By Amanda D'Ambra Manian

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There’s this deeply destructive, frustratingly pervasive narrative in our society that mental illness is a flaw — something “wrong.” Something to be “fixed.” So when someone is living with anxiety, depression, PTSD, an eating disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), bipolar disorder, or any of the many conditions that are often misunderstood and misrepresented, they’re often given diminutive labels. “He’s totally OCD,” or “that girl’s anorexic,” or “ugh, she’s so bipolar.” They’re reduced to a single dimension, a stereotype, a target. Their entire identity, what makes them beautifully, uniquely human, is erased.

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But for something that still comes with so much stigma and shame, this is astonishingly common. The World Health Organization estimates that nearly 970 million people around the world are living with mental health conditions. We’re talking about an astounding one in five adults in the U.S. On top of this, rates have been rising rapidly since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, with initial estimates showing a 26% increase in anxiety and 28% in depressive disorders worldwide in just one year at the start of the pandemic. Furthermore, eating disorder prevalence skyrocketed during the pandemic with few options for people to get the care they need. 

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Many people who are living with mental health conditions like anxiety and depression are also living with eating disorders. They are intrinsically linked, contributing to and exacerbating the other. There are over 30 million Americans who will have an eating disorder in their lifetime, yet care is out of reach for most people — it’s expensive, scarce, and tends to be designed for what society has said eating disorders “look like” despite broadly affecting people of all ages, body types, race and ethnicities, cultural backgrounds, gender identities, sexual orientations, and on and on.

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But each person living with a mental health condition is more than just a statistic. We are each unique in our experiences, our lives, our identities, our dreams. And for others to understand that mental health isn’t reduced to a disability, or a limitation, or a life sentence, but rather, just a part of our experience as humans, goes a long way in starting to build empathy and understanding. 

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I lived with the ups and downs of an eating disorder for over 15 years, never really in what I would consider recovery until I was nearly 30. That’s half my life taken up by an eating disorder on the surface, one that I got very good at hiding from friends, family, partners, colleagues — but underneath that was so much hurting that people couldn’t see. 

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They couldn’t see how obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) caused me to worry incessantly that one everyday mishap, like leaving a lamp plugged in, would cause my home to burn down in flames. Or that if I didn’t touch a doorknob five times, something terrible would happen to my parents. 

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They couldn’t see how vivid the night terrors were when I thought someone was breaking into my apartment to harm me. They couldn’t see how an obsessive fear of heart disease triggered my fourteen-year-old self into an eating disorder in the first place. 

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They couldn’t see the year I spent walking around feeling like my head was in a fog that I couldn’t escape, punctuated by loss, grief, a turbulent relationship, self-hatred, working to the point of insurmountable burnout. Depression and an eating disorder coming back swinging were both the symptoms and the driving forces of the loneliest year of my life. 

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They couldn’t see the constant anxiety that I could never escape. Or the depression that has memories of multiple years completely shrouded for me. 

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They couldn’t see the times I spent literally lying on my apartment floor, feeling like I’d lost every sense of who I am and had no idea what direction to go in next. 

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They couldn’t hear the desperation. 

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They couldn’t see the pain. 

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They couldn’t feel the loneliness. 

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But millions of us, every single day, are living through this pain thinking that we are all alone. But none of us are alone in it, when millions of us are going through it at the same time. 

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So why are we still living in the shadows? Why is mental health not seen universally as something positive, rather than something to be remedied?

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We need to be more open about mental health

One of the side effects of our current mental health crisis is that there is increasing openness around mental health, and much more conversation publicly about support for people’s mental health. But the fear, the stigma, the apprehension, still keeps us from celebrating mental health and well-being as something positive. 

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We’re also in a time where people are living every day with horrific situations that make caring for mental health near impossible. War, genocide, domestic violence, political unrest, persecution, communities being silenced, the devastating effects of climate change, people being unheard and left behind everywhere we turn. Reality can be dark, and hope can be hard to come by — but it doesn’t have to be so lonely. 

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We need open conversation. 

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We need better access. 

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We need care that actually sees us for who we are. That seeks to understand us.  

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We need connection. We need community. 

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I’m grateful that I ultimately found support and connection that was critical in my own healing and recovery. I’m grateful to my parents, sisters, and husband for that — and for my daughter, who reminds me what hope and joy is every day. But that kind of support is not easy to come by. So many people end up having to push through it alone. 

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This is why we founded Arise. Joan and I found connection in our stories — how isolated we felt when living with eating disorders and mental health at different points in our lives, how stigmatized and diminished we felt, how deeply we wished that others would see what we were going through, that they would understand how we were hurting. 

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Whether or not we “looked like” we had an eating disorder or mental health condition was irrelevant — we just wanted to be seen for who we were. And we wanted to create something where others would finally feel seen, heard, and understood — that they weren’t alone. That’s why Arise exists. 

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“Mental health matters” has to matter more than one day a year. 

In the societal and individual contexts of our lives today, it can feel completely overwhelming to either reach out for help, or to reach out to someone in our lives who might need help. We might be worried about what others will think, how they’ll see us, that we’ll be judged, that it will have implications for our life. 

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But what if that one time you reached out gave someone hope? What if it gives you hope? 

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Connection and community have proven time and time again to be healing — and while it won’t happen all at once, it’s these seemingly insignificant, but often actually life-changing, connections that can make all the difference for someone who just needs to be seen and asked if they’re okay. 

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This World Mental Health Day, we all need a bit of hope and compassion — may this be your reminder that you’re never, never alone, and your mental health really does matter.