Growing Pains was created with the desire to create a film that portrayed the struggles of mental illness and ways to overcome it. However, I didn’t want to create a film that portrayed mental illness as something dark that needed to be vanquished, but something that simply needed love and care like any other part of the body. Mental illness can often be portrayed as something that you should hate about yourself, or that it is something that makes you lesser-than. With Growing Pains I wanted to teach the opposite: that mental illness may be incredibly difficult to live with, but through learning to love yourself in every stage of your struggle and success, and through taking good care of yourself and your brain, life can be livable again.