If only mental illness were that simple. If only it were like a faucet we could turn on and off merely by coming back to reality and reminding ourselves, when we’re in the throes of it, how weak and cowardly we are compared to that woman who has to walk 12 miles to get water.

Mental illness is a true illness, brought on by chemical imbalances in our brains. You can blame our environments, our parents, our peers, our trauma, our lack of trauma, our necessity to whine over every little thing, but the truth is none of those things. Our brains are out of whack, for whatever reason.

There were billboards on the highways for a while saying, “You wouldn’t tell a cancer patient to ‘just get over it’. Depression hurts.” Most of us got it.

Mental illness doesn’t come about because now that we’re no longer out in the wilderness fighting for survival our minds have become lazy and we have nothing better to do than contemplate our lousy, filthy, good for nothing navels. It’s as real as cancer.

Even mental health experts still don’t have a good handle on what makes some of us succumb to mental illness while others can struggle through anything and not be afflicted. Most mental health experts aren’t just there to make a buck. They genuinely want to kill the curse and find a cure.

We all do. Too much damage has been done because we don’t treat mental health in the same way we treat physical health. We wouldn’t expect anyone with a physical illness to quit whining and just fix themselves. Mental illness is a physical illness. We’re desperately searching for answers to why the brain fails us and puts us in harms way.

This sort of thing doesn’t help.