For a long time I (and people around me) just believed I must have become a lazy person and that I just needed to get over myself. The idea that I might be ill didn't even come up. When I struggled to write my bachelor's thesis I did visit an insurance-approved psychologist, but all that guy did was trying to find ways I could motivate myself, with no attempt to find out what was causing me to struggle in the first place rather than just reinforce my perception that I must just be lazy. After a couple of months I stopped going because all those visits did was making me feel worse. Also, because I chose to go to a psychologist directly rather than being delegated there by a doctor/psychiatrist, insurance only covered half of the cost, so it was a waste of money as well.

Really the first idea that it might be a mental illness rather than a personality flaw and being a general failure of a person didn't come up at all until I read a book in which I saw a lot of myself in the protagonist's mother who was said in the book to have depression. That same week I had my second bout of suicidal ideation, which drove me to get help asap.