This is the first part of our series with NPR about mental health and generation gaps.

Have you ever had a hard time talking openly about your mental health?

Only Human and NPR recently asked listeners that question. We wanted to know if the generation that lives so much online is any more comfortable talking about psychological problems — in real life — than their parents are.

Hundreds of thoughtful, heart-breaking, deeply charged responses later, we realized that we had stumbled onto a nest of generational rifts and cultural baggage. And we wanted to explore what it means to be open about mental health on Facebook and YouTube when you don’t want to talk about it with people in the real world.

One of these stories came from a young woman named Rose, a Pakistani American in Texas. Rose had never spoken to her parents about her own depression. But she channeled our question into an awkward conversation with her mother — listen to her story here.

We also talked with young adults who worry they spent too much of their childhood in therapy, people who watched family members suffer with depression in silence, and people who sent anti-anxiety prescriptions to the pharmacy across town so their families wouldn’t know. Generational stigma is an issue, many of them said, that we need to talk about publicly.  

With their permission, we’ll be posting some of these stories to our Facebook page at Only Human Podcast. We hope you’ll follow along and join in the conversation there.

If you or someone know is suffering from mental illness, please find helpful resources here.

Special thanks to the Jane and Gerald Katcher and the Katcher Family Foundation for funding our collaboration with NPR.