Max's Story
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Max's Story
Before meeting his girlfriend, Chante, Max didn’t have any personal experience supporting someone with a mental health challenge. But he has learned the importance of being supportive and not judging, particularly with young people for whom mental illnesses can pose unique challenges.
Max
Prior to Chante telling me about what was going on with her I had never really heard or dealt with depression at that level. So everything was very new to me, I didn’t really understand it and I was just taking it step by step with her mostly. Everything that she would find out, she would tell me and I would try to see what we could do to try to make things better. : I do think it’s harder for young people to deal with depression and more so in a school setting just because of the different things, the tension that’s going on. Their youth, I mean their peers are focused on various different things and I think that with Chante that’s exactly what happened. Things were moving at a million miles per hour, first semester in college, no one had two seconds to stop down to really sit down and try to figure out what was going on with her.
For the most part the biggest thing that I’ve learned from being there for Chante during her depression is that depression is something that’s serious, it does need help and it’s not the joke or punch line that the media sometimes makes it to be. It’s something real that everybody deals with but some people have a harder time coping with it and they do need extra assistance beyond just, ‘get over it’.
Prior to Chante telling me about what was going on with her I had never really heard or dealt with depression at that level. So everything was very new to me, I didn’t really understand it and I was just taking it step by step with her mostly. Everything that she would find out, she would tell me and I would try to see what we could do to try to make things better. : I do think it’s harder for young people to deal with depression and more so in a school setting just because of the different things, the tension that’s going on. Their youth, I mean their peers are focused on various different things and I think that with Chante that’s exactly what happened. Things were moving at a million miles per hour, first semester in college, no one had two seconds to stop down to really sit down and try to figure out what was going on with her.
For the most part the biggest thing that I’ve learned from being there for Chante during her depression is that depression is something that’s serious, it does need help and it’s not the joke or punch line that the media sometimes makes it to be. It’s something real that everybody deals with but some people have a harder time coping with it and they do need extra assistance beyond just, ‘get over it’.
Sponsored by the Illinois Department of Human Services, Division of Mental Health and the Illinois Children’s Mental Health Partnership
