When You Picture Someone with Mental Illness, Picture Me in a Nice Tailored Suit
huffingtonpost.com.au
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After finally getting fed up/building up the nerve to talk to my doctor about what was going on in my head, she clarified what OCD was doing (intrusive thoughts -> anxiety -> mental compulsions to make the anxiety go away -> intrusive thoughts get worse, more compulsions "required" to make it go away) and gave me a diagnosis of such, as well as some treatment recommendations.
I just recently wrote about dealing with OCD and posted it to social media, announcing it publicly. There was an outpouring of support, and even more satisfying, a few private messages of people discussing their own, very private battles with mental illness.
It's a huge, private struggle for most, and I think we'd all be better off if we talked more openly about it.
There's definitely an element of learning mindfulness that's key too. Learning to accept the uncertainty of random "terrible" thoughts that pop into your head, learning to not engage with them and letting them pass, etc.
I recommend two books: The Imp of the Mind by Dr. Lee Baer [2] and The Mindfulness Workbook for OCD by Jon Hershfield and Tom Corboy [3]
[1] https://iocdf.org/about-ocd/treatment/erp/
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Imp-Mind-Exploring-Epidemic-Obsessive...
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Mindfulness-Workbook-OCD-Overcoming-C...
Nowadays that is no guarantee of respectability! Seriously, I think the typical professional carries a substantial psychological load due to the conformity and personal constraint entailed.
>I think we'd all be better off if we talked more openly about it
Well I tend to classify unwanted thoughts as the purely mental equivalent of chewing on chilli. Why would I think unwanted thoughts? The answer is similar to why would I prefer foods that cause pain to my tongue and mouth.
I descended rapidly into paranoid delusions which had me convinced that the world was going to end that very day -- and I was the only one who knew about it.
Yeah that's a pretty deep low. Mine was when I was convinced that a classmate was a ghost, and seemed to be stalking me everywhere. Eventually I broke down and confessed to him, and like a smashed mirror, all illusions disappeared. In horror I took a year off my studies.
Recovery from deep holes like that may seem impossible but it's not. Accept also that there is no quick fix, no magic bullet, and that even when you're out of the tunnel, it may still take a long time to be 'normal'.
But this will also make you stronger and more empathic - and that is valuable. I don't mean it in a hippie way, but too many people lack these, and so in a way you're blessed, because your worldview has shifted and you to begin see 'more'. You will also eventually learn to make peace with yourself: it's OK to trip up, it's OK have these 'glitches'.
Final note: I cannot emphasise enough about having a good support network. Even if you have no one to trust, at the very least avoid toxic company. And by the way, you'll be surprised by what you'll get when you reach out just a little. After all, your dignity is nothing compared to your sanity, so confess to your mom, blubber on the phone with the Samaritans, break down in front of your tutor ... usually, you will find that at their core, humans are kind.
Edit: typo
The other four of us, his sysadmin team, we have all worked so hard we had a breakdown from it. It's a hazard of the job: it draws people into overdoing it. We told him to sign the fuck off for four weeks, with possible antidepressants. (He didn't, but he did take his next two weeks off without logging into IRC.)
I've had depressive and stressed periods and I'm happy to publicly say so, so this is not secretive but normalised.
Watch your coworkers and take care of each others' well-being.
I felt enlightened and had an altercation with the police who ended up beating the living shit out of me causing 3 herniated discs and TMJ that cause me agony and chronic pain daily. I have to take opiates to deal with the pain - otherwise I would be unable to have an active life.
This guy didn't experience what happens in most mental breakdowns. If you can get yourself to the doctor you have truly not lost your mind. But its a cute story.
Keep downvoting me for posting the hard truth. Real discourse...
The solution was worse. I was put on risperidone to halt the episode. It was a total 180, in a bad way. I felt stupefied and sluggish. I couldn't put two thoughts together most of the day. I ate everything, everything; once to the point of vomiting. I had extremely vivid and bizarre nightmares nightly.
