After reading the article and dozens of responses, nothing could be more touching than the sharing of ideas around a common perception of suffering. But I have a problem with what is assumed by your article, Wil Wheaton, that goes beyond this sharing of pathos that I thought to write about for some clarifications.

1. When you make statements like <<There are parents who have learned that mental illness is no different than physical illness, and they’re helping their children get better.>> where is the evidence that mental illness is nothing more than physical illness? And if there is none, are you not misleading any parent who would care to work with a depression more accurately?
2. You say you have ‘chronic depression’, but how were you convinced of this? You simply state <<It’s part of how my brain is wired, and because I know that, I can medically treat it, instead of being a victim of it.>> How do you know that? Of course, one can always take an aspirin to feel better, but that does not treat the cause. You never once explain how this ‘hard wiring’ works to determine a depression, but just give emotional descriptives of your suffering as if such a testimony were sufficient for what you are saying to be true. It seems all the reader is being asked to do, is identify with you and your experiences, and take the truth for what you are saying for granted. Of course, you claim not to be an expert, but these are reasons that you should take responsibility for, not an expert.
3. With all due respects for any suffering and anxiety you have had personally, in the face of the world today there is often a good reason to have such anxiety and depression. Have you tried actually engaging the problem not as something within you, but as a call to act in the world and do something about why people should be depressed and why the cause of this is not in your brain? For example, not having free education and medical care in the U.S. is a cause not only to be depressed, but to do something about it — not about your brain.
4. But the question remains, why should anyone consider oneself mentally ill to actually acknowledge the truth of their suffering?

Is this not really the first Stigmatization?

When you, and no doubt others, turn depression and anxiety into a mental illness are you not stigmatizing yourself and others?

Of course, in a second step, you try to deny this stigmatization of mental illness, by then asserting that it is just a physical illness, like a cold, and therefore nothing to be ashamed of. And once mental illness is deemed to be nothing more than an illness of the body, then everyone should just let medical science relieve you and others of their guilt. But is this just a cop out?

For in the end, what you are describing is not medical science, but an old cathartic ritual of religion which begins by giving everyone sins, then tells them there is no reason to be ashamed of their sins if they are only brave enough to confess them to a priest and come under the demands of a religion. Of course, for all the non-believers, you will surely go to hell.

In the end, Mr. Wil Wheaton, I wish you luck and a bit more courage, since for someone like me you have not even begun to identify the real problem of depression or its cause, but bypassed it with a confession of suffering wrapped up in quasi-medical-scientific garb that sounds more like a plea for a grant for NAMI, than anything else.

Sincerely,

S