In my senior year Creative Writing class, I was asked to write a letter to someone I would have liked to meet if they were still alive. It was to be read as a question and asked as if we had met them in a common place, ex. running into Abraham Lincoln in the milk aisle of your neighborhood grocery store. And I thought for days who I would have loved to meet; perhaps Edgar Allen Poe, or Walt Disney, or Jacques Cousteau. Then, as time allowed, I thought of Ned Vizzini.

If you have read any of his work, you already know how relatable the characters and their stories can be. Having lived through it, he moved on to do great things in teaching students about using writing as medicine for mental health. What I loved most about his writing was how brutally honest he was with what his experience was like. This included the misunderstandings from friends and family, and the first impressions people could get from you if they hear the words "mental illness." He describes healing from one of these illnesses not as a single climb to happiness, but instead as taking each day moment to moment. Though sadly, in the end, it just was not quite enough as he too succumbed to his illness. With his work and legacy, Vizzini has helped a lot of young adults find themselves again. I mean, he saved me. So, my poem addresses the single question: Why? Mental health and illness are topics that are catching fire on social media and other news outlets. With this exposure, a stereotype has been created surrounding the people suffering from these diseases. Those with mood and behavior disorders are often pushed to the side and are labeled as sensitive, attention seeking, crazy, and weak.

And we are none of those things.

With the youth in particular, mental illness awareness has made the greatest impact through the means of pop culture. One example is the book "It's Kind of a Funny Story" written by Vizzini . The story describes the coming of age journey a young boy takes when he checks himself into a psychiatric hospital. The experience is pulled loosely from Vizzini's own experience where he spent five days in one himself. According to the National Alliance for the Mental Ill (NAMI), one in five children between the ages of 13-18 will suffer from a serious mental disease. Since the 1980s the number of young adults diagnosed with severe depression has doubled and continues to rise. In fact, nearly 80,000 children and adults in the US suffer from some form of depression. Whether this increase is due to less stigmatization around the topic leading people to seek help, or more accurate diagnosis by years of research, this epidemic is not something we as a society should take lightly. Nor is this a topic to laugh about.

A little background to the poem, the character in "It's Kind of a Funny Story" contemplates on the edge of a bridge before he runs straight for the psych hospital for help. Let me know what you think!

Your Prolonged Exposure, Ned Vizzini

I see you along the bridge, Vizzini,

Tapping your feet across the rail.

Scattered around are

Broken tar-stained coke bottles

Containing snuffed out cigarette butts.

I watch through the cut up corners of this prison ward they call healthcare

with sheets that look too thin to be comforting

Pills too colorful to feign fun

and people too easily categorized into boxes of

“on a scale of one to ten how bad is your pain”.

It hides under the skin

One

Too many times, it creeps out through every orifice.

Three, Four.

Blankets too heavy to lift in the morning.

Five.

Uncertainties that comes with every evening.

Six. Seven.

Waves of relapse that pull you both closer and further from the shore.

Why did you decide to go back?

Eight.

Was it the shadows of towering fathers

Who told their sons to man up?

Or list of doctors sneering and saying

You might just have a drinking problem.

Nine.

Or was it the prolonged exposure to the sick place within you?

You spoke to your peers,

the people I take care of

From the skeletons who peek out from their rooms in the hospital wing

To the ones whose laugh comes from a space

lost deep within them.

You helped them find themselves.

And took them away from the edge.

Ten.

I understood it was never really a job for either of us.

I’ll meet you along the bridge, Vizzini.

I’ll just have a different reason for being there.

And please remember, do not be afraid to seek help, build support, and reach out.