2024 Mental Health Essay Contest Awardee: Bronze
Speaking Up for Change
Maya, Maryland
The people are good. I repeated that simple sentence to myself over and over for days, trying to get myself to believe it. I needed to believe that the people were trying, and that they cared, because the system was failing. At that moment in time, I sat in the Emergency Room at my local hospital for a week, awaiting my first psychiatric placement. For seven days, I sat in an empty room with just my thoughts, in the moments I most needed support.
At first, I was angry at the doctors. Every “no”, every “we don’t know when”, every “we’ll let you know when we find out more” felt like a stone added to my already sinking ship. While at first I had felt okay about my pending hospital transfer, by the end I wanted nothing more than to go home. I didn’t care that the next hospital could possibly help. Nothing was happening at this hospital, no therapy, no doctors, so why couldn’t I go home to my own bed to wait? Couldn’t they do anything at all?
Obviously, I do know why going home wasn’t possible, and I use this only as an example to illustrate something that I found unbelievably frustrating, something that, in my opinion, requires immediate attention, and hopefully change, which is why I aim to write so candidly about this time of my life.
This first hospitalization was not the first time I had experienced mental health challenges, nor would it be the last. Yet each time was just as great a struggle, dragging myself up and out of bed every day until I couldn’t any longer, building towers piled high with lies until my life seemed to come crashing down because I didn’t feel able to deal with the stigma surrounding depression. I couldn’t answer the questions of “why do you feel this way?” or “how can we help you?” I avoided talking about my mental health because it made me uncomfortable, and seemed to make the people around me uncomfortable as well. Maybe if people talked about mental health more, I would have felt safe being honest sooner. Maybe it would have prevented that hospitalization and the subsequent ones because, still, stigma stopped me from speaking my truth.
Unfortunately, my experience is not unique, and is in fact quite common. The mental health system is in disarray, and desperately needs to be changed. With waiting times years long to see a specialist proactively, the hospital system now acting on crisis is severely overloaded. There isn’t enough funding, not enough doctors or therapists, especially not enough social workers, and not enough safe places for individuals, particularly teens, to go when they need it. This is a problem that is only getting worse. Change is going to take time, but we don’t have that time.
The reason for that is simply the scope of the issue. It is not a problem with the people, it is a problem with the system. I say that because the entire way our mental health system is set up is not effective or sufficient. Many changes that are made do not help the problem, but rather, exacerbate it, because there are inherent flaws that are out of the control of well-intentioned individuals.
As I see it, there are seldom individuals who understand the problem that have the power to change it, and there are even fewer people who have the ability to create change that truly understand the problem. To add to the issue, social tension between the boundaries of physical and mental health means that oftentimes the arguments surrounding change are moved away from the actual problem at hand, and instead to what people of authority feel afraid of.
For years, I felt isolated in a bubble of hurt and fear. My thoughts were enemies attacking me at every moment, and I lived terrified that someone would find out that I wasn’t who I appeared to be. I hid at school, knowing I needed help but unable to actually express what I was feeling and what I needed.
During my week-long emergency room stay, writing was my saving grace. “It’s the system that’s stuck in the past, spending on things that are important and still neglecting other things also of great importance,” I wrote. “ It’s digging itself into a hole, a giant crater, pulling us down with it. It’s saying ‘you need help, but we can’t give it’ and it’s not knowing who can slow the fall. The system is vast, full of flaws, leaving doctors scrambling by saying ‘you all need help, but who needs it the most’ as if others having it worse means you should be fine.”
To the nurses and doctors out there, I know you are trying your best. I know you are the ones that truly see us and the problems we face. I see that you are overworked and stressed under the burden of a catastrophe of a system. I see you, and you see me, and we still need change. We need to talk about mental health and the stigma surrounding it, because if changing an enormous system takes time, the least we can do is to acknowledge the problem that exists, which is that the stigma surrounding mental health is a huge part of the problem.
NIH recognizes these talented essay winners for their thoughtfulness and creativity in addressing youth mental health. These essays are written in the students' own words, are unedited, and do not necessarily represent the views of NIH, HHS, or the federal government.
Page published May 31, 2024
