It’s hard talking about mental illness in a country where differently abled children were still seen as a punishment from God two or three generations ago. You see, when you cut your finger and wince or scream as the blood gushes, you can actually lift up that finger as proof that you’re in pain. But when you have no physical proof that your mind is on fire, people feel inclined to play it down unless they’ve been through something similar themselves. “Is there no way out of my mind?” the brilliant poetess Sylvia Plath once wrote. We all know how that story ended.

I remember a conversation I had with an older woman once. She told me that mental illness was for people who were idle and that real suffering was not knowing where you were going to get food from during World War II. Why should we, a generation who have been given everything on a silver platter be feeling anything but euphoric? And there it was: the shame.

It’s hard talking about mental illness

‘The shame’ follows people like a heavy shadow wherever they go. I need to perform because everyone else does. I need to cook dinner even though I can barely stand from exhaustion because I have two jobs and a family to raise. I need to be thinner, prettier, smilier, take more instagrammable photos. I need that bag because everyone else has it. We may not be food deprived but we definitely appear to be less satisfied with our lives than our parents were. How can mental illness not creep in when we have the entire world to contend with?

So, what can be done? Well, you can start by not telling people just to get over themselves if they come to you with something they are finding hard to carry. Regardless of whether or not you think it’s a big deal, if it matters to someone else, then you should try to at least understand why. Show love by encouraging them to visit a psychologist who can help them make more sense out of any jumbled thoughts they might be having which are making things hard for them.

Most people just want to be heard and feel like they are being seen. How sad is it that in the age where we are most electronically connected with others, we are more isolated than we have ever been before with 25 per cent of millennials in the US saying that they don’t have a single friend?

Instead of seeing mental illness as something that only the weak suffer, we should keep in mind that many people who are suffering from this ailment go to work every day (taking sick days to just reset and recalibrate your mind when you’re feeling overwhelmed is still considered to be an alien concept), care for their families and friends and try to act normal while fighting the hardest fight of them all: the one with themselves. If that’s not strength, I don’t know what is.