One in four people will be affected by a mental disorder in their lifetime. Someone you know, or maybe yourself, is affected by a mental disorder.

Don’t deny it, you cringed by the italic world mental.

You’ve been trained to correlate the world mental with something negative: crazy, psychotic, retarded, etc.

The stigmas need to stop. Chemical imbalances, neuron misfires, neurotransmitter imbalances and so many other things cause disorders in the brain, not someone being crazy or being a baby. Abnormal behavior and different emotions are side effects of mental health disorders.

When someone has arthritis, joint pain is a side effect. When someone has cancer and receives radiation, hair loss is a side effect. When someone has a stroke, paralysis can be a side effect.

There are treatments to physical conditions and diseases, just as there are to mental ones. I think people forget that a diagnosis is not a death sentence. More than likely, some of the people you hold closely in your life deal with mental disorders. But they deal with them in the closet. How often do you have open conversations with people about how their depression or anxiety is treating them, but so often you hear people ask cancer patients how they are doing? Why is there such a shame associated with mental health?

Mental health is an issue. It is prevalent, it is growing and it is serious. The stigma adds on. People believe what they hear. If you are put down for having an anxiety attack, you are reacting the way you brain is telling you to, not because you are a whiner. If you have a mood swing, you are not bipolar. If your depression doesn’t let you get out of bed, we know you can’t just “be tough”. You are human; your flaws in your brain are complex.

People are more than their down falls, more than the cancer they may have, more than the physical things they deal with and more than the mental things they deal with. The labels need to stop. Name-calling is mean, especially when adults do it. If people treated mental illness with the same level of compassion and regard as someone who had surgery or just started radiation – the world of mental health would not be as scary.

Think of someone in your life who has a mental health disorder. Give them a hug and praise them for facing the world everyday just like the rest of the world. Think before you call someone crazy, or use words like the r-word. People are people, they are more than labels. Don’t forget that.