I experienced my first crippling bout of depression during the fall semester of my junior year at NYU Abu Dhabi. I'd been going to therapy since the year before, and it had stopped being helpful. Not because my therapist was lacking. In fact, I am still grateful to him for helping me stay afloat for a long, long time. But this was beyond what weekly counseling sessions could fix.

My depression did not hit me all at once. It was subtle, like days and days of annoying not-quite-rain, not-quite-drizzle frizzing up my hair. I first started sleeping a lot — during the day when I should have been in class and early in the night when I should have been having dinner.

I didn't think much of it at the time. I justified my sleeping by telling myself I didn’t have much to do, and that my best friend and roommate were doing the same. But it got to the point where others started noticing. I remember a conversation I had with one of my senior friends at the time, who told me, "Roshni, I think you have narcolepsy. Whenever I stop by your apartment you're asleep.” She didn't say it nicely. It was more accusatory, as though something was wrong with me and I was ignoring it.

When my therapist first suggested medication — he knew, I think, far before I did that this was not just me being tired — I rejected the idea. I had grown up thinking that people who claimed mental illness were just blaming their life circumstances on something else. But really, in the back of my mind, I knew I was trying to die. I would fall asleep in the bathtub and wake up to my roommate banging on the bathroom door. I would deprive myself of food because sleeping seemed like a better use of my time.

When my panic attacks started, I began wondering if maybe I had been wrong all along and that everything really was beyond my control. For those who have never had a panic attack, this is how I can best describe it: it feels like you're drowning and there is nowhere to come up for air, no matter how hard you try swimming to shore.

So I caved. I got a combo psychologist/psychiatrist deal and started my first round of antidepressants. And boy, did it change my life.

The best way to describe how is with another anecdote. During my first week of RA training of senior year, I noticed I was having trouble reading presentation slides in our meetings. Someone suggested getting my eyes checked, so I did. When I first put on my glasses, it felt like a change in technology. Like my life had been some sad VCR tape, and now everything was in high definition.

That is how going on meds felt. I wasn't suddenly cured and happy and normal again. But things seemed sharper, more tangible. I no longer felt like I was swimming in a shallow pond when I could have been walking all along.

Since then, my life has not been without trouble. I have been sad and lonely and miserable on meds. I recently moved to Shanghai all on my own and learned that you can be sad and unhappy without being depressed.

Sadness and depression are not always mutually exclusive, but they can be. People throw around the phrase, "I'm depressed," all the time, but I have come to learn that depression is not just — or at all — sadness. Even so, the phrase is used so nonchalantly that it makes me cringe whenever I hear it.

But that is just a scratch on the surface when it comes to things people have told me since my diagnosis and subsequent treatment. The most common one is, "It's all in your head. Think of how many people have it so much worse than you."

First of all, yes, it is all in my head. Mental illness can be a product of genetics, environmental exposure before birth, brain chemistry or a combination of these factors. Your brain with mental illness is actually different from that of someone without it.

Second, I know that so many people have it much worse than me. Not only am I painfully aware of this fact, but I also want to kick myself because I know I have no reason to feel this wretched.

The less common and more hurtful things I have heard came from people I love. Recently, I went through a traumatic experience that felt like someone was dunking my head in a toilet repeatedly with no chance to come up for air. Afterwards, I locked myself in my apartment and refused to talk to anyone I didn't absolutely have to communicate with. It was around this time when I overheard a conversation between two people I loved very much. It went something like this:

"You know she's making this out to be a bigger deal than it actually is because of her problems, right?"

"Well, she's always had issues, and she knows it and we know it, so I'm not really surprised at all. Everything with her is always dramatic."

Ouch. I know I'm not the only one who has lived to hear comments like this about their struggle with mental illness. The friends I feel the closest to are the ones who have also experienced being dismissed by their loved ones and being diminished for something they can't even control.

Mental illness has been relegated to a notch below physical illness, which is frustrating to watch and experience. It has been hard to live with, especially at NYUAD. I think the strength derived from our school's diversity can often become its weakness too, especially when it comes to conversations surrounding mental health.

In a place where your secrets are often not your own, it's hard to navigate how to support yourself and simultaneously contribute positively to the conversation around mental health. Add on to that the university’s limited counseling resources, and you have a place where the water is constantly nearing a boil with nowhere to spill onto.

While the university strives to provide more and more resources to address mental health, like the wonderful work of the peer support group REACH, so much more can be done to minimize stigma. I don't claim to have the knowledge or ultimate say on how to do this. But I know what has helped me: friends who take the time to learn how to support me at my lowest, professors who understand that a mental health day is often just as important as a sick day and people who never make me feel like a lesser human being because of the chemical imbalance in my brain. On the hardest days, that is all you can hope for.