Open Sourcing Mental Illness

You really need to know what you know, and what you don’t know, before you get up there. If you’re not a trained mental health professional, you don’t know much. You know your own experiences, but somebody told me once that using the toilet doesn’t make you a plumber. Your experiences are 100% valid, but only apply to you – you have to be extremely careful about applying them to anyone else. Talk about your experiences, but make it clear that experiences vary dramatically. “This is what it was like for me. It’s not like this for everybody, and it may not be this way for you.”