The Power To Change Mental Health Attitudes

Cassandra Kandah is founder and CEO of Healthy Life Chicago.

By Cassandra Kandah

I watched her push herself out from the broken window, 40 stories up, from a skyscraper, in downtown Chicago.

I screamed up to her, like I scream for all of those I know and have met with this type of pain, “It’s never worth it! There is always hope!”

She thrusted herself out the window and I cried in terror as she fell to the ground with a “thud” that still shakes me to my core. I did not know this woman, but I knew since the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, the sheer volume of individuals coming to my clinic, endorsing suicidal thoughts, skyrocketed to as high as 80% of the new patients I saw. 

In the following days after I watched her die, I asked myself, if she could not have been saved that day, was there a different day, where proper mental health care could have changed the entire trajectory of her life?

No one will ever really know why she jumped, but for the sake of so many other lives, we need to know more answers. What we do know, is on average, it takes a person 10 years before they reach out for mental healthcare. In that time, their symptoms worsen and relationships with those they love change or dissolve.

We need to be brave enough to have the power to change our own mental health attitudes first, before we expect change in the masses. We accomplish this, by talking about mental health as we do physical health. If this woman who jumped instead had cancer, there would be a team of people to surround her with the best available care to guide her back to health. Think of how many we would save, if we normalized anxiety and depression, like we do a cold.

““We need to be brave enough to have the power to change our own mental health attitudes first, before we expect change in the masses. We accomplish this, by talking about mental health as we do physical health.’ —Cassandra Kandah #PowerToChangeStories”
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