Coming Out to My Kids Or There's Another D to Talk About and I Don't Mean Drugs

A few blogs ago I wrote about how I was adding love to my four Golden Rules. So now it looks more like five Golden Rules:

1. No drinking/drugs
2. No smoking
3. Always respect women
4. Always practice safe sex
5. Love everyone but the assholes – we don’t discriminate

Friends, there is another very important conversation we need to have with our kids and I’m guessing it’s one you don’t want to have because I struggle with it too. Nancy Reagan helped us with Just Say No, the NFL (tries to) promote respecting women, the Dalai Lama teaches us not to discriminate, and I’ll coach you with the sex talk. But shhh….notice the silence? We don’t want to talk about depression and mental illness. I watch the news and see babies committing suicide. It literally breaks my heart and I’m sure you feel the same way. Yet I have not really had a conversation with my kids about mental health and depression.

I have no excuses. I used to teach about depression when I worked in wellness. I work on a college campus and mental illness issues have risen at a rate college campuses cannot keep up with. I have had family and friends impacted with mental illness. I know there should not be a stigma surrounding depression and other mental illnesses. And I am silent.

Why is it so easy to talk about the dangers of drinking, smoking and drugs? I’ll admit, cracking the conversation on safe sex was difficult but now it’s easy. Heck, just the other month, I answered the question “What is a dildo?” barely batting an eye. I’m still working on talking about race and discrimination. Depression though? Shhh. We don’t talk about that. But we need to start. The time is now. We cannot waste another minute.

Have you lost someone – friend or family - to suicide? I have. As I watch the news, we are seeing children killing themselves for various reasons – bullying, drugs, mental health problems. It is devastating. It is frightening. We need to have open conversations about mental health with our kids. Just like the sex talks, I want my kids to feel comfortable telling me if they feel depressed or if they have questions about it or if their friends say something troubling. I want an open door policy and the only way to get there is if I open that door.

We are so used to knowing everything about our kids physically. How much they weigh, how tall they are, what they had for breakfast, how tired they are at the end of the day, if their tummies hurt after certain foods. Often we stop at the physical though and don’t want to ask about the tough mental stuff. It’s scary. Suicide completely frightens me because it is so final. There is no treatment after a suicide. Game over. No more tokens. If I found out that my child was struggling with depression or another mental health illness and I didn’t know and didn’t get him help, I’d be wrecked.

Are all suicides preventable? No. It’s no one’s fault. Depression and mental illness are diseases, sometimes fatal ones. We just want to pretend they aren’t. If you had cancer, we’d crowdfund you, throw you a benefit breakfast, start a meal train. We’d rally! You are a fighter! If you find out someone in your family is battling mental illness, you are going to take that journey with a lot less people by your side. There will not be a pancake breakfast. There will not be t-shirts made in your honor, no viral ice bucket challenges. Yet mental illness can be expensive to treat, insidious and long-term, and emotionally and physically draining on the caretakers, just like cancer, ALS and other illnesses that affect families. We aren’t going to mention it in the Christmas cards though. You aren’t going to hear those remission stories. In fact, chances are that no one is going to talk about it at all. That’s not okay.

How did we get here? Mental illness is scary. It causes symptoms we can’t necessarily see, like the way we can see tumors on an MRI. But if you talk to someone with mental illness, they will tell you it feels like one, the way it can take over your mind. Our society perpetuates this by providing inadequate mental health resources and benefits for mental illness. Access to care can be difficult for some, only further hindered by a population that is hard to treat. For example, it’s not uncommon for someone with bipolar disorder to go off their meds because they are feeling better – except it was the medicine that made them feel better in the first place. Back to the cycle. There are so many different depression medicines available now and it can take time and trial and error to find the right combination and dose, which can seem hopeless to group that already feels hopeless. Supporting our friends and family with mental illness can feel daunting and solitary.

So many in our homeless population suffer from mental illness and we see them in an untreated state, which can be disconcerting. If we are disturbed seeing their behavior from the outside, can you imagine the inner turmoil they are in? Or have you watched someone starve themselves intentionally? They "want" to do it. Now find them help. Even the best insurance plans will balk at providing adequate care.

It’s time to cut the stigma of mental illness. At our house we are going to start talking about mental illness. No one is immune. Personally I have dealt with an eating disorder since I was 16. I have been battling it for 24 years. I have been going to therapy for more than four years. I have not told my children. Therapy appointments are simply called doctor’s appointments in our house – not because that’s what they are but because I don’t want to tell my kids I go to therapy. Heck, I hardly tell anyone. I may say I have some “eating issues” – we all take dieting to the extreme sometimes don’t we? Just like we all have “bad days” or feel “blue.” I downplay it. But in reality, I have not had one day in 24 years where I did not have a conversation with my eating disorder. Some days are better than others. Some years are better than others. I’m starting to accept that I’m going to be dealing with this, possibly for the rest of my life. It impacts me every day. It is part of my history, it is a part of my present. It has shaped who I am. But shhh. We don’t talk about it.

It’s going to take some courage but I’m going to come out to my kids about this. If Mom can have mental health problems, anyone can. I happen to think that while I’m not perfect, I’m not doing a half-bad job most days (depends on which kid you are talking to.) My eating disorder impacts me but does not define me. There is no shame in being a survivor. It means you are a warrior. Trust me, I go to war with my eating disorder every day – I am a fighter, just like everyone else with internal battles. It’s time to stop hiding our mental health issues. If we talk about them, our kids will know that they can talk about them too. If one of my sons is feeling depressed or is hearing voices or having hallucinations, I want to be the first person to know. I want them to feel as comfortable telling me if they are depressed as they do telling me about a hang nail. And we will treat it with the seriousness and dignity it deserves. We will not hide in the shadows. Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of – our attitude towards it is.