I grew up with major depression and a major mood disorder. My doctor thought I was autistic but when she gave me an IQ test I was high functioning and in 1975 they didn't discover high functioning autism until later in the 1990s. So I was diagnosed(misdiagnosed) as depressed. I was picked on by bullies, physical, mental, emotional abuse, etc. Just because I was different in some way, called an Oddball because of X or Y, that is something the other kids didn't have.

I managed to graduate high school and college and was working a good job until I developed schizoaffective disorder in 2001. It is like bipolar with schizophrenic cycles. Less than 0.5% of the population suffers from it and it is very rare so not everyone knows about it.

In 2003 I ended up on disability as I could not find a job, and could not hide that I was mentally ill. ADA says one cannot be discriminated against because of a mental disability or mental illness, but I was called overqualified or any other reason to reject me. As I grew older I also have age discrimination.

I wish I can say it gets better, but it is like fighting with demons in your head to keep the negative thoughts away. The thought that say you are worthless, or that you will fail, nobody likes you anymore, you are past your prime, etc. The medicine helps treat a chemical imbalance but not all mental illnesses are due to chemical imbalances. Getting a good doctor is hard as well.

I'm 48 and have been suicidal about 14 times in my life. I'm still alive to talk about it, so I survived somehow.

Generation-X is called the suicide generation because of so many of my generation killing themselves or getting suicidal. It is like life is so hard to live, you are on expert mode and struggling just to wake up in the morning and get ready for work, and by the time you get to work you used up most if not all of your mental energy to get up and get ready.

http://boingboing.net/2016/12/11/insiders-americas-largest-c...

Mental Hospitals as shown in that above link, are not always for helping mentally ill people and some are run like prisons and they keep you there until your insurance runs out to maximize their profits.

A mental illness is an invisible disability, when companies think of disabled people, they think of someone in a wheel chair, a deaf person, a blind person, someone missing body parts, etc. They never consider a mentally ill person or accommodating them. If the stress is too much and it is making you sick, other employees will do things to you to see how angry they can make you. Just because you can't smile due to flat effect paralyzing your face muscles, some employees think you might be up to something because you have a 'poker face' and didn't wave back to them when you walked in during the morning because you are too busy fighting demons in your head to see people wave at you.

There is no cure, no magic, it does not go away, you just try to learn skills to cope with it and find ways to screen out negative thoughts and maybe try a different medicine and see if it works better.

I am not 100% recovered, but I am making progress and trying to get back into programming. I am writing this to let people know that there is no magic bullet to kill the mental illnesses, and that we are not all violent like those public shooters they call mentally ill but they are sociopaths and most of us are not, we are just dysfunctional in some way.