The Anatomy of Care

​In August of 2014, I broke my arm climbing a fir tree and Robin Williams took his own life. I was eleven, a camper on the northwest coast, just beginning to gain consciousness of the world and feeling its rage. The details of his death ruptured my small, sheltered understanding of the universe. And soon after, I got an X-ray.
Robin Williams, in my mind and many others, lives on as a beloved face for the nefarious truth that depression is furtive—silent, secretive, and all too easy to miss—and like a broken bone, the more it’s neglected, the more precarious it becomes. The stigma around mental health is systemic, but the solution may begin as a personal pursuit. So, dear reader—reader who is struggling with depression, reader who has neglected their mental health, and reader who loves someone who’s hurting— consider this piece my raw attempt to help catalyze your journey toward a healthier mind and a happier life.
There are countless reasons why someone may feel hesitant to seek help regarding their mental health. More intuitively, there are attitudinal barriers— there are systemic gender norms that silence men and pathologize women. There are structural and logistical barriers, worries about insurance, costs, geographical maldistribution of providers and care. There are cultural and systemic barriers, racial disparities in access and quality of care, varying stigma in certain communities, and a huge lack of cultural variation surrounding the mental health field— that is, depression does not look the same for everyone, and as many things are, the studied participants and subsequently the accepted research tends to come from a narrow demographic.
The stigma surrounding mental health is a labyrinth built over millennia—one that tells us both to hide our pain and to feel ashamed for having it; denying depression only drives it deeper underground, and the numbness that follows can start to feel like relief. My intention, however, is not to reduce any of these very real, very consequential barriers, but rather to offer equally legitimate reasons to rush joyfully not solely towards treatment, but first towards tranquility.
As someone who has spent a great deal of time and energy into pretending that I wasn’t crying, I feel deeply that it is my moral obligation to argue how irrational this kind of mental neglect can be, and how as a species, we have vilified a natural practice that must be redefined as one of the most beautiful parts of being human: working on your mind!
In the years surrounding Robin Williams’ death, one question kept resurfacing: why do we fear caring for the mind? You may fear treatment for a plethora of reasons that I know I cannot soothe in a couple hundred words, but for many, the suggestion of medical intervention is daunting because it bypasses the crucial relationship between mind and body. While I invariably advise seeking professional help—indeed, I do not believe there exists a person who would not benefit from some form of therapy or treatment—I also believe that advice alone is futile without a shift in how we understand our own minds. Before we can heal them, we must learn to regard them not as enemies to subdue, but as companions to nurture.
If a broken bone deserves a cast painted with signatures of compassion, a fractured mind deserves the same. I want to trace both the roots and the remedies of that fear, in hopes that confronting its fallacies might offer some relief.
Us humans feel a tremendous amount of pressure to prove to ourselves and those around us that we are strong of mind from the beginning of our lives to the end, that our minds are impermeable to the oh so embarrassing experience of trauma and pain. Bear with me as I speak in a degree above myself, but what would be the point if our minds weren’t malleable to some sort of corruption? Are we humans or are we robots? And what could possibly be more exciting and more worth living than the consistent pursuit of a happier, healthier mind, and sequentially, a happier and healthier existence?
A therapist once told me that healing and growth are unavoidably holistic. Simple enough but think about all the areas in your life that you put blood, sweat and tears into. Maybe you prioritize your physical strength, your career, your art, or your relationships. Hear me when I say that there is no area of our physical lives that won’t improve if we don’t also allow our minds to. There is also no area of our lives that are not actively suffering from a suppression of these very natural experiences. So maybe if you need a push to be vulnerable, redirect your intention.
I think it’s really easy for us as humans to separate our minds from our bodies. When we’re hurting or tired, we feel like skinful vessels carrying our brains around to communicate with other brains, hoping those brains don’t pay too much attention to what’s holding us up or how we decided to dress it. We identify so deeply with our consciousness that we objectify and disassociate our physical bodies, and in turn, we feel much more comfortable nurturing them in a way our minds do not deserve.
But why, if our minds are so important, so above the rest of the physical world, do we reject their care? Why has depression been given a shameful narrative while a fracture is deemed noble or a consequence of the brave? It is time that we reject the notion that we should subsist on our physical health alone, that the dentist and a balanced diet, a gym membership and Dayquil will suffice, that a hurting consciousness is impenetrable into the real world just because it shouts silently. The truth is that our minds and bodies are intrinsically connected, we cannot neglect one and hope for the other to be unaffected.
But these are two sides of the same rusty coin. I will be the first to admit that there was a large sum of truth in my parents’ advice to ‘work out’ or ‘eat healthier’ as a response to some unfounded anxiety in my teenage years. When talking about taking care of our minds and our bodies, we cannot ignore bidirectional influences: poor physical health can worsen mental health, and mental health disorders can lead to worse physical health outcomes.
And now, science is catching up with what intuition already knows: the mind and body move in tandem. A 2023 study found that physical illnesses like heart and metabolic disease often co-occur with depression, yet these overlaps rarely receive attention in psychiatric practice. Cardiology research echoes this link, showing that depression and heart disease not only coexist but accelerate one another’s progression.
All that goes to say is screening for depression does not have to carry these intense emotional and personal connotations of defeat— it can be as routine as an x-ray. I would even aspire to feel as unashamed of crying as I do of bleeding.
There are a million ways to go about caring for our minds. If I’ve inspired you in any way to exercise your stability and adaptability, the next steps might take the form of a depression screening, reaching out to a loved one, or compiling a list of mindfulness exercises that speak to you (some of my favorites include journaling, meditation, and practicing gratitude, but these can take relatively any form). The first step, however, is recognizing that the struggle is not a flaw to be forgiven, but a fact of being alive. Because why learn anything at all if we assume our minds are in their final form from the start? Why bother exercising if we believe our bodies are born strong enough? Everything we do as humans is to become a better version of ourselves, and mental health is no different; as mindful, social creatures, it must be a priority.
Healing is not indulgence—it’s maintenance.
 So, get screened for depression, embrace your imperfections, and start strengthening your mind. The alternative is to keep pretending—vouch for lobotomies, blame it on weakness, call it anything but what it is— being human.
And how beautiful is that?
                                                                                                        - Kate Albert