Should You Share Your Mental Health Story?

Ending the stigma around mental health is becoming a popular fight. People everywhere are using the opportunity ti share their mental health stories, and organizations are using personal stories to raise awareness about mental health.

I am an anti-stigma advocate and writer, and I am always so inspired and honored when I get to hear or read a personal story about mental health. It is so brace and so special. But it can be a very hard thing to do. I know it took me years to feel comfortable sharing my own. Creating this blog and sharing my struggles with mental health has been both challenging and empowering.

For some, a mental health story represents a day in the life of a person who lives with a mental health illness. For others, a mental health story is a moment in time when an individual struggled with their mental health. For me, it's both. Snapshots of tough moments in time along an ongoing journey of struggles.

Sharing your story is a community-building act. It promotes mental health awareness and helps those who suffer feel less alone. If you really want to tell your story but are kind of still on the fence about it, here are some things to consider:

Your Story Is Important

Mental illness has a deep and lasting effect on the people that it touches. It might be a defining moment of your life. It would be heartbreaking to think that those experiences were meaningless. Remember that every story of mental health is profoundly important, to those who have lived it and to all of humanity.

Make Recovery Real

Until you share your story of recovery, it is just a hope inside you. Sharing your story with someone else helps you to declare that I or someone I love has lived through a mental illness and this is how we coped.

Find Your Voice

Writing about a tough time in your life can help you to organize your chaotic thoughts and memories by giving your story a beginning, middle and an end. Plus, you will end up finding a moral that you can learn from. By getting it all down, you are allowing yourself to think about past events in your life and express them in a way that not only makes sense to other people, but to you as well.

Find Strength

Sharing tough stories with someone else is so good for your well-being. When you share your story with someone else, it helps to establish supportive, strong bonds with that person. It also helps you to reaffirm positive values and reinforces lessons that you have learned.

Help Other People

Your story could be the light in someone else's dark spot. It could be a message to them that they are not alone and that their situation is far from hopeless. Our emotional resilience and ability to cope is strengthened when we realize that we have the wisdom and strength to help other people.

Build Community

Shared story telling is a major foundation of our civilization. We build community and connections by sharing stories, especially those that deal with loss and hope.

Now that you know some of the benefits of sharing your story, where should you go to share it? You can always confide in family and friends or maybe a close co-worker. The point is that it doesn't matter who you share it with. Fear of talking about our mental health struggles is something that keeps the stigma alive. So don't be afraid. If your story seems important to share with someone, share it.

There are some places online you can turn to to share your story too. Here are a few:

NAMI "You Are Not Alone"

NAMI "OK to Talk:"

Mental Health America

MQ Mental Health 

Outrun the Stigma

Make it OK