How “Fake It ‘Till You Make It” Wrecks People with Mental Illness

Sometimes, the world is full of bad advice.

Did you know that if you turn out the lights, light a match, and say “depression” into a mirror three times, someone in a “live laugh love” shirt will appear and tell you that taking a walk will make you feel better?

Dumb jokes aside, as someone who lives with mental illness, I have been the recipient of a lot of bad advice on how to deal with it. Very often, I get advice on how to regulate my illness from people who don’t know anyone with mental illness but read an article about it or people who have a cousin who is bipolar, or that person on everyone’s feed who is constantly hawking essential oils.

This advice is generally well-meaning but misplaced suggestions with little basis in fact or experience. Often, a legitimate piece of advice gets twisted into a generalization that obviously must apply to everyone with a mental illness.

There are a lot of common suggestions for how to brighten one’s mood. “Go take a walk, you’ll feel better” is a common one. It’s a fair suggestion under some circumstances — exercise is a good way to perform self-care and boost endorphins that help your mood. However, it’s often suggested in such a way that ten minutes of fresh air will cure everything that ails you.

Another one is something along the lines of “nature is my antidepressant.” This is kind of a riff of “go take a walk,” suggesting that a hike in nature will make you feel better. Unfortunately, this is also commonly suggested by people who think depression is “getting a little sad sometimes,” which is entirely unhelpful to people who have spent two months feeling suicidal for no particular reason.

One other common refrain is “if you smile a lot, you’ll eventually just feel happy.” While this is based on actual research, it is often hyped up in blog posts as a cure-all for sadness. And, for many people, this works. Simply smiling a lot helps them feel better. For people with depression and anxiety, however, smiling every day is what we do to keep people from seeing how awful we feel.

When I was at my last job, I told nobody about my bipolar. On the days where I felt bad, I still came to work, put on my smile, and did my job, even though I hated my life at the moment. Nobody knew what I was going through internally.

When I began telling people at my current job, they were generally surprised. I began telling people several months into my time there, starting with the person who had hired me based on previously working with me. By and large, it went well.

On multiple occasions, I would reveal my illness to a coworker and they would say something along the lines of “I never would have guessed.” This included my boss, who at the time I told him had known me for over four years. To add impact to it, I had been struggling with suicidal feelings during the first few months of my time there, and nobody had noticed. Indeed, my supervisor told me she never would’ve known if I hadn’t told her about it.

Everyone knows the saying “fake it ’til you make it.” It generally is used in a business sense — if you’re in over your head at work, get yourself up to speed as quickly as possible and bullshit like mad until you know what you’re doing.

For people with depression, “smile and you’ll feel better” is their “fake it ’til you make it.” While the advice works for some, for those of us with mental illness, we never get to the “feel better” part. Those of us who can more or less function while depressed fake it all day every day for months. We go to work, we do our jobs, and we smile, but we never feel better.

Living with depression is faking it every day, but we never make it anywhere. We simply move through our day with no passion or emotion, just the goal of getting home and collapsing. For many of us, we even smile while we do it.

And, for those of us who live with this reality, telling us to smile so we feel better, to fake it until we are happy again, can be damaging. Other people can do it, we think, and there’s a ton of science around it. Why can’t I?

The answer, more or less, is that our brains aren’t wired to accept the “happy chemicals” that are produced by smiling. So, even though we smile, or take that walk, or go on that nature hike, we don’t benefit from it as most people do.

The societal pressure to do so can be very heavy since we are constantly bombarded with stories about people who were at a low point and pulled themselves out of a funk to become successful. America is a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” kind of place, and “fake it ’til you make it” is a mantra for many business people. Many people have become successful by faking their way through life until they became an expert.

That societal pressure can do a lot of damage when faking it gets you nowhere. When you’re depressed but spend your days forcing a smile, it’s easy to feel like it’s a personal failure when you don’t become happy. Mental illness is already stigmatized as a moral failing anyway, and this just adds a log to the fire. When nobody wants to talk about your depression, trying to explain this concept to people is a no-go situation.

So, what can those of us with mental illness do to help this situation? The answer is twofold: be patient with those people close to you who don’t understand, and be patient with yourself.

For the people close to you who don’t get it, do your best to explain. Look up different ways of explaining it, perhaps collect articles on the subject. Link them to resources like NAMI and Mental Health America, or the government’s website on mental health. If you are close enough to them, maybe share some personal stories.

You should understand that some people will never get it. Whether they cite religious reasons why your illness is a moral failing, or perhaps insist that homeopathic remedies and essential oils will help, or if they’re an exercise junkie or nature walker, there will always be that fundamental disconnect with them. Many people simply can’t grasp the idea of being depressed or anxious for no reason, and sometimes, you just need to accept that.

Of course, it should not be incumbent on us as people with mental illnesses to explain this to everyone we meet. In an ideal world, mental illness would not be stigmatized and we wouldn’t have to explain this at all. However, we are not in an ideal world, and as draining as it can be, sometimes we have to do this.

As you are being patient with people who need an explanation, or those who don’t understand, so too should you be patient with yourself. When you are experiencing a depressive or anxious episode, life is tiring and hard. That’s okay. You shouldn’t have to explain mental illness to everyone, and when you don’t have the energy for it, you don’t have to.

Instead of trying to cite sources and write long missives on social media, take care of yourself instead. Yes, I’m beating the self-care drum again, but I cannot understate how important it is. Do the things that make you feel better. Exercise. Eat something decent. Watch your favorite show on Netflix. Carve spoons. Whatever it is that you do to take care of yourself, do it.

The truth is, making your way through the world with mental illness, particularly the “go go go” American culture, is exhausting enough without people telling you to power through. You will always encounter those types of people — the type-As, the bootstrappers, the self-motivated people who can’t imagine taking a rest — who will insist that you can power through. Remember, sometimes, you just can’t, and that’s okay.

Instead of accepting that you just have to put on a smile and power through, remember that you are allowed to take care of yourself. You don’t have to explain yourself to anyone if you don’t want to. The only person you owe anything to is yourself.