Helping Parents Acknowledge Depression

As if your brain wasn’t already cooperating with you enough, sometimes it can be hard to verbalize what is happening in your head to your parents (or anyone).

Depression, anxiety, and other mental health symptoms and disorders can make it difficult to express yourself.

If you are having trouble addressing your depression (or any mental health symptom) with your parents, or if your parents aren’t seeing the depression, there maybe ways to help start the conversation.  Some suggestions are:

• Write them a letter about whatever you’re feeling, and give the letter to them.  Allow them to process in their own time. You took the time to write it, and now try to give them some space to read it.
• Find information online, or from some of our “educate yourself” posts and print it out to show them how depression works.
• Advocate for yourself, keep talking about what is happening, don’t allow depression to make you shy away from taking care of yourself.

What are some other ways you can communicate with parents or others about your mental health? What are some ways to open the lines of communication that you’ve successfully used before?