One conversation that changed my life happened during my senior year of high school, with a teacher of mine.

I said to her, in tears, “I just really hope that I can get myself completely better by the time I go to college. I’ve been trying for so long,” to which she responded, “But, what if it’s not something that can just be fixed with hard work? Maybe it’s not like that. And in that case, it’ll follow you wherever you go. Even if you up and leave for college.”

This conversation got me thinking so much that that night when I went home I talked to my father about going to a doctor to talk about medication.

Whenever people ask me for help for their anxiety/depression, I always ask them if they are on medicine. Such a great number of them respond with things like, “Oh, I just don’t want to be controlled by it,” “I want to be able to be me without medicine,” or “I don’t want to be putting chemicals into my body.”

The thing is, though, medication for mental illness is only putting the hormones into your brain/body that everyone else’s already has and your brain just unfortunately fails to make. It’s not random chemicals that turn you into some kind of a robot. It allows you to live and feel the same way that the people around you are living. Would you withhold from medicine for a physical illness?

These medications are designed to return you to your former personality, not create a different one. That is the whole point of them. They aren’t meant to change you, just simply help you back to who you normally are. They do not interfere with your sense of identity or feelings.

They aren’t “happy pills,” either. Taking them does not mean you walk around all day with a huge smile on your face. People on medicine feel happy, sad, angry, disappointed, etc. They feel all of the emotions of life. The myth of “happy pills” has been disproven.

One thing my dad was huge on when I started taking my medicine was that he didn’t want me to have to “depend” on them for the rest of my life. There is no sense of dependency on these medications. Many times, a doctor will put you on a certain medicine, have you try it for a certain period of time and then, when you feel you can go off of them, you will try going off of them.

I truly understand the skeptical feelings about these medications. But if it means anything at all, nothing else worked for me and this did. I tried for so long to beat my mind without medicine. But sometimes, you just can’t. I spent so many years with an indescribable amount of hurt in me every day over nothing, and I am finally living now. I spent almost all of my teenage years looking past this option, only to realize this was the best one all along.

Please do not push this option out of your mind because of any myths you have heard, or because you feel there is always a way to be better without it. I know sometimes there is, but then again sometimes there is not. Keep an open mind, for the sake of a better life.