Inspired by Mental Illness Awareness Week this month, a group of Utah Public Radio interns and reporters began sharing their personal experiences with mental illness. These were not stories about their observations of others who deal with mental illness; these were their stories.
During Part 2 of our series on Mental Illness Awareness series, we begin listening to a conversation between Storee Powell, Ryan Cunningham, and April Ashland as they work through some of the myths associated with mental illness.
Storee: "I thought maybe I'd grown out of my OCD, and I realized I hadn't. I was actually really depressed about it. I thought I will be moving on with my life now, but I realized I'll probably have to be medicated and working with this for the rest of my life." April: "I think one of the problems with the stigma of mental illness is that you can't always physically tell that someone is mentally ill." Ryan: "Sometimes I'll get to know someone and I'll let it slip that I have a mental illness or that I'm bi-polar and they'll say 'you don't look bi-polar to me.' I don't know how to respond to that."