It was a Catch-22 situation. I needed the antidepressants to battle winter depression, but SSRIs were the only ones that worked. However, those have a well-known side effect of triggering mania in people (and in my case, for sure).
Happy ending is that I moved to the tropics and haven't had to take any medication and have had no relapses since the move.
Your case is really not what I would call "most mental breakdowns" and it's unfair to belittle someone else's issues because they don't match up to yours. Mental issues are an everyday reality for millions of people, and by their very nature might mean the world to those suffering from it while seeming insignificant to everyone else.
You don't need to emphasize the severity your own experience, feeling shit is not a competition.
As an observer, the most alarming thing to me about this whole "raising awareness of mental illness" movement is that it's another judgment-forbidden sort of "every subjective experience is equal" movement. It's gone mainstream, too, in the usual sickening, missing-the-point way; you now have neurotypical college students with essentially easy lives drawing posters and holding fundraisers. It's not surprising people with authentic mental illnesses are rolling their eyes.
The downvotes this person is getting are a symptom of exactly this problem. "How can this person belittle someone else's illness?" In other words, everyone's illness is equally important. We've got to be diverse and inclusive. Never mind that some cases of mental illness are actually more severe than others. If everyone's entitled to their own perspective and experience, isn't this person entitled to theirs? Why downvote that? Because it doesn't fit into the modern mental-health-awareness agenda?
I think it's important that instead of lazily saying "everyone's suffering is a problem," we discern between degrees of suffering. Partly because perspective matters, but also because being told your problems are non-problems compared to someone else's is a helpful thing. The truth is, most people's problems are to some extent self-inflicted/self-created, and it's never a bad time to examine the size of that extent.
The downvotes (not mine) aren't for their experience, they're for the dismissiveness. It's like the paradox of tolerance; you shouldn't be surprised if people don't support your viewpoint about not supporting other viewpoints.
> Because it doesn't fit into the modern mental-health-awareness agenda?
Because it doesn't actual contribute anything substantive; it invalidates the author's experience seemly just to make a point that the author already acknowledged ("It seemed the only real difference between us was that I knew something was wrong")
> being told your problems are non-problems compared to someone else's is a helpful thing
How so? Far more often, people tell others that their problems are non-problems in an attempt to shut them up, not to help them. What actual value comes from attempting to precisely determine who has it worst?
> How so? Far more often, people tell others that their problems are non-problems in an attempt to shut them up, not to help them. What actual value comes from attempting to precisely determine who has it worst?
Now that I think about it, I do see this on the internet a lot, and agree that it's highly unconstructive.
What I was more getting at was a critique of a pervasive idea that everyone's self-reports should be taken at face value, and treated with equal gravity.
A contrived example: imagine someone who feels depressed because they were pumped full of self-esteem as a kid, then found out in their twenties that they weren't that special; and someone who feels depressed because of chemical imbalances they can't control. Both people would use the word "depression" to describe themselves, and in our culture, you're not allowed to say that one is "real" while the another "isn't." But in fact it would probably help the first person to know that their depression isn't, in a strict sense, real: they can get out it by improving their external circumstances, while the second person can't.
(That's not analogous to the situation here; it's just a random example.)
But that's kind of the crux of the matter, isn't it?
First off, we still know so little about mental health that we can't accurately tell which is which. And it strikes me as really harmful to categorize people's issues as 'real' or 'not real' based on vague notions. Autism, for example, was initially seriously considered a result of bad parenting, and the consequences are noticeable to this day.
Second, even if we can distinguish between, say, depression because 'raised with too much self-esteem' or 'chemical imbalance', this is mostly relevant for treatment, not diagnosis.
If the person in question cannot find their own way out of the situation, the problem is by definition 'real'. The only difference might be how the situation is handled. In fact, in many cases the treatment is the same, regardless of how someone got there.
I've seen a lot of harm caused by people arbitrarily distinguishing problems as either 'nature' or 'nurture' or 'internal' or 'external'. This distinction is not only extremely vague, it doesn't actually matter to anyone except those who are developing or implementing solutions. To everyone else, I'd advise compassion, support, and avoiding judgment.
