Last week, the University College Cork held a mental health week to bring about awareness to the issues of mental health and help educate and end the stigma attached to the topic.
Linda Creedon, a final year student at the college, decided she would kick-start the week by sharing her own struggles in a moving video.
The nursing student poses in front of a camera and details how she battled with depression in 2013 via handwritten pages.
“I am not a victim, I am a survivor”, she writes in a bid to encourage others to ask for help and seek advice.
Creedon, who is an advocate of positive mental health and avid campaigner, ends the post by asking the viewer three simple questions.
The video, which Creedon posted to her Facebook account, is just under 10-minutes long and has been viewed over 155,000 times since being uploaded on November 9th.
Accompanying the clip, Creedon wrote:
“So in aid of UCC mental health week starting tomorrow I made this video about my own struggles with mental health. I am a huge advocate of mental health charities and foundations and attend and support as many events as I can, some of which I make public via social media sites. While the majority of people who choose to communicate with me on these topics are very positive, there are always the handful of people who post a nasty comment or message trying to be insulting or demeaning towards me.
While normally I can keep my cool and ignore these people, enough is enough. It is my responsibility to take my power back from those whose goal is to put others down.
I hope that by watching this video one person who is going through something similar can find their inner strength to ask for help. We all deserve to live a happy life and it is not for others to dictate how we feel!
If you like this video please share in order to spread a positive message and awareness that mental illness can affect anyone! If you don’t like it, that’s no problem, we all have different opinions but just click it off and it won’t bother you.
Take your power back! #mindyourmind #stampoutstigma [sic]”
Watch the touching video in full below:
