It's time for a change in the narrative and naming surrounding "mental illness". In this age where words that were just fine to use my whole life have suddenly become un-PC and taboo, how the hell can they still refer to us as mentally ill?

Depression is not a mental illness. It is a physical disorder of the whole central nervous system and it affects your body down to sub-cellular level.

Depression is not a mood disorder. Happiness and sadness are moods. Depression is not sadness. From the outside it probably most resembles some form of mourning to others, but when you suffer an actual depressive episode, you'd donate a limb just to be able to feel sadness.

Because sadness sucks a whole lot less than feeling nothing at all. Where even the things you love most become meaningless and you face that added horror of depersonalisation and/or derealisation. Everyone an actor. "Is this really my life? Have I really been living this for xx years?"

But buried deep inside all of this is the real you. Sane. Your body and CNS just decided that it's not keen on doing it's job of interfacing with reality as we evolved to experience it.

If clinical depression is a mental disorder, then so are epilepsy, Alzheimer's and ALS. You are not mentally ill. Just ill.

We cannot allow them to lump us in with serial killers and sociopaths. We suffer enough prejudice already.