That said, you do have a point. Personally I've become more and more convinced that for various reasons, some good, most bad, our current treatment models err on the side of adjusting yourself to fit your environment, while the most beneficial solutions I've seen involve shaping your environment to fit 'you', or at the very least a combination of both. Regardless of whether an issue is 'internal' or 'external' (again, I don't think making the distinction is as valuable as it seems).
What I do think it's productive to do is to assess based on evidence the relative weight of people's issues. I think we'd agree that treatment depends on successfully and accurately identifying the problem. A huge part of that is figuring out what order of magnitude of difficulty you've got in front of you.
I'd say that in distinguishing between 'raised with too much self-esteem' and 'chemical imbalance,' the difference in the resulting treatment is so drastic that it may as well be a different diagnosis. Someone in the former category needs to acquire some combination of acceptance, a sense of agency, and goals to strive toward. Someone in the latter needs medication. The former is easier to solve, because the latter in some cases may not be solvable at all. This doesn't mean we should abandon compassion and start yelling at the person, but isn't it a good litmus test? Shouldn't someone who genuinely wants to get better be delighted to hear that their problem wasn't so big after all?
It sounds like you're less against judgment in general and more against lazy, dismissive, heartless judgments. But that's not what I'm advocating at all. I just have sympathy for the war veteran rolling his eyes when he hears a story about someone who got mugged getting PTSD. Of course no one should be mugged, and getting mugged sucks, but oh come on, let the guy roll his eyes.
Thing is, as far as I know, and correct me if I'm wrong, our knowledge of depression and it's causes and solutions is so rudimentary that we can't really make that distinction in the first place, which means we can't really argue whether treatment needs to be 'drastically different'.
I'd argue that based on this lack of knowledge, both categories should probably first try the first solution you mention, and settle for the second if that's no help. Who's to say, for example, that someone who's entire being has been shaped over decades into 'having too much self-esteem' can actually be 'fixed' without medication?
Or consider schizophrenia. Is it nature or nurture, when there's some evidence that it can very well lay dormant until it's 'triggered'.
tl;dr: what's the value in creating ill-supported distinctions on an issue that is already rife with judgment, unwanted advice, self-esteem issues (across the board, whatever you suffer from), and so on?
> It sounds like you're less against judgment and more against hasty, lazy, dismissive, or leave-them-out-to-dry judgments. But that's not what I'm advocating at all. I just have sympathy for the war veteran rolling their eyes when they hear someone who got mugged telling a story about PTSD. Of course no one should be mugged, but come on, let the guy roll his eyes.
Such a person is free to roll their eyes, but I don't see how we should have sympathy for the 'my situation is worse than yours' kind of judgment. We can tolerate it and perhaps understand it, but it's still harmful, judgmental, and pointless.
I lost my sympathy over this behavior once I realized that much of the worst judgment I've seen and, sadly, experienced, is caused by this attitude. The people with the worst attitude to the poor are often those who used to be poor but are not anymore, obviously by not being lazy like the rest of them. The same goes for the attitude of people who used to be fat, ugly, insecure, etc. At least in my experience (and overwhelmingly so).
Given that, its a good thing people are raising awareness of mental illness. I'm especially glad that they convey a message of witholding judgement because there are a lot of people who feel entitled to be mean/judgemental to "weirdos". Those people will only stop if they are shamed for it - its a matter of emotion not knowledge. The "everyone's suffering is a problem" is like a "society-approved response" to those who shrug off problems they can't see and judge too quickly.
2. This was Your mental break. Folks with other diseases and issues have other ways of breaking down. Some folks can get to the doctor because the fear goes a different direction, and the doctor is a safe spot. Please don't discount other's troubles because they don't match your experience. Yours could have easily been a suicide attempt or something like that as well - my ex did so to try to silence the voices. His paranoia made it difficult to seek help until he got help, but not everyone has this.