I'm going to add my two penneth worth.

I used to think that mental illness was something 'they' got. It would never be me.

It was a great eye opener for me to find that when I started my training to become a psychotherapist, the people that I met on the course, the ones whom I related to the most and found the most engaging and human were those people who quite early on in the course revealed that they were suffering from varying forms of mental illness, or had done so in their past. Strangely enough, these people revealed themselves to be the most open, compassionate and human of the group.
The rest of the group , as the time wore on , started to reveal themselves to be no strangers to mental illness neither. It's just that they were more defended than those who were more at ease with themselves and their vulnerabilities.

Being human, experiencing life's ups and downs and having emotions means that no one is immune from mental illness. It's not a question of us and them, I've come to understand. It is more of a US and when ...
It will come to us all at some point in our lives. It is part of the human condition.

Babyfairy