I’ve never been good at asking for help. Some might call it independence or self-reliance, but mostly I think I’m just too stubborn to let anyone know I can’t handle everything on my own.
It’s the first annual Mental Health Awareness Month at Duke and groups across campus are teaming together to help fight stigma surrounding mental health.
Many of us will respond to the Facebook event but most will nevertheless think to ourselves, “I don’t have a mental illness”, and continue on with our lives as if this month and its meaning is no different than any other.
It’s a common tendency, I think, to keep yourself on the other line of mental illness. “I haven’t been diagnosed, I haven’t gone to the doctor, I don’t take pills—I must be healthy”.
Or at least, that’s what I thought to myself when I had an overwhelmingly rough semester a couple years back. I wasn’t healthy, per se – my diet, my sleep patterns, my mood swings all pointed to something being wrong. But I knew all too well, from friends and family, what it meant to be depressed, and knew that couldn’t possibly be me. Mental illness to me was doctors and pills and diagnoses. But this, this was temporary and I would recover. So when friends suggested I go to CAPS I politely declined and went about my business. I dealt entirely on my own.
My struggles were, as I knew at the time, temporary. But that didn’t make them any less difficult. And dealing with them on my own, and attempting to go about my life pretending I was okay when I most certainly wasn’t, didn’t make things any easier. In fact, I’d argue they made them much, much worse.
To me there was a line, between them and me – them being the ones like friends and family and those close to me who suffer every day from diagnosed mental illnesses, and me being the one on the other side, who couldn’t possibly be dealing with anything in need of help and further attention.
One of the goals of mental health awareness month is to help students realize that the line isn’t as definitive as we may believe. In fact, there is a broad spectrum of mental health issues and all of us fall somewhere on that scale at some point as we go through periods of waves of sadness, depression, fear, anxiety and stress.
After all, this is a tough environment.
We go to a school run on talent, ambition, coffee and 20 hours locked up in Perkins to get work done. A thousand activities, extracurriculars, interviews for internships and jobs and summers saving the world. Many of us—myself included—strive for perfection, and do not let our imperfections show to anyone but ourselves. Our answer to “how are you?” is always “fine” with a smile, even when we’re so far from that. We are too driven, too smart, too stubborn to say when we need help. When we’ve let ourselves bite off more than we can chew.
If there is any one single piece of advice I can provide as a senior, looking nostalgically back on my time at Duke, it is to not be afraid to ask for help. It doesn’t make you less strong, smart, driven or determined. It only makes us human, more human, and perhaps even more wise and strong for admitting that we can’t handle everything on our own.
And we don’t need to. Between CAPS, Peer for You, You’re Not Alone, the Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity and countless other organizations and resources on campus—not to mention staff, professors and our own peers—Duke has countless support systems and countless people offering helping hands for the moments when our mental health isn’t at its best.
Everyone needs that helping hand at some point. I hope Mental Health Awareness Month will help encourage us to learn to accept it.
Julia Janco is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Thursday.
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