Hargun’s Story

Hargun’s Story

When Hargun first walked into the psychiatric emergency unit at BC Children’s Hospital, she couldn’t help but feel overcome by an intense mix of emotions.

She was 17 at the time, and her first instinct was to try to convince her nurse that it was all a misunderstanding—that she was feeling better and was ready to go back home.

But her nurse wouldn’t budge.

“When the nurse told me I was going to stay there, the reality of the situation finally sank in,” she says. “At that moment, I questioned whether or not it had been a good decision to tell my psychiatrist how I was feeling.”

What Hargun had told her psychiatrist earlier that day was that she had lost all hope. She’d already been struggling with severe depression for over six months, and she had started feeling like there was only one way out: suicide.

“I had even gone so far as to plan everything out, which looking back is absolutely terrifying,” she says.

Hargun couldn’t know it at the time, but telling her psychiatrist about the depths of her hopelessness was an important step in her path towards recovery.

Although she’d been getting help for her mental health since 2014, she’d had spent the vast majority of the past year and a half hiding her most intense feelings from the people around her.

No one in her social circles and very few family members knew she was battling against debilitating anxiety and depression, and even fewer knew that she had turned to eating disorders and self-injury to numb the emotional pain she was feeling.

“I didn’t feel comfortable enough with anyone to share my feelings or tell them about my unhealthy coping mechanisms, so I pretty much just isolated myself,” she says. “The only people I told about the self-harm and the depths of my depression were people who were paid to listen to me.”

This isolation only made the situation worse. By the end of 2015, her depression was getting more and more intense, along with increasingly persistent suicide idealization, but talking with her family and friends about it seemed practically out of the question.

“Mental health is frowned upon in my culture…South Asian people don’t talk about it and normally don’t get help for it either…”

“Discussing mental health is frowned upon in my culture,” says Hargun. “South Asian people don’t talk about it, and normally don’t get help for it either, because they don’t want to be judged by others within the community for seeking support from a mental health care professional.”

Hargun wasn’t alone in this. According to the American Psychological Association, race, ethnicity, and culture all shape the rates in which young adults receive help for mental health. This means that mental health disorders affecting youth from visible minority groups often go undiagnosed and untreated, showing that cultural stigma surrounding mental health negatively impacts people’s lives.

For Hargun, not being able to talk to her parents about the extent of her depression for fear that they wouldn’t understand her or would be unnecessarily bothered led to an immense sense of isolation that fed into her depression and anxiety, intensifying them to a point where suicide seemed like the only escape.

“When this stigma exists, you become really good at hiding things, which is very unhealthy.”

“When this stigma exists, you become really good at hiding things, which is very unhealthy,” she says.

Perhaps that’s why when a visit with her psychiatrist ended with Hargun being admitted into the hospital, her parents had no idea what was happening.

“When my mom was first told about the situation, she was completely shocked,” Hargun remembers. “She even said: ‘you were perfectly normal when we came in’.”

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Although the experience wasn’t always easy, nearly four years after going into the hospital, Hargun is a changed person.

She’s learned about the importance of speaking with others about her mental health, and eventually found a therapy – Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT) – that continues to help her cope with her depression and anxiety.

Along with ensuring to continue therapy, she has been trying to engage in meaningful work surrounding mental health. She is currently a member of Foundry’s Provincial Youth Advisory Committee, a crisis responder at  Kid’s Help Phone, and was previously a member of the Kelty Youth Ambassador program at the Kelty Mental Health Resource Centre at BC Children’s Hospital. 

As a member of Foundry’s Provincial Youth Advisory Committee, she has had the opportunity to participate in and lead various projects promoting wellness and educating others about the importance of mental health. Along with the meaningful work accompanied with destigmatizing mental health and mental illness, she has been able to use her lived experiences, as a young person of colour, to help create content and write articles that can be found on Foundry’s website.

“My experience taught me so much about mental health and has made me passionate about making it more visible.”

“My experience taught me so much about mental health and has made me passionate about making it more visible,” she says.

By shedding light on these issues, she hopes to break the stigma that still surrounds mental health, specifically through the various intersections of her identity, such as being a South Asian woman.

“During my moments of most distress, stigma isolated me, which made my depression more intense,” she says. “I don’t want anyone else to have to deal with that sort of isolation and loneliness.”

This story is part of a series aimed at sharing the experiences of young people across BC. As part of Foundry’s goal to work alongside young people, create connections and promote mental health and wellness, we are creating a platform for young people’s stories to be heard.

This story was originally published in 2018 and has since been updated in June 2020 to better reflect Hargun’s growth and journey in her mental health.

Article by Peter Mothe. 

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