Steven Gold of Duluth is starting a conversation about mental illness by selling  'Mental Illness Sucks' shirts. The hope is to make mental illness more visible.

After talking with Steve, he told me the reason he started this mental illness campaign was to create a safe and creative environment for anyone and everyone to talk about mental health issues of all kinds. Steve also said the reason behind the name was because he wanted to give it a little bit of a lighter feel to such an already heavy subject.

Everyone knows someone who has to deal with mental illness whether they have it or know a loved one who does and no one really talks about it. Steve wanted to make it a more approachable subject and it works. I wore my 'mental illness sucks' t-shirt to the grocery store the other night and had a great conversation with a worker and she said I made her night. All it took for that conservation to start was her seeing my shirt.

The best part of this little start up is what Steve envisions what this can turn into. The goal is to turn it into a non profit which will help pay for people to get the mental health care they otherwise couldn't afford. He also wants to create a group of people whom would go to schools and talk about how to better deal with mental health issues, how to ask for help and how to better approach someone if you believe they may need help themselves.

He is currently working on a website where people will be able to send their stories in and also be able to buy a shirt if they'd like to get one and help support the movement. I went to school with Steve and raising awareness of mental health issues has been a very big passion of his. He got tired of seeing so many people being effected by something so invisible, and he wanted to start up conversations about it. Hopefully by  creating these shirts, he'll be able to give mental health a more physical embodiment for people to see.

If anyone would like to talk more about 'Mental Illness Sucks', you can reach out to Steve by searching for Steven Gold on Facebook and send him a message. Or if you have Instagram, you can find him @mental.illness.sucks and message him on there as well.

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