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When ever I see the “mental illness isn’t real” crowd I would swear that these people must have forgotten that the brain is an organ working on chemical reactions.
If you’d believe chronic hormonal or chemical imbalance or issues like that could effect any other part of your body, why the hell would you think that the most important organ in our body is just magically immune??
This is definitely something I struggle with. Like, its obvious to me that hormones and chemicals can get out of balance in the brain and cause trouble and that’s Bad.
But thanks to my conditioning/abuse there’s always this thought in my my mind of ‘well, if that;s how your brain works there’s nothing *wrong* with it, you’re just different.’.
But then again, of course if something causes you distress and to be unable to function of course you should do something to fix it.
But then again if that’s how you are you shouldn’t be *forced* to fix it and to conform to some arbitrary standard of ‘normalness’ ir you don’t want to?
and it just goes around and around in my brain.
Well I mean, obviously variations and quirks exist.
The point something is classified as a mental illness is when it actively causes some form of harm to yourself or others.
Like if you get a flu every winter when most people around don’t, you just get a flu every winter. Take some nyquil, get some rest, soon you’re living your life again as normal until the next time you get a flu again a few months from now.
But if you’re constantly experiencing horrible flu symptoms that won’t go away no matter what you do, you might have a chronic illness. You might have something wrong with your immune system, or something like that, and you might need to get treatment for it.Similarly, out here in Seattle people sometimes suffer from temporary depression in winter months due to a lack of sunlight and thus the vitamin D it provides.
But if you’re constantly depressed to the point it effects how well you function in your every day life, you might have a disorder which is causing that depression.The brain is a complex organ that is still very mysterious to us. But we know that experiences in early childhood, traumatic experiences, genetics, and just happenstance can have a profound effect on the actual chemistry of your brain, just like you can experience something that makes you constantly physically sick or you can be born with something that makes you contantly physically sick. Your brain is an organ just like any other which deals very directly with the chemical reactions caused by our emotions and experiences. And just like any other organ, it can have very real problems, even if they are not immediately physically evident.
Ack this is a bit long, but I think you might get th gist of what I mean.
I totally get it, and I agree with everything you’re saying, which is what makes my conditioning really hard to live with. I was basically taught that ALL doctors are evil, hostile and trying to ‘lock people up and medicate them for no reason’ which is just blatantly untrue, but was drilled into my head so much and so young that I can’t get it out of there. There’s this war in my head between “this person is obviously in distress, needs help and is seeking help” vs “evil doctors are telling people they’re depressed in order to brainwash them with chemicals.”
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