I’ve been seeing a therapist since August 2017. When I mention this to people, I usually see their eyes widen for a second before they catch themselves and try to act like they don’t have a million questions. Are you alright? What happened to you? Are you dealing with some sort of giant burden from years and years of childhood trauma?

The truth of the matter is, I’m no different from the next teenager. I try hard in school, I go out on the weekends with my friends and I check Twitter whenever I possibly can. I just also happen to take 15 milligrams of an antidepressant every evening and meet with my cool therapist/friend for an hour every other week. The only major difference here is that sometimes my brain needs a little more help to stay in a healthy place.

I started to realize my brain worked in an abnormal way around eighth grade. More and more often, I would find myself getting incredibly anxious about things that didn’t seem to matter to other people. That would send me to a dark, lonely place where I’d have to live in until potentially days later when I would start feeling fine again.

I knew I didn’t have to be living like this, but I was terrified to speak up about the issues I’d been dealing with. I had seen all of the typical guidance programing in school and the media I saw told me it was okay to seek help when you need it, but I just didn’t feel like that was the world I was living in. I noted that this “era of acceptance” we’d been told we were living in contained far too many empty promises.

Despite there being plenty of effective, accessible treatments, there are often huge gaps of time between the first appearance of mental illness symptoms and when people actually get help. A study by the National Alliance on Mental Illness showed that approximately half of all chronic mental illness begins by the time a person turns 14, and that number rises to ¾ by age 24. This means that although many young people may struggle with mental health issues during their young adulthood, far too many of those people choose to go untreated.

The stigma around the topic of mental health is still alive and well. According to a Duke University study, more than half of teenagers with psychiatric disorders receive no sort of treatment at all. These teens are so afraid of judgment from the world around them, or worse, that no one would take their concerns seriously, that they’d rather just suffer in silence.