On Mental Illness
Forgive the length of this post. It’s something that I wrote earlier, and that I want to put out there.
On Mental Illness:
The most common thing heard about mental illness today is that it is a disease. A disease like a physical disease, simply one of the brain. More precisely it is defined as a disease not of the physical brain itself, but of the chemicals and neurons with the brain that define our personality and mental acuity. I believe this view is wrong; perhaps not untrue, but ultimately counterproductive. I believe that a mental illness is an experience, in the same way as a thought or a feeling.
To put it simply, depression is considered a disease but bad personality traits are not. Depression, meaning recurring sadness caused by chemical imbalance, is now considered a disease of the brain. However, arrogance, which is also caused by the chemicals and neurons in our brain, is not. Someone with depression may be a kind, humble person. Yet they are considered diseased and in need of treatment and psychotherapy. An arrogant person is simply called a jerk, and then ignored. Why is it that bad people who do bad things are not considered “diseased in the mind” yet a good person who is moody for a few weeks is?
This example ignores more debilitating mental illnesses such as mine, schizoaffective disorder. This I can speak on with a position of some authority, having experienced it. Schizoaffective disorder is defined as a person who experiences hallucinations, delusions or both. I have experienced both, in many cases overlapping. I am considered diseased because of this. And it certainly must be considered some sort of disability. It is difficult to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head. It is difficult to go to a job or a class and hear voices that you experience as real, yet you must ignore them and try to elude their power as if they don’t exist.
Others say my hallucinations and delusions don’t exist in the “real world” because only I hear them. This argument is similar to saying a sad person is not truly sad because someone else might be happy. If your mother died, would you accept me saying “you are not grieving, because I am not experiencing that grief?” Yet society tells psychotics (by this I mean people who experience hallucinations or delusions) that what we are experiencing does not truly exist. If I experience a hallucination, how on earth can one say that the hallucination doesn’t exist? It exists for me because I live it. If you are not experiencing a mental illness and are dealing with someone who is, that is the most important thing to remember. It is insulting and ridiculous to say anything otherwise.
Some simply say “it’s all in your head”, usually with a tone of condescending pity, to which I want to reply “and so are all of your feelings, thoughts and your entire personality”! Does my enjoyment of learning languages exist anywhere outside my head? No one would tell me that I don’t enjoy learning languages if I told them so. They would take it as a statement of fact. They would respond the same way if I said I was feeling sad, happy or angry. Yet if I were to tell them the watchers are speaking to me, they would say “it’s all in your head, it doesn’t really exist, it’s a disease that needs to be treated, etc.” I would hope that all psychotics feel this way, but I will not claim to speak for anyone but myself.
My opinion is this: If grief and any emotion is “real” but a psychotic symptom is not, then what does this make the psychotic? It makes them diseased, different and isolated. By classifying mental illness as a disease like cancer, it makes us isolated. The first thing we do to diseased people is isolate them. The first thing we do to people who do not fit in, don’t make friends easily, or act differently from social norms is isolate them. So on all levels, society moves to isolate the mentally ill without truly understanding them as simply different. Thus the psychotic who believes that psychotic symptoms are not real is accepting the stigma that society puts upon them at least in my mind. The psychotic experience frightens most people and is classified by most medical professionals as a disease. I consider it a difference, an element of myself, which needs to be regulated with medication in the same way my pride, anger and sadness must be regulated. The fact that it takes pills to do this does not make a difference to me. If I were to feel that my psychotic symptoms are not real, that they are “fake”, I would be resigning myself to the view of those who stigmatize the mentally ill. I would be permanently classifying myself as inferior. I will not do this.
This is not to say that psychotics should refuse medications and insist that society accepts our hallucinations and delusions as the reality that we experience. I certainly endorse using force to stop a psychotic who is going to harm themselves or others. However, we must remember that society for better or for worse is structured in a way that makes it difficult for us psychotics to function and succeed within it. If you cannot master your psychotic symptoms, you are left to endure them alone until you are deemed a threat to yourself or someone else in which case you are put in a mental hospital in an odd mixture of medical treatment, prison and day care. A psychotic cannot risk telling people about their symptoms for fear of social ostracism and rejection; we must master them and act as if they are not there in order to be socially accepted and succeed at most jobs. Naturally, this is extremely difficult and for some psychotics it is impossible. I must go to my job and act as if some of the voices I hear do not exist, and pretend that I hear only those voices that belong to other people rather than all the voices I hear. In this way I tailor myself to the reality that I live in – at least that of the outside world. Those who fail at tailoring themselves to the expectations and desires of those who do not experience our reality almost always are regulated to hospitals or end up impoverished and broken. This is a travesty.
