Image: Olivia Leach is a third year at the University of Minnesota studying Anthropology. “My mental illness isn’t who I am,” Leach said. (Courtesy of Olivia Leach)
Olivia Leach is a third-year majoring in anthropology and minoring in Spanish, diagnosed with major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder.
“I was diagnosed when I was 11 with a major depressive disorder. And then I think a little bit after that, I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.
Symptoms of depression are, you know, that you get really tired. I struggle with insomnia, so I don’t get a lot of sleep. But even when I do get a lot of sleep, I’m still really tired or I sleep too much. And then I just lack a lot of motivation. I lack inspiration a lot of times. I’m a perfectionist at heart. Inevitably, I’m not going to do well on something in at least one class and at least one assignment, and the issue with depression that I’ve noticed is that it’s not just oh, I did bad on this and I need to do better. It’s oh, I did bad on this, and so I’m bad all around. I’m not good at this, I’m never going to be good at this. It turns into a spiral.
When it comes to anxiety, I have a lot of anxiety about doing well, about talking to people, about going into class. I’m always worried about what I am wearing and whether it’s going to elicit some sort of response from people. Or when I’m writing essays, it takes me forever to turn them in. It doesn’t matter how long I’ve been working on it, I’m panicking right up until I turn it in. And then I’m panicking until I hear back.
I’ve been diagnosed with it for almost a decade. So it’s almost become an impulse at this point, to just go straight to that dark place, to that thinking of, ‘Oh, my God, everything’s falling apart,’ even though it’s not really.
It really helps to talk to people about it. I’m always surprised at how much I feel I have in common with other people. Even people who aren’t necessarily mentally ill, when I tell them I have so much anxiety about this or that I’m feeling really unmotivated or depressed, it really helps to talk to them. It even just helps to get it out of my system, because it makes me feel a little less insane, I guess, a little less weird.
My mental illness isn’t who I am. I think in recent years talking about it with other people and in the media has really helped. And I think that most of the time, people are like, ‘How can I help you? What can I do for you? Like, do you want to go do something? Do you need me to distract you?’ That sort of thing. It’s really helpful.
I think people who have never experienced mental illness, or never read about it, they hear that and they think I’m off the rails. They think that I’m not a capable human being, that I’m not capable of making my own decisions or having interests or personality traits that aren’t completely centered on my depression or my anxiety. You know, I’m not just the sad girl or the anxious girl. I’m funny. I’m smart. I like to try different foods, and stuff like that. I think a lot of the times I do feel put into a box, and I feel like it’s because people think that if you have a mental illness, you aren’t able to be a full person.
Outside of school it’s really hard for me to get out of the house some days, because I’m so depressed and I cannot make the effort to even get out of bed. Some days, I can really only manage to brush my teeth and pull my hair back into a ponytail and then change my clothes. And that’s about all I can do..
A lot of the people that I feel comfortable talking to about this also have mental illness. They know everything that I felt, or they’ve experienced it with other people. They just have a lot of empathy. Their first instinct is not to judge; their first instinct is to try to understand. That’s the kind of people that I surround myself with.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity
Interview conducted by Mitchell Levesque