• WHAT DOES MENTAL ILLNESS MEAN TO ME?

    by Just_Fn_Crazy

    What does having a mental illness mean to me? It means that being myself will perhaps make others and/or myself very uncomfortable. It means that because of that possibility I may have to take medications; the newer ones having fewer side effects than the old. But still it means I will most likely have to take one or more of the more user friendly types of medication for the rest of my life. It means that while others my age have long since settled into an occupation and are looking forward to retirement, I am really just beginning to start out on the road toward my dreams. And it means that people are not going to know what to say when I tell them what my disability is, or that they will say something to the effect that it is not all that bad.

    It’s not? Just think about it. Doesn’t the mere knowledge that it is possible to lose your mind scare you? It did me, even before I had my breakdown. Everything I knew of madness came from the media and my interactions, or should I more rightly say, my refusal to interact with mentally ill people at all. They were scary. There was something in not knowing what they were thinking while at the same time hearing it was not the same as what I thought about reality that scared the daylights out of me. Mentally ill people made me uncomfortable, and even today when I am around someone who is quite delusional or talking incoherently I am uncomfortable. And that’s okay. Most people are just like me, except that I know what it is like to be psychotic, and at least delusional or not making much sense.

    The difference is rather like a television show I watched one night which I believe was called “Earth: The Final Conflict”. In the show one of the aliens then ruling earth, some time in the future I presume, somehow broke with the Commonality, which was some sort of mind link between the aliens that did several things for them. One of the things it did was to afford to the aliens the ability to change shape so that they did not look as horrible as their ancestors did before the Commonality was discovered. But another was that it allowed the individual aliens to be far less of a threat to those around them than the creatures they had been when in their beastly past. The difference is, I like to think, everyone nowadays is aware that people suffering from a mental illness are no more likely to be dangerous than so called “normal” people. In fact we are less likely to commit a violent crime than those of the “normal” population.

    However, the fact remains that people with a mental illness do break the commonality which, in this case, is the human perception of what reality is, and whether one is to behave in society in, might I say, an unacceptable manner, for that it is, both to normal folk and crazy folk alike when the latter have recovered enough from their psychosis to realize the difference. Thank Heavens the common reaction then is not as it was in the tv show wherein the alien that broke the Commonality was to be hunted down and killed. More human than those aliens most people tend to just want to fix the mentally ill, a most frustrating goal because in a way the mentally ill do not so much need to be fixed as to be put in a position wherein they might heal.

    Now an ideal environment would not only mean a quiet, pleasant place but one wherein they were respected for who they really are rather than what they seem to be while ill. A place where they may interact with normal people and establish a bond, not only with those normal people, but with the reality they left behind for whatever reason, be it some situational misfortune or some biochemical imbalance in the brain. A place where they are treated as fairly as anyone else, where they have the right to meaningful employment, socialization with their peers as well as interaction with family and others in their community. And a place where they are understood, where their illness is understood and where the side effects of their medications are also understood.

    But here in the real world people with a mental illness are going to be treated with little, if any, respect by some people. As happened in St. Paul a year or so ago, people are going to be unsettled when any sizable population of mentally ill people are to be brought into their neighborhood, and they will react rather like others did to blacks when they first started moving into the suburbs; more over-reacting out of fear caused by the differences and myths concerning the nature of the minority involved than any real danger, whether social or economic. Here in the real world we who are mentally ill will continue to recover in the same sense paraplegics, or diabetics do, while those around us will continue to believe that we are either going to have another episode or that we were never really mentally ill in the first place. Here in the real world insurance companies are going to try to weasel out of paying for our treatment or treat it differently than physical illness in their policies to begin with. Here in the real world most people with mental illness are going to be left on SSI or SSDI with barely enough to get by on and no incentive to work since most of what they may earn will only be taken away. Here in reality, you and I will still be uncomfortable around delusional, or incoherent speaking people; you because they represent the unknown, and me because I’ve already been there. Here in reality many will hate, few will love and most won’t care at all. The truth is: Reality stinks until you have smelled the depths of madness. Then even this reality smells pretty dog-gone good.

    But in closing, might I say something about what I think of mental illness? Many of my peers, others with a mental illness, they think that mental illness is perhaps the worst thing that could have happened to them, but sometimes I disagree. If I never knew madness, I perhaps could not have come to love Reality. If I never had a mental illness, I would not appreciate and understand sanity as I now do. If I had not been insane at one time during my life, I would have taken what sanity I now have for granted. Come to think of it, I already did that very thing once. When I and the world both agreed I was normal I did drugs and alcohol, which were both considered normal things to do by me as well as my peers. Well, I know a couple of people now who never came back from acid trips for example, and I wonder sometimes what part my drug usage played in my own breakdown. But the fact is there: if you were never insane you are more than likely going to take your sanity for granted and you may never even begin to imagine what a wondrous gift sanity really is. But let me tell you that if there is a God, and I believe there is, you, each and every one of you has one enormous reason to praise Him.

    Thank you.