If you are lucky, you have no idea what it’s like to have a disease that society questions because people can’t see it and aren’t sure they believe in it.
…..But, suddenly, a tumor on my spinal cord!…There was something wrong, there was something they could do, but, more important, I had something that I wasn’t ashamed of.
I recall actually saying to my twenty-year-old self: “Thank god I have cancer.”
This is something I wish for everyone who has a mental illness or addiction disorder. Not to have a tumor, obviously, but to have your illness taken as seriously as cancer.
-Patrick Kennedy Jr.