Today is World Mental Health Day. According to the World Health Organization, the objective of the day is, “raising awareness of mental health issues around the world and mobilizing efforts in support of mental health.”
Up until recent years, there has been a stigma surrounding mental health. And although we’re still not where we need to be as a society with regard to our views on it, we’ve certainly come a long way. The National Alliance on Mental Health states that 1 in 5 U.S. adults experience mental illness each year.
What this means is mental illness is closer than you think. If you, yourself, aren’t battling a mental illness, you surely know someone (or multiple people) who is. They’re your coworkers; they’re your friends; they’re your baristas and your CEOs. And in our case, they’re our own Content Director, Court Bishop.
According to our Head Media Mechanic, Karen Helsinger, Court is “the master behind our best creative work.” Court also suffers from clinical depression and generalized anxiety disorder. This has been found with Creatives time and time again. From writers to standup comics to fine artists, mental illness seems to go hand-in-hand with creativity.
In an effort to make mental illness and the treatment of it more of a mainstream topic, we’d like to share Court’s new blog on the subject. Discover HAPPY SO HARD. It’s a blog about fighting to overcome mental illness in the pursuit of happiness. It’s an honest look at how mental illness impacts everyday life. Here’s an excerpt from the intro:
My goal with this project is to get out of my head and get
into your caruncomfortable. To stop being afraid. My Ego would like for me to mention that I’m not generally a “scared” person—I enjoy pushing the limits of my body and mind—but I do struggle with the aforementioned depression and anxiety (along with 18.1% of the U.S. population). I’m also the proud owner of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. OCPD is characterized, among other things, by extreme perfectionism. People with OCPD are “hardworking, but their obsession with perfection can make them inefficient.” So that’s neat!This translates to real life in the form of inaction. If I don’t think I’ll be great at something immediately, or if a situation is set up in such a way that makes me feel like I lack the majority of the control, I’d rather not do it than attempt and “fail.” It’s super dumb. It’s self-sabotage. And I’m f*cking over it.
— Court Bishop, PREFACE — Why Is Being Happy so Hard?
We wouldn’t tell someone with a broken leg to “shake it off.” We wouldn’t expect someone with nearsightedness to see better if they just “wanted it bad enough.” Mental illness is illness. Plain and simple. So on this World Mental Health Day, check in on your friends and family—you never know what someone is going through beneath the smile, success or creativity.
Follow Court’s blog, HAPPY SO HARD, on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
