If you don't know what you're talking about, be quiet.

I went to WVU a few months after I graduated from high school. I began taking advantage of the university’s free counseling services within a couple of weeks of my arrival on campus. I remained in therapy until I was in my 30s. I saw a number of therapists, and sometimes I went as often as twice a week. For several years, I carried around emergency phone numbers so that I could call a therapist day or night.

A couple of years after I started seeing a therapist, I was referred to a psychiatrist. I saw a number of them over a ten year span, and I took increasing amounts of prescribed psychotropic medications. For about three years, I was taking handfuls of pills several times a day.

A year after I started seeing a psychiatrist, I was hospitalized for the first time. I was hospitalized several times after that. The last time I was in a psychiatric hospital, I underwent electroshock therapy. Sadly, some of the professionals I encountered while in the hospital were quite homophobic, and nearly all of them didn’t have a clue as to how to talk to me about the gay, so they pretended I didn’t even have a sexuality.

When I realized that I wasn’t well enough to work and support myself and that I was in fact making myself sicker by continuing to push myself to lead what I thought of as a normal life, I applied for disability. I was approved quickly even though I was a young man in my late twenties, and this was a few years before I was diagnosed with a brain tumor. My tumultuous mental health alone was enough to qualify me.

My situation is hardly unique. While in the hospital, I met scores of people who had been battling mental illness for a very long time. Some were in their 60s and 70s and had been fighting since they were teens. I’ve met many online that have had to deal with mental illness for most of their lives.

It is more than bothersome when someone who doesn’t even know the half of it thinks they can fix us up by suggesting that stubborn symptoms that many have had to endure for decades can be easily dispensed with. Platitudes are not the healing balm that has been missing from our treatment regiment. Oversimplifying our conditions only exacerbates and annoys. We already know that our symptoms are strange, unusual and not quite rational. And telling someone to “get some help” in a flip, cavalier way is almost as bad as telling them to go to hell. Many of us have already gotten “help.” Sometimes it relieved out situation to varying degrees, and sometimes it only made things worse. It might come as a surprise to some, but professional help is often not a panacea. Sometimes the best you can do is learn to manage your symptoms enough so that you’re able to get a little enjoyment out of life. If someone trusts you enough to tell you about their mental health issues, don’t respond by being dismissive or pretending you know just what they need to do to recover. It is better to say nothing if you can’t be supportive.