In 2018, I mustered up the courage to tell my mom that I had been secretly seeing a mental health practitioner since 2016. I was seeing my most recent psychologist following suicidal ideation from a multitude of factors — financial instability, lack of full-time prospects in journalism, general and social anxiety, and PTSD after a postgraduate study abroad experience gone wrong, which I still haven’t fully recovered from.
She called me selfish and dismissed my pain and need for professional help. It was the second time that I had told her that I sought therapy to deal with anxiety and depression. The first time I told her was in 2013, months after I stopped going due