Fact: 1 in 5 children between the ages 13-18 have a mental health condition, published in a report by the National Association on Mental Illness. My name is Karen Manley, and on this day last year I was admitted to a mental hospital.

Now, it’s possible that some of you may have read my article last December, just two months after being released. This was an attempt to overpower my mind, a cure-all for my disorder (at the time, depression, now acute bipolar.) The article worked for me in a similar way to the hospital; it got me through the crisis, a temporary fix.

I intend to make this article much more permanent, more powerful. I want others to learn from my mistakes and be inspired to help themselves get better. I am going to make a difference in the stigma of mental illness.

It is irrefutable that individuals with mental illness are stigmatized. According to the Child Mind Institute, 17.1 million children under the age of 18 in the United States alone suffer from some sort of psychiatric illness. And yet, as adults, only 44% of people have received help. There’s lots of reasons that this could be – from being worried about how one will be treated, to being scared that there isn’t a fix, to just not knowing where to start. Feeling stigmatized has made me completely shut down at times. I believe it comes from the perception of those struggling with mental illness. It’s hard to unlearn that a friend is deeply unhappy, and it becomes difficult to view them in the same light.

Emotionally, I felt as though I had something to hide. I felt shame. I wanted to protect the people around me and help their lives remain happy.  At some point, society had taught me there was something wrong with me if I felt this way. I was embarrassed and because of this I was afraid to ask for help. It took me four years to tell my own parents.

Something people don’t understand is that nothing happened to me. I didn’t experience some horrific, scarring event. I wasn’t abused or raped. I had a good life. But at some point, around twelve or thirteen, I started realizing that I spent a lot of my life sad.

In an article early last year, prior to being admitted to the hospital, I talked to students I knew who struggled with mental illness. The only way I was able to get interviews was through anonymity of my subjects.

This is due to the fact that people who do not suffer with mental illness are rarely able to grasp the idea and emotions their loved ones are feeling. Nights were the worst. I would sit in my room, sobbing, scratching my skin raw, and thinking way too much. I wondered what it’d be like if I didn’t exist. I knew it would hurt my family and friends, but that didn’t make it any harder to disappear.  One night, I came to my mom in tears and told her, to her face, that I wished I was dead–my saying that damaged her deeply, and knowing that will never stop hurting.

These nights of anguish in combination with my general attitude about life are what put me in the hospital.

While there, I met an incredible group of people. We had all been through some really hard times, and yet each of them was really fun and quirky and normal. They completely shattered my mental image of a psychiatric ward. They are what gave me the confidence to write to such a large population about my disorder, and I couldn’t be more grateful.

For me, it took a long time to be at peace with my mood disorder. I was just frustrated that it wasn’t going away tired of everything being hard for me, even things that were supposed to be fun. There are still times like that. I have days where I am hypomanic; mean, shaking, loud, and everything feels too fast. Then other days, I am so depressed I can’t breathe or move or live.

Being forced to get help and choosing to are very different experiences. Just being in the hospital or going to therapy doesn’t mean you’re going to get better. You can’t just go through the motions; you have to want it. The moment I began to want to live again was upon receiving a letter from my little brother, my second night in the hospital.  “I hope you’re having enough fun to stay alive,” it said. There’s nothing that can prepare you for a sentence like that. It tore the air from my entire being. Those nine words changed my life.

After that moment, I vowed to get better. I tried all sorts of coping mechanisms: everything from deep breaths to writing narratives for the school paper. But above all, I made my mental health my first priority. I learned that things like school need to take a back seat if they are stressing you out and your life is on the line. I ended up dropping math so that I could have a free period for therapy. I let all of my teachers know what was going on and kept my parents in the loop of my day-to-day mood fluctuation. It felt so good to finally be getting help. When people know, they care.

That’s not to say of course, that avoiding your problems or expecting people to treat you differently is the way live forever. Rather, after it gets you through the hardest moments, being reminded of it all the time is smothering, and can make it worse again.

Effective long-term solutions include therapy, medication, and self regulation. While the first two are self explanatory, the later is not as straightforward. People were constantly telling me to exercise and think happy thoughts. These are the sorts of things that came to mind when I heard the words “self-regulate.” I thought it was a joke. I have a chemical imbalance in my brain, not a pessimistic personality. I couldn’t just think myself out of depression. However, upon reading the note from my brother, I understood. It isn’t a solution but rather, it is a mindset. For as long as I blamed every shift in emotion on my illness, I was only giving it power.

I take a total of three medicines directly to aid with my disorder, so I’m never going to be one to advertise “have a positive attitude and you’ll be cured,” but I really do believe that my mindset played the biggest role in my recovery. Most days were hard, but I took each day individually and looked to each tomorrow as a new opportunity and a fresh start.  

I am now living a happy life. It never fully goes away. There are always bad days. But I promise, you are not at your end. Life gets better. I believe in you. If you’re unsafe, contact the crisis text line here. For more information and to learn how to help your loved ones, click here.