our day to day. Ladies and Gentlemen, stigmatization of mental health, whether they are trying to be helpful or not, has been, and will continue to be the reason we lose our friends to suicide, and why individuals will get hurt, shunned, and in extreme cases physically hurt because of something that is physically impossible for them to control.
Now, look to your left, look to your right, look to me, now to the opposite side of the room, now to another side, now back to me. How would you like to know that, statistically, one of the people you just looked at has some string of depression. Who would you guess it would be? That question might make some folks uncomfortable, since they’d be labeling and judging their friends, but is crucial you understand WHY I asked that question. I ask this because currently, we have to make guesses. We lack the proper knowledge to be able to see signs and help our friends, so what we’re left to do is guess, and hope we don't miss an opportunity to help. Dr. Roxanne Edwards has found that depression affects 20% of us by the time we’re adults. 20%. According to standard stigmatization, 4 of us should be acting and looking depressed for an extended amount of time in order for us to be classified as depressed. Two issues are involved in this:
The first one, and the most important one, is the fact that depressed individuals don’t spend their everyday lives moping around like they do in the videos we see. While I hate to piggyback and exploit someone else’s speech, Abby’s speech to us yesterday perfectly conveys this. An outsider who does not know her, and most likely even some of her closer friends, would not have guessed or expected her to have depression, based off how she presents herself. 100s of our peers fall in to this same forced persona. A persona where because their depression isn’t visible by the day, they are deemed as impossible of having depression, but as soon as something is triggered make things worse, they are told they are overreacting. The third party perception of the individual not only mistreats the illness at hand, but it also severely decreases the likelihood that an individual will share again. Through ill informed ideas as to what depression really looks like, and how it has evolved between generations, a child is left by themselves with bottled up emotions and negative self understanding,
The issue of expectations and perceptions leads me to the second issue present when looking at that 20%, what type of depression do they have? Cause while you may think that only the so called standard depression and bipolar depression strands are the only two highly common strands of depression, that just simply isn’t the case. There are 6 leading strands of depression:
Major Depressive Disorder: Spurts of extremely heavy and destructive depression at different integers.
Persistent Depressive Disorder: This is the closest to the public's view of depression, a consistent, almost never ending stream of bad thoughts, but the bad thoughts tend to not be as totally severe or as is irreversible.
Bipolar Depression: A form of depression where an individual bounces between a full manic state, and a smaller depressed state.
Seasonal Depression: While the concept seems ridiculous, our bodies have a natural reaction to the change in seasons, and our brain chemistry is no different.
Postpartum Depression: While hormonal influxes are standard around the time of giving birth,consistent symptoms can lead to a variation of MDD caused by the extreme hormonal shifts.
Psychotic Depression: The instance where MDD or PDD reaches an extreme and is later followed by hallucinations and extreme paranoia.

These 6 different strands are scarcely known to us and peers, and therefore we don’t know how to properly look for it, on top of us having to properly dissect puzzles for communication. Depression isn’t an everyday thing for most people, it also isn’t crippling for most. Yet, depression is portrayed as a life crippling disorder that can be summed up in one simple word. We as peers want to help, we do. We just don’t know what we should be doing.
So what’s the solution? How do we fix the issue. It’s simple really. Proper communication about the CURRENT mental climate. Many students use jokes, memes, and humor to cope, or even cry for help. Educate us on the signs we can pick up on in humor, there are whole papers dedicated to the study of comedy. Educate us on the types of depression, and how to recognize specific triggers and symptoms. Educate us about ways to take care of ourselves and others, remove the stigma that depressed teeangers are wortheless without help. Educate us on how to save our friends. Educate us on what’s actually happening, educate us about the truth, not the Stigma.