Depression

The bottle of champagne I had chilled and ready to pop in celebration sits untouched. My 21-year-old daughter sits near me, solemn. She has lost hope.

t interests me that I can immediately think of the gifts of anxiety, panic, and even my spurts of agoraphobia. Being tense in body and mind, living with fear that feels real even though I know intellectually it isn’t, experiencing the migraines, chest pains and choking sensations — these aren’t things that lend themselves to my happiness.
Yet the compulsion to stay at home, brought on by edginess and unease outside, keeps me productive. Anxiety makes me communicative, even if just through electronic means. The worry about judgment pushes me to write better, to edit more thoroughly, to answer the voice in my head saying “You’re not good enough” with a defiant “Then watch me improve.”

As the headline article (“Anxiety, Depression and the American Adolescent”) points out, depression has been replaced with anxiety as the leading mental health struggle of today’s adolescent. The one possible cause that stood out to me most was the impact of social media. With smartphone in hand, teens can be reading harmless texts, or – as was the case for one young female interviewed – they could be viewing disturbing Instagram posts, or reading about distant tragedies, or scrolling through hateful Facebook comments. Maybe even comments about them.

These side effects are not new to hormonal birth control; rather, hormonal birth control is new to men. Women and other folks with vaginas have been dealing with this sort of issue since... well, ever.

CN: suicide

My favorite thing about being mentally ill, aside from the random emotional lability and people never taking you seriously because you're

It’s a strange day to be writing about how my mental illnesses have made my life better.

This article originally appeared on