As someone who hasn't personally had depression, I find it hard to grasp an understanding of it sometimes.

Depression is invisible and is more than 'feeling sad'.  
It's highly likely that you will not be able to notice that someone you know or a stranger walking down the street has depression, making the understanding process harder. Maybe as someone who hasn't experienced it, I'm not meant to understand it. Maybe I'm not expected to. How can I? All individual experiences are different, so how are we able to really understand an others emotions, even if you have experienced a mental illness or not.

However, just because the understanding of depression may be hard, it doesn't mean that you can't have awareness of it. It's like thinking that because you're not gay, the LGBT community are not important - it's illogical. I'm not black but I still support Black Rights eg. 'Black Lives Matter', because it's important. I've never had depression but I support the groups pushing for greater awareness, because it's important. There is a large stigma around mental health, as if those suffering from mental health problems, are a group of weird creatures that you're not meant to go near. The girl that cuts at school is a 'goth' or 'doing it for attention' and the boy that doesn't talk to many people due to anxiety is a 'creep'. No one is less of a human due to their mental state.

Moreover, I feel that the stigma around mental health is not helped by certain things on social media. As soon as you type in depression, numerous images come up - like so:



Sites like Instagram and WeHeartIt, for example, have thousands of images related to the topic of depression and mental illness, some of which are extremely negative. Expressing emotion through images, text posts and creative edits, is a way that someone can reach out to others or simply release thoughts. However, I don't think that the images above and text posts that spring up on the internet often, help anyone really understand mental health. When I first got WeHeartIt (an app/website for sharing cool images), if I was in a bad mood, I would make it my duty to find images that would relate to how I was feeling, 'heart' them, thus sharing it to my wall, for others to see. This would mean that I was often sharing negative images with my audience something that over time, I realized didn't actually help how I was feeling. My friends would do it too, so you would instantly know if they were in a bad mood. My conclusion is that, sharing these negative images and text posts about suicide, hating everyone etc etc, has no real link to understanding mental health or, in my eyes, would help someone who is suffering from it. Glamorized depression.

On the other hand, there are a number of positive images on the internet surrounding mental health awareness. Even though the topic of mental health may not even cross your mind or 'it's not that deep', to some indiviuals, it's an everyday a battle. Why not make it easier for them and understand that not understanding depression and mental illnesses is not the issue but treating someone as a lesser human just because they have a mental illness is.

Spread awareness, they aren't nutty, murderers, attention seekers or 'just sad'.



Simply by listening to someone, you can help.
Let's tackle depression... together.

I wrote a post similar to this last year and went on to be my most viewed and shared piece of writing. Thank you for your continued support for this blog and the topics that I write about.

Nicholls x

After a very annoying (to put it as pleasantly and politely as humanly possible) younger student approached me today whilst swearing at me and immaturely calling me clapped and frass (i.e. ugly), I was left angered.  As I was leaving school, this child saw me and done the same.  At this moment, I was to either smash him round the head with my school bag or approach him non-violently. I personally believe it would be a waste if my own energy if I was to hurt him and it is plainly wrong, so I didn’t. Instead I approached him.

How was your monday?

Today I sat back and thought (just after JAMIE MCDELL followed me on twitter and me fangirling for like 10 minutes straight...) about the pros and cons of social media. As my family don't really use social networking I am practically the opposite. I love spending my time on Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. I was going crazy over the fact that Jamie had followed me and as I showed my notifications on twitter to my sister pointing at Jamie's name, she simply said 'Who are they?'. She was talking about Jamie and a few other people who followed me. It stuck me that I didn't know a lot of these people.

I really don't know. Twitter is a place where I tweet irrelevant things, kinda like my blog. My blog is a place for my irrelevant comments and ideas on things that according to my blogger stats people enjoy reading. It just struck me that people have the chose to follow another person. It was quite weird. Like do I really want people knowing where I'm going etc. It's hard. I love writing on my blog as I want to share the stupid things I do with people and share positivity. Like most of the time what I say on my blog is very irrelevant. However it does strike me how isolated my generation are. We don't socialise often and the so called 'social' media actually makes us stay inside and not go and explore the world around me. My brother made a point this lunch time that my generation will actually be the most unsociable, disrespectful, dumb people who are the most sociable, respectful and smart people. Think about it...

We spend all our time on social networking sites communicating with people all across the world. We spend a lot of time respecting peoples work and sicking up for others online.
We spend a lot of time researching new ways to cure illness etc

however that is all online. If we looked up from our phone for a split second it could change our lives as we make a new friend. It's a hard thing to grasp. Another example being we made calculators that can do sums that we can't do ourselves in our heads. Will technology be smarter than us? Is it smarter than us?