Firstly, apologies for feeding too much mental health into your brains through my last few write-ups but let's just hope this would be the last or maybe not.

We often hear people talking about their "insomnia" which actually translates to having slept in the afternoon and not being able to get some sleep during the night. We hear people saying that they have "OCD" because they didn't like where a cup has been placed or how their bed has been set, some are "depressed" because they fought with someone close to them, the others are "suffering with anxiety" because they can't handle an hour-based stress of their results. There are a hundred instances as to how we misuse actual disease-names as something very normal, as just another feeling.

Imagine saying "I broke my leg" when it's only your toe which's hit some table edge. Doesn't make sense. Does it? It's just the same with mental illnesses as well. We can't say "I have cancer" while all we observed in ourselves is just a symptom or two of the common cold. Can we? When bodily diseases cannot be joked about or used in place of a temporary discomfort/illness, why can't the same rule be followed for mental illnesses? I am guilty of having said many things as such using the names of serious illnesses to just express momentary emotions. 

It narrows down the chances of someone with an actual mental disease to be believed in, diagnosed and cured. If diseases come down to sound like just another day-day occurrence, who is going to take up the responsibility of bringing about seriousness around the same topic over and over again? 

It's not like all of us are empathetic towards people who open up regarding their mental health issues; we're already in a sorry state and all we happen to do is just make it worse for ourselves. Saying it out loud, getting rid of the taboo or stigma around it doesn't work this way. This is probably the only downside of normalizing mental health care.

I wouldn't prefer delving into details but yeah, personally, there was a time when I couldn't manage to eat one single meal a day and had lost about 3-4 kilos in just a month and a half. I would get shivers down my body upon encountering certain situations(limited to a single issue), fiddle with anything and everything that's around, shut myself out and precisely think of myself to be undeserving of positive emotions around me. Some of these things still hit me in the middle of the day but I'm doing better now. Back then, when it was getting hard to control I had no clue whether it was as serious as it appeared to me in my head. I did not even try talking about my issue as a serious matter of concern because I had heard plenty of people around me talking about how the youth today feels it's cool to be mentally unwell. It definitely did not feel "cool." After that, I still struggle to identify with basic emotions that I happen to experience each day as well. It feels like I would become a part of the tribe that romanticizes mental illnesses. 

I still don't know whether half the things that I happen to go through are really pulling me down mentally or not. 

"I don't want to create drama out of something that everyone is bound to go through and eventually feels okay about." 

This thought inside me has been instilled because I don't want to be a part of many of us who think that it's cool to be mentally unwell.

I don't say that I was mentally unwell or that I needed help back then or that I need help now, all I am trying to say is that the way I struggle to express how I feel in the fear of being misjudged as a lazy teenager; someone with an actual mental illness must be weeping in silence too. 

Stop being the person who romanticizes mental illnesses. Stop using illnesses to describe feelings. Stop dismissing people when they reach out to you. Suggest them to confide in someone else if you aren't emotionally available at that point of time. Don't be the reason why someone decides to never talk about how they feel anymore. 

Basic communication about whether or not you can be there for a person can go a long way. Basic communication about how you exactly feel can help your own self be at peace as well. It will not appear to be a pseudo mental illness if you just say I am sad/tensed/disappointed etc.  Thus, it will not eliminate the option of being heard- for someone out there who really needs to be heard. There's a word for almost every emotion and experience. FIND IT and USE IT. 

Let's try and stop conveniently replacing words with mental illnesses just because we fail to fetch the right words!