Growing up, we are taught that health is important. Health classes are implemented in school curriculums across the country, completion of a physical education class is required for graduation. Posters line the walls of schools with anything from safe sex, to instructions for washing your hands. When you do not feel well, you go to the doctor; If you need a tooth pulled, go to the dentist. When you watch a person coughing and sneezing, you assume that they have a cold, maybe the flu; you see a person vomiting uncontrollably and complaining of stomach pain, we assume they may have a stomach bug, maybe food poisoning. Have you ever thought about illnesses with symptoms that we cannot see? Maybe the problem is not that we cannot see them, we just choose not to.  What about when you watch someone go from smiling and laughing all the time, to never cracking a smile? Do you try to see if they’re okay, or do you just go about your day? We have all been sad at some point in our lives. We all have days where we just went to be by ourselves and just cry it out; unfortunately, some people carry that feeling for months, sometimes years. You’re probably reading this and thinking “who wants to walk around sad all the time”; and I agree with you, but sometimes the person cannot help it. These are all signs of mental illness. Mental illness is, or mental health conditions, are disorders that affect your mood, thinking, and behavior (Mayoclinic.org). They don’t wake up in the morning and say, “hey I want to be sad today”; it’s their brains that make the decision for them, this is commonly known as depression. Depression is an illness that involves the body, mood, and thoughts, and that affects the way a person eats, sleeps, feels about himself or herself, and thinks about things (Medicinenet.com). Sometimes the person doesn’t show any symptoms. They walk around smiling and laughing like everything is okay, when they’re dying on the inside. My cousin was one of those people. Devin had a smile that could brighten the darkest room, and a laugh that was contagious. We grew up in two different states, but we always spent the summer together at our grandma’s house. As we got older, the summers at grandma’s house slowly ended. We went from spending two to three months together a year, to only seeing each other once or twice, three times if we were lucky. The last time I saw him was over Thanksgiving break, we spent Thanksgiving in Pennsylvania at grandma’s house. I wish I would have known that it would be the last time. On December 8, 2016, my cousin took his own life. I went numb when I received the news, I felt like someone had ripped my heart out of my chest. That evening, I decided to look at his social media accounts. After scrolling through endless posts about drugs, lyrics, and pictures, one post caught my eye. It was from October, he had made a post about how he had been battling with depression. A CDC study showed that African Americans have the highest rates of suicide, at more than twelve percent, despite having a lower lifetime risk, but suicide is the third-leading cause of death for Black males ages fifteen to twenty-four (Newsone.com).  My cousin, at twenty-one years old decided that his life was no longer worth living. Also, A study conducted by the American Medical Association showed that the prevalence of major depressive disorder was the highest for White people, eighteen percent, but is most chronic for African Americans, fifty-six percent, only forty-five percent seek treatment (Newsone.com). Devin was a part of that eleven percent, and so was someone else’s family member, maybe they were a part of it themselves. Although the reasons that people ignore mental illness are as unique to the individuals involved, members of the African American community are less like to seek mental health services because of racial and class disparity, lack of knowledge, and religious and cultural traditions. 