Are you Mental?

Well, I'm not sure what to write here except to say that this, so far, has been a remarkably uneventful month.  And that's just fine with me.

Logan has been on his new medication since October, and it has positively affected our lives and his.  He actually said the other day that he feels better when he takes his medicine.

There are many people who are critical of parents who medicate their children, whether it's for ADHD or some other ailment, like autism.  My theory is that people are critical of medicating children because they don't actually understand the disorder that the medication is for, and they're only looking at the surface of the situation.  It sounds horrible to say, I give my child Prozac.  There are many parents who hesitate to talk about it because of the stigma that surrounds it.  I do not hesitate.

We don't know enough about mental disorders in children.  They are hard to study and understand because children aren't "finished" yet.  They are still growing, still changing.  Hormones start going 0 to 60 once they reach puberty.  So it's hard to talk about disorders in children the same way that we talk about them in adults.

Mental illness, mental disorders, whatever you want to call them, really should be viewed the same way that other physical disorders are viewed.  People have a hard time doing that because the brain, for many people, is largely an unknown. We hear that someone broke their leg and we understand exactly what that means and what needs to happen next to fix it.  We hear that someone had a heart attack and we know exactly what that means and are familiar with any number of outcomes from that situation.  But we hear that someone was admitted to a hospital because they were hearing voices, or that someone has to take a pill to keep from ramping up and down between extreme euphoria and extreme depression several times a day, and we don't understand.  It's scary.  What makes someone do that?  It's not a broken bone or a blood clot or too much fried chicken.  So, something must be wrong with them..as a person.

My hope is that in my lifetime, the world, or at least the United States, will see a paradigm shift in the way we view mental illness.  My hope is that awareness will increase, services will become more readily available, and that the stigma that is attached to people who suffer from mental illness and disorders will slowly and permanently disappear.

With that in mind, maybe we should just get rid of the term "mental illness" altogether.  Whenever I say this phrase, it reminds me of a phrase I used to hear when I was growing up and someone proposed something outlandish.  They would say, Are you mental?

When we say someone is "mentally ill", it's really not very descriptive.  It conjures up an image of an unkempt crazy person, rocking themselves back and forth and muttering.  I've also heard people say things like, Well, so and so was mentally ill, and so they did x, y, z, or they were mentally ill, so they tried to kill themselves.  Or they were mentally ill, and so they set the house on fire and robbed a convenience store.  Whatever.  It's a label we attach to people when their behavior is dangerous or doesn't make sense to us and scares us.

What the label doesn't do, is explain anything to anyone.  Why did so and so go into a school and shoot ten people?  Because he was mentally ill.

Because he suffered from extreme depression and psychosis, did not receive the proper treatment and medication, because he lived in a poor community where these services are practically non-existent, because he was abused at home, because he was high on meth.

Do you see how much more awareness could be gained if we actually looked beyond the label of "mentally ill"?  If we were really interested in the WHY instead of the convenient explanation that makes us feel better and doesn't require us to think?

But sometimes there really isn't an easy answer and the only information we have is that someone is "not right in the head".  I get that. The media can only do so much, and sometimes, they do more harm than good or the answers just aren't available.  Personally, though, within our own social sphere, what if we actually made the time to understand people that are otherwise labeled as "strange", "out there", or "mentally ill"?  What would happen then?  You might learn that there is a good reason to stay away.  Or you might learn something completely new, and you might gain an understanding of something that you never quite grasped before.  Like what it's like to have OCD.  Or suffer from PTSD.  Or bipolar disorder.  And that, my dear readers, is where change begins.