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This Is What Depression Really Looks Like

Time to Change has launched "Get the Picture", a campaign to end the use of head-clutching pictures in stories about depression.

All too often stories about mental health are illustrated with pictures like this:

1. "I remember how difficult it still was for me to get out of bed every morning."

2. "My life had fallen into a routine of harming myself."

3. "My family were great, but they didn't know what I was going through."

4. "I would still wear a fake smile every day to try and hide the pain I was feeling."

5. "I'm most comfortable disappearing into a crowd full of strangers."

6. "I felt totally disengaged and trapped in a bubble of my own misery."

Today sees Time to Change, the mental health anti-stigma programme run by Rethink Mental Illness and Mind, launch Get the Picture, a campaign aiming to encourage media outlets to stop using simplistic and stigmatising images of people clutching their heads to illustrate stories about mental illness. Visit Time to Change for more info and to see more pictures of what mental illness looks like, and share your own with the #GoodbyeHeadclutcher hashtag on Twitter.