The death of a celebrity is always front-page news, but the death of beloved actor Robin Williams, shook the nation to its very core.

Although his sunny disposition and happy-go-lucky attitude was what the public saw, Williams was struggling with more than he let on.

With past alcohol and drug addiction, money problems and depression, there are many assumed reasons behind his gruesome suicide.

I, like many others, was shocked to hear about his suicide. In the light of his death, mental illnesses need to be brought into light. While I feel as if it won’t change the way people with mental illnesses are viewed by the population for a long time, it could help, even in the smallest way possible.

According to News Week, nearly 1 in 5 Americans suffer from a mental illness, varying from depression, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. On top of that, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration also indicates that approximately 9.3 million adults (about 4 percent of Americans 18 and up) experience a serious mental illness that hinders their ability to interact in day–to–day activities.

I am one of those numbers.

While I won’t reveal what I have been diagnosed with years ago (I don’t want your pity), I will talk about what it is like to live with a mental illness in America today.

Growing up, I knew I was a bit different, but when I was 14, I was diagnosed. Unfortunately, my school councilor let it slip to my entire school of 160 students. From that point on I was told that I was “crazy” or was “just making it up for attention.” I even got a message on Myspace that said “You shouldn’t come back to school, I don’t want you to go crazy and pull a gun on us all,” and many other words and statements that are far to inappropriate to state here.

Living day by day with the weight of an illness and those words still floating around in my head is still very difficult, and I’m not the only one. Many stars and musicians today suffer from any range of illnesses, and yet, we still love and respect them.

So why is it so hard to believe that these mental illnesses are actually a serious thing?

I believe part of it is because it’s something where we can’t fully see what’s going on. With cerebral palsy, you can see what is going on with the body. For cancer, you can see the effects the cells have done to that person as well. With depression, or bipolar disorder, sometimes you can’t see much more than them looking sad, or in the case of bipolar disorder—abnormally happy.

“The generations before us did not believe in mental illnesses,” Millikin junior, Amanda Skopek says. “Nothing was wrong with you. You didn’t have ADD/ADHD, you just needed a good smack or some form of discipline and you would be fine. While it is, in fact, very real, I believe that it will take a while before the population as a whole treats mental illnesses of all forms with respect.”

The ideals of the past generations have, surprisingly, stuck around and still influenced us to just think the population is just making up something so they feel special. Unfortunately, I feel as if it will be some time before that way of thinking disappears.

It’s a cycle. The majority of the population will continue to treat it as nothing or using it to make fun of people or themselves—for example going happy to sad in an instant and saying “Oh wow, I’m like, totally bipolar. Haha”—until someone else commits suicide from depression and they’ll be upset saying something should have been done and once again the cycle will continue. It will honestly take many years until something is done and these illnesses are treated with respect.