Question: When do you tell someone you are getting close to that you see a therapist and take medication?
Anne Fenton, MD: The simple answer is: when you are confident about yourself and your treatment. Consider a person who has a family, a social life, and a job teaching in a university. He also happens to have asthma. Obviously, he is much more than simply an “asthmatic”. He has to treat his symptoms so that they won’t interfere in his daily life, but nothing more than that.
Similarly, even though psychiatric symptoms affect emotions and behavior rather than physical areas of the body, they are no more than symptoms of a condition that can be treated in order to carry on with normal life. A person who has bouts of depression is not “a depressant” nor is a person with panic attacks “an anxiety disorder”.
Clearly there are complexities to relationships and personalities. A lot depends on trust, history, and approach.
Your question also touches on a larger issue: when, how, and whether to tell schools, employers, peers, managers, etc. There are many variations on this theme that space does not permit a more complete and inclusive answer. However, I will be happy to respond to questions on specific situations as they come in.
Without a doubt, stigma continues to play a role in such situations.
All things considered, it would be useful to talk it over with your therapist, or anyone who knows you well and/or has been in a similar situation.
Hopefully one day we will progress to such a point that stigma is no longer an issue.