After years in the shadows mental health has finally become part of the collective conversation. Openly admitting you've suffered depression or anxiety or any condition that used to be swept under the rug is finally seen as a sign of strength rather than weakness.
Despite this push for greater honesty and less shame there's one thing that hasn't completely shaken its stigma - seeing a therapist. 
I recently started paying someone a significant portion of my hard earned to listen to me rabbit on about crap I should have dumped on someone years ago. The reason it took me so long to get my arse on the couch wasn't because I was embarrassed or thought I'd look weak, it was because I couldn't find anyone who could recommend a good therapist.
I didn't feel like using my 10 government subsidised sessions to sit on 10 different chairs searching for the right person for me. If I was going to do this I wanted to do it right, and that meant sitting across from someone I felt comfortable with, who wouldn't have me leaving with more baggage than I'd walked in with.
Any time I discussed this with anyone they'd either stare at me blankly or give me a look of "should you be saying that out loud?" I mentioned this to one of my friends in New York and she was flabbergasted: "If you lived here I could give you 10 names right now and 10 more if those were booked up." In the US, starting your dinner conversation with the words "my therapist said" is about as shocking as "pass the salt" and people swap shrink's business cards like they're collecting the set. This could be seen as America's tendency to over diagnose or it could be seen as what it is - good mental health.
In Australia we're obsessed with the idea of "mindful living", "finding your bliss" and a whole heap of other terms that mean nothing. There are people who think nothing of dropping $5000 on a wellness coach (whatever that is) or $300 a week on personal training but when it comes to the most important muscle in our body, we don't seem to be that concerned about how we're exercising it.
The other reason seeing a therapist was not high enough on my to-do list was because I'm someone who deals with the hurdles of life pretty well. I knew there were a lot of things in my past and present that should have been having an impact but since they weren't dragging me down I felt like seeing a therapist was an unnecessary indulgence. I can pile a lot on my shoulders before I start to feel the weight but that's exactly why I should have been working through things. If you're resilient and make the best of bad situations you often feel unjustified making a fuss about hardships. If you don't let them drag you down it seems pointless to dwell on them but if you don't process life's struggles properly, everything builds up quietly until you get to a point where it can't be ignored. I was completely blindsided by my breaking point and it shouldn't have taken getting to that point to make me take stock of my mental faculties and give my mind access to the tools it needed to stay healthy in the long run. It's great we're removing the stigma around mental health issues but the next step is to make it OK to do something about it.
@RachelCorbett