It may seem odd and counter-intuitive to say, but I have come to the realisation that I am actually very fortunate to have been diagnosed with a major psychiatric condition. Let that sink in for a moment..
I have actually had several diagnoses throughout the years. In childhood I was misdiagnosed with 'hyperactivity causing behavioural issues'. In my late teens it was anxiety, then in my twenties it was seasonal affective disorder, anxiety and depression, before the bipolar diagnosis in my thirties. Most recently, I am in therapy for what can only be described as high-functioning anxiety. It would be easy to say that I've had a really rough ride, but it is dawning on me that what I thought were curses are actually blessings in disguise.
Allow me to explain.
When you suffer from mental health problems you are, in an ideal world, eventually given access to talking therapies. If you are lucky enough to find a good therapist and are able to engage in quality therapy it opens up your whole inner world, the world of your thinking. Further reading and study unveils a plethora of tried and tested methods, tools and techniques, both scientific and holistic, enabling a process of personal growth and discovery you had never thought possible. The concept of therapy becomes normalised into your life.
Of course, it is not all rainbows and butterflies. By the time most people have come to therapy their mental distress has reached such a level that every facet of their thinking, and their subsequent attitude and behaviour, is affected. Negativity has become ingrained and the process of cleansing oneself from it is painful and involves hard work. For some, this is as far as the healing gets.
Mental health isn't simply an absence of mental illness. It is 'thinking well', and that means keeping our minds open and challenging our preconceptions and presumptions, about everything, all of the time. We have to continually revise our 'maps' of the world around us, adjusting to the ups and downs, the highs and lows, the pitfalls and opportunities, and the pace of change in our busy modern lives. Regardless of how eventful or uneventful we consider our personal lives to be, this process is absolutely essential if we are to achieve anything close to a real state of wellbeing and contentment in life.
Many of us who honestly believe we are mentally well are actually suffering from some form of what psychologists call neurosis. Put simply, we get stuck in our way of thinking. We fail to revise our internal map of the world outside. Given that the world is constantly changing, our old ways of thinking and relating to the world become outdated, to the detriment of us and everyone we interact with. The result is any number of often physical symptoms, such as fatigue and general aches, pain and discomfort, which we just explain away as normal, seek physical relief for or ignore completely, coupled with a creeping negative undertone to our attitude and subtle changes to our behaviour, which we are usually the last to be aware of. These are the warning signs of mental distress.
Unfortunately, neurosis does not go away. It multiplies. We develop complexes - neuroses building on top of each other. Our thinking becomes disordered. If we remain unaware of what is going on we develop further neuroses which negatively reinforce our disordered thinking. When we are unable to ignore the problem any more our inbuilt human response is usually not to reach out for help, but to become defensive and even attack those who might be trying to help. A tangled web is spun. Ultimately, if we do not go against our nature and try to change our thinking, weeks, months and years go by and our mindstate ferments. Increasingly, people get to old age having never challenged their thinking, and sadly all too often the end result is senile dementia.
Anyone who hasn't been living under a rock for the last twenty years will be only too aware that we live in an age of increasing fragility of mind. Instances of depression, anxiety and stress-related nervous disorders are skyrocketing. In tandem with this, people are increasingly turning to the self-medication route of drugs and alcohol, which only compounds and extends the problems of mental illness. It's understandable, after all, it is simply the natural human instinct to bury ones head in the sand, avoiding the pain and work it takes to truly look into oneself and change how we think.
It doesn't have to be this way though. If we consider ourselves to have any influence on others, especially our children, surely we should take the plunge and challenge ourselves to change, learn everything we can about helping others to change, and teach it? If we trained all educators to champion the tools and techniques of mental health awareness, and to teach therapy as an essential, core life skill, at every stage of the developmental cycle of our children, within a relatively short period of time we would eliminate what can only be described as a shit load of unnecessary pain and suffering. One thing is for sure, the status quo is incompatible with a positive outcome for too many people, and for society as a whole.
You don't have to experience unnecessary mental distress and illness.You don't have to end your days senile. You just need to challenge how you think. Now, and always. After all, it's far easier to prevent the rot than to treat the disease it creates.