Olympic Runner Alexi Pappas was surrounded by mental health growing up. But, that did not mean she had the vocabulary to describe it. It was not until she had her own experience with depression and her doctor explained that the brain, like a bone, could get injured, that she began to understand.
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age. Kids, she says, should be taught,"that your brain is a body part, and it can be injured, like any other body part."Olympic Runner Alexi Pappas had no choice but to be surrounded by mental health growing up. Her mother, who had bipolar disorder, died by suicide when Alexi was only four years old. That did not mean, however, that she really understood mental health or had the vocabulary to describe it. It was both a taboo subject in the 1990s and in her household.
Alexi explains she thought that her mother, “Was so sick and unhelpable that she had to go. Therefore, I wanted to never be in that situation where I reminded myself of her, because I thought in that case I might be unhelpable, too, and I might have to go.” So, Alexi tried to do everything she could to be different from her mother. To her, that meant becoming someone great, someone happy, and ultimately an Olympian.
She didn’t even notice how bad she was herself. It was actually her dad who made her get help. Even still, getting to help was much harder than she could have ever imagined. She did not know how to find a provider and describes the process as humiliating, feeling she needed to ask for favors to find doctors and get in quickly given her urgency. This humbling experience inspired how she thinks about the challenges in the mental health system.
, as she believes that if it had existed when she tried to get help, a lot of her story would not have happened the way that it did.
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