I was never close to my younger brother. With our six-year-age gap and clashing personalities, we rarely had anything to talk about at the end of the day. I regret not talking to him more. These past few years have been a whirlwind of bright lights and trips to the hospital, as I prayed and hoped for the illness to go away. I often find myself spending my days going over certain memories and blaming myself for not seeing it sooner, and not being proactive about it faster. The truth is depression in children is prevalent in today’s societies and the discussions about it are limited.

Most days, I pretend the brother I talk to on the phone is the brother that would laugh and make fun of my nerdy appearance. Sometimes, I distance myself by pretending that my life is a television show I can watch on TV, and turn off whenever I want. The lines between reality and fantasy quickly become tangled up in my mind. In my “fantasy”, my dad acts in the part of the stern but loving father. My mom is the stressed-out parent trying to ensure the best for her family. My sister plays the detached and angsty teenager. My brother portrays the depressed child struggling to make it through the day without another panic attack.  I star as the nosy helicopter sibling. These days it’s getting harder to pretend.

Every time I come home I notice some new development in the grand scheme of my family’s soap opera. In this week’s episode of “Keeping Up with the Hulets” my character finds out that her younger brother had another panic attack at school and ran away again, an episode that ended with the police taking him to the hospital for further psychiatric evaluation. The big  problem is there seems to be no resolution in any of the episodes. Each episode is a new issue that ends up being piled onto the stack of existing problems that revolve around one main plot point: my brother’s mental health. For example, last season’s episodes mainly focused on my brother’s two-month stay at the Phoenix Children’s Hospital, where he endures plain white walls, and consistent prodding from his doctors. This season centers around the financial strain and bills that never seem to end because of my brother’s anxiety and depression. With each of these struggles, the Hulet family continuously hopes for an easier week than the last, but to no avail.

Lately, I’ve been struggling to distinguish between the fantasy that my family’s lives are actually a soap opera and the reality that everything I “imagine” is actually happening. With each passing visit to my parents’ house I notice their tired eyes and strained smiles. My grandmother appears more hunched over and frail. My sister continues to detach herself from what’s happening altogether. The sad reality is that because my brother is only 12 years old, the doctors and nurses at the hospital can only prescribe so many medicines to him, and offer limited advice.  In turn, my parents struggle with making decisions in how to best support my brother’s mental illness with the few choices they are given from therapists and doctors combined. It is hard to not notice that with every passing day, my father has less and less hope that my brother will return to his former lively self. Even worse, it seems all my mother can talk about these days is my brother overcoming his depression and being able to go to school again like other kids his age. I think she focuses on his returning to school to convince herself that he will get better sooner, rather than later.

Sometimes I dream about what it would have been like if my brother hadn't been born at all. Would my parents be happier with their lot in life? I always squash these dreams as quickly as I can because a world without my brother would be bleak and dreary compared to my family’s current reality. This only adds to my guilt of not being a better sister in the first place. After all, maybe if I had been closer to my brother when we were younger maybe he would have confided in me about his depression sooner. Nowadays, I’ve slowly embraced my role as a helicopter sibling, constantly worrying about her younger brother and monitoring his every move. Yet my role in the tv show has been limited because I moved out of the house to go to college. Consequently, my character has been reduced to a supporting character who tries her best to keep in contact with her brother but even this appears to be impossible. Stilted phone calls, and blank stares are what my character encounters whenever she visits home and calls her brother.

However, as much as my family and I don’t want to admit it, we can’t fix my brother’s mental illness with a snap of our fingers. Mental health within younger children is a relatively unknown territory for many doctors and therapists, as it is hard to pinpoint a single solution. It doesn’t help that every time mental health is brought up in the media it’s quickly deemed insignificant because people often bring up the “resilience” myth, and state that kids will bounce back from their mental illnesses. The problem with children’s mental health is that more people aren’t talking about it openly and instead view it as a taboo. After being a part of my brother’s continuous journey with anxiety and depression, I can safely say that it’s a topic that should not be ignored.

Even I ignored what was happening concerning my brother’s depression for the longest time by pretending that it was all a façade. I remember thinking to myself that my brother was “acting out” for attention, and his hollow eyes and monotone voice were an act. Children’s mental health is a topic that is so easy to ignore when it shouldn't be, and it's our jobs as human beings to start the conversation. Whether it’s with friends, family members, mentors, or another type of confidant it’s a discussion that needs to be started. For the more we ignore the brokeness within our society that begins in childhood, the more dangerous and frightening the world may become.