SALT LAKE CITY - To the outside world, Melissa Gregory looks like any other person, similar to so many others dealing with her condition.
However, unlike someone with a serious physical ailment requiring prolonged medical intervention and extensive treatment, her disorder is invisible to the naked eye but also requires years of intensive therapy and medication to prevent its potentially debilitating impacts.
Until age 14, Gregory was a high-achieving person who enjoyed school, as well as spending time with her friends and family. In ninth grade, she began feeling especially anxious, she said, which affected her academics and her interpersonal relationships.
"My anxiety kind of went through the roof," Gregory explained. "I wasn't able to attend school anymore. I couldn't even go into the building."
Right around that time, she began cutting - a common form of self- injury for people with mental disorders - and eventually began self- medicating with drugs and alcohol, as well as engaging in increasingly reckless behaviors.
"I felt like my world had completely crumbled," Gregory said.
With her life unraveling, she was diagnosed at 16 with bipolar disorder and later was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Fortunately, her mother found the National Alliance on Mental Illness Utah.
Looking back, the discovery "completely saved my quality of life," said Gregory, now 26.
"Something really bad could have happened," she said. "I could have just ended up dead or in the hospital."
Gregory said once she was able to find the correct medication and mental health therapies, "I had never felt that good in my entire life."
Today she is the mother of a 7-year-old daughter and has become an instructor at NAMI Utah, helping others dealing with mental health issues.
On Saturday, about 2,000 people participated in an event at Liberty Park to raise money and awareness for mental health. Among the participants was Gregory's mother, Robyn Emery, who also has a son with diagnosed mental illness.
Emery said the resources available through NAMI have helped their family immensely.
"Without (NAMI Utah), I don't know if we would have been able to get through it," she said. The event was part of a nationwide effort to raise awareness about mental health in society and the unfair stigma that is often associated with it - something Emery said must change.
"People with mental illness are people just like everyone else," she said. "I would hope that (events like this) would help people to see that we're all people. Some of us have diabetes. Some of us have heart disease. I have a lung condition. They have something wrong with their brains.
"The stigma and discrimination are not right, and I would like to see that erased," Emery added.
NAMI is the nation's largest grass-roots mental health organization dedicated to building better lives for the millions of Americans affected by mental illness. The organization advocates for access to services, treatment, support and research, and works to raise awareness, said NAMI Utah Executive Director Jamie Justice.
"One in 4 people will have a mental illness, but you won't know it because they look like anybody else," she said. "There is this stigma that people with mental health issues are crazy, but many of the people in recovery are getting the help they need with family support, and they are doing well."
Justice said the access to services is the key to helping solve the mental health crisis that exists today. She said mental health should be covered the same way as physical health, with patients able to visit professionals who can help them in their time of need.
Currently, many insurance plans don't adequately cover mental health, and many individuals and families suffer needlessly, Justice said.
"If we all treated mental health like we treat physical health, we would be a much happier society," she said.
Email: jlee@deseretnews.com
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