In the past, Kayley Reed kept her struggles with depression and an eating disorder to herself.

“It was something that I didn’t really talk about with anybody in my life, I didn’t tell my family or my friends.

“I really just had this big self stigma around what I was going through and what I thought the perception would be if I opened up about what I was dealing with.”

Now, Kayley’s mission is to break down this stigma surrounding mental illness — and she’s doing it with fashion.

In her last year of university, Kayley took an internship at a mental health organization where she met Kyle MacNevin, a fellow intern. Kyle was extremely open about his experiences with generalized anxiety disorder and ADHD, and helped Kayley to realize she wasn’t alone.

“That’s one of the things that mental illness does, it creates this fog over you and it kind of convinces you that you’re isolated in what you’re going through, when really you’re not,” she told NewLifeOutlook.

The duo began to brainstorm different concepts for raising awareness and getting people talking about mental health and illness. Both fashion lovers, they came up the idea of a clothing line.

“We very naively started this project as a side project in school and over the next few months got support and mentorship and funding to build what is now Wear Your Label."

The fashion brand designs t-shirts and other apparel featuring slogans like, “Sad but rad,” “Anxious but courageous,” and “It’s okay not to be okay,” with the aim of encouraging conversations about topics like depression, anxiety, and self-care.

Ten percent of Wear Your Label’s profits are donated to mental health initiatives, and the company partners with various mental health organizations.

Included in every online order is a handwritten note of encouragement. The Wear Your Label team used to write these themselves, but as the company grew this was no longer feasible.

“We wanted to continue that connection with people but put it in the hands of our community, and so we created With Love as a way for organizations and schools to host letter writing parties and encourage people to write positive letters and stories of hope for a stranger somewhere in the world.”

And the models you see on Wear Your Label’s website aren’t your typical fashion models. They’re “role models” — “real people who are brave enough to wear their label.” Role models don’t need to be a certain height or weight. The application just requires that you share your mental health story and why it’s important to you to raise awareness around mental health.

Engaging with the community in these and other ways is hugely important to Kayley — just as if not more important than selling the clothing.

“The product is kind of never at the forefront of our work ... fashion has always been the secondary piece.”

Two years after the launch of Wear Your Label, Kayley says while running a business is incredibly stressful, it has produced a wonderful community of supportive people who “get it,” and have helped her towards her mental health recovery.

Stigma Still Exists

One of the Wear Your Label t-shirt slogans reads, “Stigma still exists.” According to Kayley, there are several reasons why the subject of mental illness is still taboo.

“It’s for the most part an invisible illness, and so it’s something that I think is really difficult for people who don’t have that experience to understand,” she says.

And so when you’re living with a mental illness it can be really difficult to talk about it, and scary to reach out for help.

Research into the timeframe between the onset of a mental disorder and receiving treatment for that disorder has shown many people go without help for years, sometimes even decades.

“When you break your arm you get a cast, and it’s kind of like a symbol to the world that you are hurt but you’re healing,” Kayley says.

“There’s no real symbolic thing like that for mental illness so the onus is really on the individual to reach out and say, ‘You know what, I’m hurt and I need help,’ or ‘I’m hurt but I’m healing.’

“So in a way we’ve kind of tried to emulate that with Wear Your Label, creating a little bit of visibility around something that is invisible.”

As long as we shy away from these conversations surrounding mental health and illness the stigma will persist, Kayley says, but she is encouraged by the feedback she receives from the Wear Your Label community.

The entrepreneur says hearing from customers about the conversations the brand’s clothing has helped to start is her favorite part of the job.

“Initially it was hard to see the impact because we were just so small.

“But now that we’re growing, every day we get emails or messages on Instagram or Twitter from people reaching out telling us their story.”

She has heard from people who say Wear Your Label has inspired them to talk to somebody in their life, to reach out for help, to create an advocacy program at their school, and more.

“Being able to see all those things come together ... it’s pretty amazing.

“We know that we’re just one small piece of the puzzle here, but it’s still really cool to see that happening.”