This is the speech that Heather Armstrong delivered at the ribbon cutting ceremony for a new unit at the University Neuropsychiatric Institute. It is reprinted from her website with her kind permission.
If you suffer from or know anyone that suffers from depression you need to read this and pass it along. In fact even if depression hasn’t touched your world, please read and share it anyway because one day it might….
“I remember the first conversation I had with someone about my mental health. I was seventeen, too young at the time to understand that it was actually my mental health and not some character flaw that made it impossible to tackle the simplest of problems. My life was filled with the normal stress that a senior in high school endures — papers, tests, acne, ill-fitting bras — but my reaction to that stress was to panic. Everything felt completely out of control, so I stopped eating to prove that I could control something.
That’ll show me!
Eventually that self-inflicted starvation turned into binging and purging, and I was smart enough to know that I didn’t want to continue living that way. Smart enough, and well, when you throw up as much as I was throwing up the blood vessels around your eyes start to explode. Good times!
I knew I couldn’t make myself stop. I knew I’d need major help. My mother had started to notice my change in behavior, because she is a mother, and mothers can be four states away from you and notice a change in your mood. I knew I could turn to her. It was my father we would have to convince.