Before I moved back to East Lansing to live by myself this semester, I was convinced that nothing would go wrong. By this time in my life, I felt pretty confident that I knew the signs of my recurring big depressive episodes — the physical exhaustion, the struggle to communicate with others, the lack of motivation to do anything, really. I had been in and out of therapy and on and off medication. I had learned and tried all of the coping mechanisms and strategies. If I started getting depressed, I would simply recognize it and shut it down. I would wake up every morning with a routine and I would meal plan and pick out my outfits the night before and read a chapter of a book every day, and I convinced myself that this would happen.
Evidently, this did not happen. Between struggling with working on my online classes and the lack of face-to-face interaction in general, I could feel myself starting to slip. I recognized that I was slipping and knew I was spiraling into something worse, but nothing changed. Empty cans and used dishes began piling up on my desk. I started forgetting when I had showered. My room was littered with unwashed clothes and unread mail. I forgot to pay my electricity bill. Trivial things would send me into an emotional meltdown. Even brushing my teeth took massive amounts of energy that I didn’t have.
When someone finally encouraged me to go back to my therapist, I had accepted that I had fallen into another hole. But this time, there didn’t seem to be an easy solution. My parents’ insurance company had not paid for my therapy appointments in the past, and I could no longer rely on waived costs because of the pandemic, which had expired in June. Since my weekly appointments were regularly over $150, I needed to find a way to pay for it on my own. My unemployment checks had been processing for over 4 months, and I was scrambling to find a job that would be accommodating for school while trying to not burn out. The hopelessness of the situation continued to worsen my mental health to the point where it became physically harmful to me.
And as I was taking all of this in, I began to wonder about how this situation would have gone differently if there were other obstacles blocking my way. If I hadn’t had food and housing security, if I had been physically disabled, if I had been a single parent, if I had been Black, if I hadn’t had access to an education. I thought about how so many factors can come against you in a working environment specifically because of how I think there is a common misconception in mental health discussions that therapy is easily accessible and an option for everyone, and that’s simply not true.
So much of our capitalist society is built upon who is able to have access to resources and wealth over others, and as evident by my struggle with my private insurance company to aid me with my therapy bills and the difficulty of dealing with the unemployment office and job searching, access to mental healthcare is a privilege in its own right. If access to mental healthcare as deemed by other people requires an unaffordable amount of cash, how can we expect people who face far more disparities in a capitalist, bigoted society than I do to have access to it when they’re arguably the people who need it the most?
There’s a lot of push online to normalize the reality of mental health issues and their effects on the people who have them, and while I agree that we need to, we also need to address how other aspects of our society play into our mental health and how those same aspects can prevent access to the care that we need. For as much as certain people like to bring it up that it’s an issue, we keep finding ourselves running in circles on how to talk about and treat mental health, and it’s because we won’t address the systemic issues at play with it. People like to say that they “never saw it coming” whenever someone struggles with mental health, but the reality of the situation is that it really is pretty obvious to see it coming sometimes. Food and housing security are mental health issues. Racism and xenophobia are mental health issues. Access to education is a mental health issue. Childcare is a mental health issue. Accessible healthcare is a mental health issue. Addressing the systemic issues in our society is the only proper way that we can address mental health.
We’ve learned where our mental health problems start. Now we need to work to make sure we can learn how to heal.