I like books. People in books do lots of things. They jump, they walk, they dance, they kiss, they sometimes do really naughty things like having depression or being bisexual – hey, just like me! But I’m yet to come across a book where, in the fit of some great existential crisis, while gazing out over Lake Geneva with a parrot on one shoulder and a samurai sword in one hand, the protagonist has suddenly exclaimed, ‘Alas! What shall my future employer think of all this!?’

This thought came to me as I was filling out an application for an internship. Apparently, because I’m not getting a massive inheritance from a far-off relative anytime soon, I have to face up to my own limited funds and look for a place I can go every day to earn some moolah – but first I need to go to a place every day where I earn no money but something called ‘experience’ and ‘transferable skills’. This particular company wanted to know what I’d been up to for, oh, say, every vacation since arriving at university. A brief précis of 100 words would do. Thus began my long contemplation of how to stretch ‘I did pretty rubbish revision for my exams and started to think I might have depression’ beyond its paltry word count.

When I was first diagnosed with depression, my mother pointed out, not jokingly, that future employers would know about it – have to know about it, for that matter. When looking at options for a year abroad after university, I was stopped dead in my tracks by an application form that requested I provide ALL RECENT MEDICAL HISTORY INCLUDING MENTAL HEALTH. It warned that I would be assessed and if my medical health record did not match precisely what I had set down there, MY APPLICATION WOULD BE CANCELLED.

The Equality Act in the UK outlaws employers from treating those with mental illnesses any differently from other employees, or from enquiring about their employees’ health before they are offered a job. The country I was considering had very different guidelines – in the international job climate, I was perhaps naïve to expect that I could expect the same legal standards. Your past, your imprint, online or off, follows you wherever you go. I’m essentially attempting to smuggle my brain across an international border and I may well be arrested for the forgotten banana in my frontal lobe.

There are countless successful people who have made a living while having a mental illness – some have made enormous leaps and bounds in their field because they simply have a different way of thinking about the world. Carrie Fisher, Stephen Fry and Temple Grandin address their own mental health and confront stigma with the kind of chutzpah most of us could only dream of. But not all of us are going to be movie stars or activists or world-renowned scientists. Though we may not be exposed as much to internet trolls, ‘average’, ‘non-famous people’ who try to speak out about discrimination from a boss or a co-worker won’t necessarily garner 500,000 shares on Facebook or a Change.org petition. Some will fight long, quiet legal battles that strain their mental health even further. Like stigma anywhere else, mental health discrimination in the workplace needs to be rooted out through the collective sentiment of ‘This is never okay’, whether it happens to a Broadway star or a teacher in Truro.

I always have the temptation to narrativize my own existence – to see each missed bus as some great metaphor of how I, the protagonist, am wrangling with the subject of time and space. But the truth is that I struggle to romanticise those many days spent playing Pokemon FireRed for 8 hours because everything else felt terrifying. It’s not something I can put on my CV, even if getting better has made more of an impact on my life than my part-time job at a supermarket ever did. But it’s not something I want to pretend never happened. Lying about it isn’t helpful to anyone, especially not myself.
What has been impressed upon most young people, whether intentionally or not, is that there is a certain careful way of presenting themselves that will give them a base level of success and professional appeal. They should dye their hair a normal colour, avoid writing anything controversial for a student paper, delete that YouTube video of them doing a ukulele cover of One Direction. But mental health isn’t something that can just be deleted from your internet search history – it’s intrinsic to who we are, and shouldn’t be swept under the rug like a dirty secret.

The days, weeks, months and years of recovery are not often commemorated like the ‘expected’ milestones of life. Rarely do people post about their mental health as much as they’d post about a new relationship status, a job offer, or finding a piece of toast that looks like Mr T. But, even if an essay on overcoming your anxiety is unlikely to make great waves with Stacy in H.R., I for one think getting up and doing each day is pretty marvellous and makes us all rather cool – probably at least as cool as those book characters I hear about so much.

If you think you or a friend may have a mental health issue, or you would like to know more, go to:
www.studentminds.org.uk
OR
www.nhs.uk/Livewell/mentalhealth/Pages/Mentalhealthhome.aspx

In Cambridge, the University Counselling Service can normally fit you in pretty quickly if you’d prefer not to go down the NHS route:
www.counselling.cam.ac.uk

And finally, here is a self-care, de-stressing activity (you don’t even have to order something from Amazon):
www.virtual-bubblewrap.com/bubble-wrap.swf