You can feel depression and happiness together. When I dealt with my first severe bout of depression from my early to late teens, the best way to describe it would have been an all-encompassing darkness. It was the stereotypical, everything sucks versions of depression that we so often see in media, fiction and on the Internet. As many of us know, however, that’s not the only form of depression there is. So why are we only presented with this version of it? Why aren't we presented with happiness and depression together?

When it comes to gun violence, mental illness is most of the time an assumed precursor for that violence -- this stigma teaches fear. When mass shootings take place, especially in the U.S., the assailant typically is found to have been suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder – pretty much the staple mental illnesses that popular media knows. When that diagnosis isn’t present, the dig for it begins. News media heavily stigmatizes mental illnesses in this way which lead to fear and the assumption that all mental illnesses will lead to gun violence.

Handling a job with a mental illness can lead to stigma. To say that mental illness can make a job more challenging would be an understatement. Not only are there the challenges of actually completing a day’s (or night’s) work, of deciding how open to be about your mental illness with your boss or supervisor, and trying to figure out how many sick days are acceptable before you’ll get fired, but there are also a number of work-related challenges outside of the workplace. There is mental illness stigma around handling a job.

There’s no denying mental illness stigma is a year-round occurrence, but, sometimes, different points in the year make that stigma feel more poignant (What Is Stigma?). Summer is one of those times because it boasts good weather and longer days, and, typically, people encourage each other to be outside. It’s time to “enjoy the weather” so to speak, but that’s not always so easy. Summertime mental illness stigma can be a problem.

There is a stigma around suicide that says suicide is selfish. Despite all the conversations everyone has started about mental illness, despite any awareness campaigns and openness from people who have struggled, suicide is still a touchy subject (#SU4MH). It’s avoided and it’s looked down upon. Most commonly, suicide is called selfish. How can someone kill themselves and not think about the people left behind? How can someone only think of their own pain? But the idea that suicide is selfish is a product of stigma.

We’re pretty obsessed with time and how its passing affects mental illness. We look at the amount of time we’ve suffered from mental illness and the amount of time we’ve recovered (Another New Year With Mental Illness). We use time to gauge how far we’ve come and how far we have to go. We use it to commend ourselves for how long we’ve been fighting. This obsession with time affects mental illness, but time does not heal mental illness.

It's important to know when to let someone with a mental illness be upset. The phrase, “It’s okay not to be okay” is commonplace among the encouragements from the mental health community; and rightly so since the message is more than true and something that we all need to realize (With Mental Illness, It's Okay To Create Your Own Normal). Unfortunately, the phrase seems to stop there and “okay” means only certain types of okay. What I mean is, while people are happy to say that phrase and feel like they mean it, letting someone with a mental illness be upset isn't considered "okay."

Self-care isn’t a foreign topic when it comes to mental illness. Not only can self-care improve your overall mental wellness, but it’s more often than not a topic of conversation because of how incredibly difficult it can be to take care of ourselves when we’re struggling. The simple act of getting out of bed or having a proper meal can seem like a mountain to climb. One of the more interesting aspects of self-care, I think, is the self-stigma that’s attached to it; the self-stigma that says maybe we should stop focusing on ourselves for once.

I wish to address the good and bad of mental health self-diagnosis after my last blog post Destigmatizing Self-Diagnosis of Mental Illnesses  due to the response I’ve gotten. I knew from the moment I thought of writing that blog I would be faced with a large amount of disagreement, and although I didn’t receive as much as I had expected, it was still present. So here is, more or less, a response to everyone who commented and probably even some of those who didn’t on the good and bad of mental health self-diagnosis.

One thing that has a bad reputation, even within the mental health community, is self-diagnosis but I think that self-diagnosis of mental illness should be destigmatized. I have seen posts that suggest people who self-diagnose are just attention-seekers who give a bad name to mental health and those who suffer with mental illnesses. Especially in the day and age when Googling symptoms can sometimes lead to really extravagant diagnoses, it seems perhaps better to just avoid self-diagnosis at all but destigmatizing self-diagnosis of mental illness may be a good thing.