May is Mental Health Awareness Month and it ends in just a couple of hours. Although Mental Health Awareness Month is over, mental illness never ends. There are always people who are suffering or who have family or friends who are suffering. The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) reports that 1 in 4 people experiences mental illness in any given year.

Here at Little Merry Sunshine, I’ve dedicated 5 of my 14 posts in May (including this one) to the topics of mental health and mental illness. They’ve been some of the most personal posts I’ve written in my seven years as a blogger.

Why did I dedicate 36% of my blog posts this month to this topic? I did it because I firmly believe that the only way to conquer the shame, stigma, and discrimination that surrounds mental illness is to bring it out of the shadows. It also seemed that not talking about mental illness, an issue I so passionately believe in and have been profoundly impacted by, was completely inauthentic and bordered on irresponsibility.

In Little Merry Sunshine I have a platform that touches hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people each day. If I sit in silence about mental health topics, it would make me complicit in how mental illness is viewed in our society. It would appear as though I was embarrassed or ashamed or that I felt mental illness gets all the positive press it needs. And I don’t believe any of that. I’m not embarrassed or ashamed about what my family or I have experienced and I absolutely do not believe that mental illness gets treated well by the press.

So although Mental Health Awareness Month is coming to an end, I will not stop talking about mental illness. I won’t be talking about it as often, but I wouldn’t be true to my mission of making the world a better place if I didn’t continue to discuss it from time to time.

I believe so strongly in stamping out the mental illness stigma that I’ve taken the Association for Behavioral Health and Wellness Pledge to Stamp Out Stigma to do my part to recognize and reeducate people about mental illness, treatments, and success stories. I believe that in time this will reduce or eliminate the stigma around mental illness and we’ll all be healthier.

Will you join me and take the Pledge to Stamp Out Stigma for yourself?

Read my other four posts about mental health:

• 10 things I know about mental illness
• 17 ways to help yourself when you have mental illness
• End mental illness stigma, save lives
• We never met, but my grandfather, Jesse Paulk, shaped my life

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