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My name is Daneisha and I'm an African American woman who suffers from severe anxiety and stress. I was around 18 years old when I had my first panic attack. I couldn't breathe and it felt like I was going to die.

Most would agree that treating invasive cancer when it is still just the size of a mustard seed has a much better prognosis than waiting and treating it when it metastasizes into a larger, less curable disease. My cancer experience makes me more resolute about treating anxiety early. 

Growing up in Japan with a workaholic surgeon father and an often-absent socialite mother, I was raised by a revolving cast of caregivers who worked at my father's hospital. An unstable home environment and lack of a consistent caregiver created in me a melancholic, anxious child prone to insomnia.

My mental and physical state was so strained but I could not find time to show weakness because I was a mother of two and needed to get back to work in 2 weeks.

For many years music helped me to feel less alone going through something I hadn’t come to understand about myself until recently. My new song CARE describes that fork in the road we all come across in our lives where we have two paths to choose walking down.

In 2020, I made a life-altering decision to take my passion for music to a new level. This decision set me on a path of self-discovery, helping me overcome depression and anxiety while also aiming to assist others in their own journeys.

I draw small robot figures on the backs of domino tiles and give them to people. I also encourage others to draw their own Bots, as they are called, and name them as a creative way to connect community. For me, the Bots and all my artwork are a way to help myself, but also a way to recognize, support and celebrate others.

My name is Jamie and I battle anxiety—social anxiety—and depression. As I write this, I am 18 and it's the middle of June. I'm going to college in a few months, which is something I never thought was possible.

As I made connections between Buddhism and neuroscience, I realized they both shared a common insight: the need to retrain our brains and ourselves to value inner peace over fleeting pleasure, to find joy amidst challenges, and to discover happiness in the very process of living.

I didn’t know that what I was experiencing was called depression until I was in my early forties, although with the benefit of hindsight I have come to realize that I have been dealing with it for almost my entire life.

When my mom saw my situation, she also understood there was something wrong. She took me to a psychiatrist and they confirmed that I had clinical depression.

To me, a survivor of trauma was someone who had been in a gruesome war or was violently abused or someone who was trafficked. I was just in a really bad accident, no one intended to hurt me. I should be happy that I survived when others didn’t and yes I was in pain all the time and I felt lousy, but I was one of the lucky ones. How could I be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder?