“Will My Mental Illness Hurt My College Chances?”
As a 9-year college consultant and someone whose depression first showed up when I was 14, around some of y'all's ages, I've worked with well over 100 college-applying teens with mental illnesses who landed T30s. I also wrote personally about my own depression and ended up landing full rides to USC (BA) and the #1-ranked Iowa Writers' Workshop (MFA). Here is everything I wish I knew at your age.
First off, colleges legally cannot discriminate against you for mental illness, so don't worry about them rejecting you because they "see it as a weakness" or a vulnerability. If you demonstrate self-advocacy (see later in this post), disclosing your mental health journey can actually become a valuable application asset and, in consultant terms, a powerful "hook."
The second thing, however, is that if your depression holds you back extracurricularly / stunts your grades / caps your course rigor, that will absolutely hurt your chances, so it's crucial that, if you're experiencing depression, anxiety, OCD, or any other mental illness, you address it ASAP.
Therapy and meds literally saved my life, so I'm a huge believer in exploring both. However, they're not your only option—I often meet with students whose parents are in denial or, worse, don't believe in mental illness at all, sometimes due to cultural stigmas or their own upbringing. There are interesting studies showing that physical exercise can be as effective as psychotropic meds, as well as similar findings about gardening—I guess soil microbes enter under your fingernails and simulate SSRIs? Here's a Harvard piece about mindfulness meditation, too. My point is: there are lots of options of ways you can tackle this, all of which feel impossible when you're actively depressed, but start small! I'm talking 3 mins of meditating a day, or 20 minutes of walking around the block. And be gentle with yourself; like the great poet Donald Justice said, "When besieged by doubt or depression, take a shower and change your clothes." Sometimes the first step is that simple.
As far as your college apps, don't listen to anyone who tells you not to write about your mental illness—this drives me up the wall. Your mental health journey is an important part of your selfhood and candidacy, and it contextualizes all your accomplishments across the board. Think of college apps like a track race where AOs are watching from the bleachers and everyone running is doing so carrying a backpack. If you place 3rd, that's pretty impressive. But if you place 3rd and then, in front of everyone, you dump out your backpack and show that you've been carrying 50 pounds of bricks the whole time (i.e. your mental illness), all of a sudden your 3rd-place finish becomes more impressive than the empty-backpack 1st. But if you don't show AOs the bricks you've been carrying, they won't know to factor them in.
The secret is: don't write a sob story; write an origin story. If you take active steps to address your depression, like exploring meds, therapy, exercise, gardening, peer support, etc., you can then share those steps with AOs in your essays. This demonstrates self-advocacy and emotional maturity, two things colleges explicitly look for in applicants. As long as you limit the hopeless, "woe-is-me" lamenting to the beginning of your essay and then, by the end, list concrete, positive, impressive actions you undertook that wouldn't have been possible without your self-advocacy, your application will be golden. It's especially impactful if you can describe how you've used your lived experience with mental illness to help others with theirs (with the added, documented benefit of it ironically helping you heal in the process).
Finally, and most importantly by far, please please reach out for help if things go very dark and your depression ever tells you to hurt yourself or that the world would be better off without you. I've lost friends and immediate family members to depression and bipolar disorder, and young people right now are in a crisis. Please don’t become a statistic; I promise there is always someone who will listen. Leaving doesn’t end the pain—it only displaces it onto others after you’re gone.
Your depression can equip you with superhuman empathy and resilience if you learn how to wrangle it. Bill Hader, whom I love, shared that, when his panic attacks threatened to derail his SNL career, he learned to visualize his anxiety not as an enemy, but as a little monster sitting on his shoulder, thus befriending it. That's helped some of my past students. And if your mind ever takes a dark turn, please don't ever be afraid or embarrassed to dial 988 (if you're in the US) or contact Didi Hirsch, my favorite support group with a dedicated teen line. No matter how alone or isolated you feel, people are out there who care and will help—many of us motivated by our past inability to save others whom we loved.
Hang in there, y'all, mental illness can be brutal, but it doesn't have to hinder your college success or your life if you take it seriously and address it with guts and self-compassion! I'll be rooting for you 😄