'I want to be able to talk about my mental health with my friends sans memes.' brookealamantia writes
Photo-Illustration: by the Cut; Photo Getty Images All of my friends are anxious — some have general anxiety, some are anxious and depressed, some have social anxiety — but you wouldn’t know it even if you asked. Instead, we talk about it while decidedly not talking about it, most often in texts and through the internet.
I first started seeing a therapist after feeling moments of sheer panic sometime in my first semester of college. I didn’t know what was normal and what wasn’t. Later, when I transferred schools, I gave up on therapy until something felt off again and I was having panic attacks every time something went wrong. Last year, I began experiencing intense stomach pains that my doctors believed were stress related, and they started me on medication for anxiety and ADHD.
Gen Z is known for being open about mental illness. It’s also the most anxious and most depressed generation ever. A report released by the American Psychological Association shared that Gen-Zers are more likely to seek out help from mental-health professionals than people belonging to older generations because, in part, the stigma around therapy has lessened.
Anxiety can take you to places of irrationality, projecting our worries onto those we’re sharing them with or not allowing us to think outside ourselves. “For example,” says Miriam Kirmayer, a clinical psychologist and friendship researcher, “we might be judging ourselves and worrying whether our anxiety is ‘a big deal.’ When we ourselves are in that headspace, then we assume that other people are judging us. Those types of assumptions play a tremendous role because that affects our behavior.