On the Bus

All of us either have some form of mental illness, or know someone else who does. Are we crazy? Are we different from normal people?

Almost everybody knows someone with a mental illness. It is unfortunately all too common. Crazy and normal are really a poor choices of words. Healthy and ill are better choices. But even then they are variable terms. A person can have a broken leg and still be healthy. Likewise, a person can have diabetes or even cancer and still be considered healthy. Conversely, a person can have the common cold and be terribly ill!

The question that all of us have asked ourselves is, “Why me?” Why are we ill and others are healthy? Why do we have these thoughts that make us say and do the things we do?

Something happened to each of us, something not very good. Yet these same things happen to other people, and they do not become mentally ill. Or at least they do not let it affect their lives.

There is a body of evidence that abusive and dysfunctional homes are not the cause of mental illness. I have no idea how they came to that conclusion, but try explaining that to someone who has lived that experience! Yet some people do survive this kind of experience and go on the lead happy, healthy, and successful lives. They must represent a statistical majority, although I have met very few people that can say they are one of them!

There is obviously a biochemical component to mental illness. Adding certain chemicals and using other chemicals to impede or enhance our body’s own chemicals do make a difference in how we think, act, and feel. For some people, some of these chemicals work very well, for some, with varying degrees, and others, not at all!

There is considerable research into the genetic component of mental illness. In wild animals, where most of their behaviors are instinctive, almost all of these behaviors are genetically encoded. Many of these encoded behaviors lie dormant until environmental conditions predicate that they engage. We do not like to think of ourselves on the same level as the animal world, but we most certainly are. We also must certainly have genetically encoded instincts and behaviors that become triggered by environmental conditions. Many of the selective pressures under which our ancestors have evolved have diminished in importance to our survival. From a purely parochial scientific viewpoint, many people who would not have survived under the old pressures have survived to produce offspring. Much of this encoded information may have been intensified, altered, diminished, or out bred altogether!

All of us, as children, imprint upon our parents. We speak the same language and use the same inflections. We learn to act like them in many ways. Maybe for a child growing up with a mentally ill parent, mental illness may be a learned behavior!

But! But! But! Normal people have all these same things, what makes them different and why cant I be like them? Normal is a setting on the dryer or air conditioner. Considering that there is an estimated 40 million undiagnosed and untreated mentally ill in this country, and the World Health Organization believes that mental illness is the worlds number one public health problem, there may not be anything such as normal! Much like flu or the common cold, even the healthiest person can have a “touch” of mental illness, and then it goes away. It doesn’t have to be forever

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For those of you who have not heard my mantra before, here it is again; “mental illness can be treated, managed, and controlled. Mentally ill people can lead happy and successful lives.” Essentially, they can become normal. Maybe the “normies”, unlike us, do not have to go to a doctor or therapist to learn to do these things. They devise their own strategies for dealing with their symptoms. When something doesn’t work, they try something else. They never give up!

Maybe we aren’t so different after all!

See you on the bus!