Wesley, I don’t pay compliments very often. But I find you to be reasonable, intelligent, nice person and I’m sorry that life has dealt you such a shitty hand.
To me, a mental illness is the same thing as cancer or low blood sugar, depending on the severity. There is nothing shameful about it and I wouldn’t see it as a violation of privacy or TMI to hear that a coworker needed to spend some time in a mental hospital. I would hope that s/he got their condition under control and are now on the appropriate medication.
Depression can be a serious debilitating condition and I see it as equivalent to diabetes instead of a yeast infection. A yeast infection is TMI because it involves genitals. What’s wrong with speaking about depression?
I wish that more people were educated about mental disorders. Earlier this week, my parents and I had a very frustrating and frightening experience trying to convince the authorities and local people to take my schizoaffective bipolar brother to the hospital after he’d gone through a melt down. Despite the fact that he’d lost his car, phone, wallet, and was hours from his home, they refused to do anything for him. Of course, he went missing, and it was only through a lot of pestering and help from his doctor that we got them to take us seriously and find him. They were convinced that he was on drugs and treated us rudely until we got his doctor involved. If he’d had low blood sugar or an asthma attack, they wouldn’t have hesitated to get him to the hospital.