Growing up in the 1980s, depression was a dirty word. It was all that was unsaid in our society. The silence that surrounded my father’s mental illness still remains within me, even though it is more than thirty years ago. Back then, a breakdown meant failure. It was a dark time for all. It signified something severely wrong with the individual, as opposed to the society that he or she had found themselves in.
To some degree, I inherited this system, this fractured way of framing one’s life. I built it into myself, often unconsciously, goading myself to be better and better, to never accept defeat. The anxiety, the depression, the panic attacks predated ...