I'm sure all of us that live with mental illness have been in the situation in which we mention our mental health condition and some of the symptoms, and someone tells us, "You don't have a mental illness, everybody does that." I was in this situation recently, and I have to tell you, it took me a minute to try to figure out the best way to respond. As you can imagine, one of the emotions I experienced in the few seconds of silence I had to take was anger. How could somebody tell me that I didn't have mental illness when I was the one that had been clinically diagnosed and had been in treatment for nearly six years after silently suffering with that mental illness for the better part of a decade to the point that sometimes I wasn't sure I was strong enough to keep fighting?
Yes everybody will, at some point, experience something that is a symptom of a mental illness. Everybody in the world will have a panic attack at least once in their lifetime. That doesn't mean that everybody who has a panic attack has panic disorder, but it also doesn't mean that panic disorder isn't an actual mental health condition. Everybody, at some point, will have a period of high anxiety or a low period that they classify as depression. That doesn't mean that everybody who experiences that brief period of anxiety or depression has clinical anxiety or depression, but it also doesn't mean that anxiety disorders, depressive disorders, and mood disorders aren't actual mental health conditions. Everybody in the world has intrusive thoughts (for people without OCD and certain other anxiety disorders like GAD the brain does a better job at filtering them out so the person doesn't pay too much attention to them). That doesn't mean that everybody that has intrusive thoughts has OCD, but it also doesn't mean that OCD isn't an actual mental health condition.
So, what's the difference between the thing that everybody has experienced or will experience and actual mental illness?
For those that experience the thing without having mental illness, the symptom, like the panic attack, anxiety, or depressive episode is often tied to an external event that can be (mostly) clearly pinpointed, and the symptom occurs in relation to that external event. Also, the panic attacks, anxiety, or depressed feelings are short-term, and they often go away on their own as we overcome whatever external situation that triggered them is resolved. Most often, in this situation, the symptoms don't tend to come back again and again, and they don't really interfere long-term with a person's ability to function at their usual level of functioning.
For those of us that experience the "thing that everybody does" as part of an actual mental health condition, the panic attack, anxiety, or depressive episode might not always have an external trigger that we can figure out. A lot of the time, we can be having THE BEST time and then BAM...oh, hello, symptoms of my mental illness. For those of us that live with mental illness, the symptoms aren't short-term. We had them over a period of time, probably six months to a year consistently, which got us a clinical diagnosis by a licensed mental health professional, and the symptoms are on repeat, not an isolated occurrence. These symptoms don't go away on their own. In fact, without proper treatment, symptoms associated with an actual mental illness will get worse over time, each time they come back, and they will significantly interfere with a person's level of functioning and overall quality of life.
Basically, you can think of the difference like this: it's like somebody taking a vacation to a place versus somebody living full-time in that same place. One person, the one that's just taking a short trip, can return home after the trip. This is what thing that everybody will experience is, a vacation, albeit an unpleasant one from which they can return home, to normalcy and comfort. The other person, however, lives in the place that the other person just took a trip to. That is their home, the place they're in every day, and they don't have the resources needed to leave that place for good (although they can take a short vacation to a more pleasant place from time to time). That's what the actual mental illness is.
I'll end with this: Yes, everybody in the world, at some point, during their lifetime will experience a panic attack, period of anxiety, or a depressive episode. That doesn't mean that actual mental illnesses characterized by those same symptoms do not exist. The difference is simple, the thing that has happened or will happen to everyone is a short-term experience that isn't likely to become a regular occurrence that significantly interferes with someone's quality of life. Actual mental illness, however, is a long-term cycle of symptoms on repeat that DOES significantly interfere with the quality of someone's life. Let me also just say that, if you find yourself in the situation in which you keep experiencing anxiety, panic, or depressed feelings that aren't really going away or that keep going away and coming back, don't talk yourself out of making an appointment with your doctor or a community mental health agency to get checked out because you think, "everybody does that". Everybody doesn't do that, actually, and you deserve a better quality of life than living in the land of untreated mental illness.
