How other people view mental illness

(This post is probably meant for people who don't understand mental illness
but It's also a defense of our position in society)


There is something that I want to say about the way we all percieve the term "mental illness" and the connections we as people in society make when we hear that term in connection with another person. This term is usually perceived as something to stay away from and as a measuring unit of belonging in society. We hear many terms: Crazy, Mental, one wheel short, one wheel more, someone with problems, is weird.
Most notably however we tend to put all these words and all these terms into one bag - a guy or girl who is crazy is also weird and also different and therefore doesn't belong. Now i'm not saying the person doesn't feel mentally ill. Perhaps he/she is ill. Perhaps he she is dangerous even, we are afraid that they will hurt us, we don't want to be associated with them because it would compromise our place in society the way OTHERS SEE US as well.
But do we necessarily have to connect somebody being mentally ill to somebody being weird or different in the sense that they don't belong in society? The problem is most people cannot understand and cannot feel like them and can't put themselves in their place, and this is frankly quite normal and I'm not talking about that. You can't imagine being hit in the face when you haven't been hit in the face, you can't imagine an experience you haven't had, you rightfully and logically will not be able to generate the emotion of feeling the same way if you have NEVER EVER felt that way. That is quite normal.
However today with the rise of mental illness, due to economic wellness and progress - for x and y reasons problems are coming up and people are starting to take care of themselves more and starting to seek out professionals to help them with problems.
I want to compare that with say if you live in the middle ages and you have been living all your life with a "bad leg" because you have a bad hip or you have another kind of physical problem, and then suddenly someone invents the medicine you need to make it better or you can afford it and all of a sudden you can treat it.
What is the difference essentially between a broken leg and a broken mind? Some broken legs can be fixed easily some broken legs require surgery and some legs can't be fixed at all. And so what I want to make clear and what i firmly believe to be true is that with the mind it works just like that.
You can heal a mind quickly if you have a bit of stress, you can heal a mind less fast if you have more stress say you lose a job, you may be very stressed and anxious or you may have an accident which frightens you to death and makes you afraid of making new choices in your life.
But what if the tools that are available for a broken leg aren't as socially available and acceptable as tools available for fixing a mind. If we have a broken leg, everyone will send you to a doctor. Everyone will send you or in fact they might even call you crazy! Yet if you have are stressed some will help you and assuage your pain and some will increase the pressure and call you crazy for not being able to put up with it! That's like treating a broken leg by sending someone to go for a run! In the end you become crazy not just for the mental illness but of the ostracisation and dissocation by other people, who make you feel different and weird and acceptable. Whereas in fact what you need is compassion and help and understanding.
Lack of those in a lot of cases actaully just adds to the fire that already exists. Literally it feels like somebody pushing you down the stairs with that broken leg. Emotional pain can be quite equal to physical pain and can be us intolerable when it gets too much. Now imagine a person who has had an accident and can't feel the same way for x and y reasons, I will get to those reasons later. Is it logically not the same as a physical injury, in the same way an injured person cannot be accepted into some of the same activites.
Why shouldn't it be possible to dissociate the fact of "belonging" from injury which is in simple words just an injury? In essence we don't need to understand, we can't , we don't need to help, we can't. But we can stop pretending its a burden, if it is, we can speak openly about it and we can move toward seeing those people who are anxious as other people. We can see other people who have mental illness as a problem, but does everyone else stare weirdly at you when you have a broken leg? Sometimes but you are not on the edge of society for that. Sometimes it even attracts compassion and help and people draw things on the casts etc.
So how can it be like that? why are we not doing that? I don't think there is something wrong necessarily with society but the lack of knowledge we have about these illnesses causes us to think about them as a sort of unknown. We don't know how to help, we don't know the consequences of us helping and we don't want to have that responsibility we can see that those people who suffer sometimes need more help than we can give need more help than we have time and money and perhaps we will get nothing back. We think it's totally not worth it. Well, perhaps it's not. Perhaps you will get nothing back and you have no time, nothing can change that and you will NEVER know, but perhaps the perception of this whole thing can change with a simple start of a change an inch by inch change to the way things are, not giant leaps and immediate understanding.
I want to change only the way we LOOK at those people nothing more. And that when you see them and they give you an awkward smile or an awkward sad look that you won't see weird or more weird - but pain, fear, sadness, awkwardness, shame - Emotions that truly exist on the other side of the coin in society. And I am not alone in making those judgements myself because i also don't want to upset the norm just like everyone else but I think with more awareness there can be a real slow inch by inch change.
So to change that I want to present reasons why this happens, why people suffer so much and look "weird" and perhaps with reasons why, it will be easier to comprehend why this happens. This will hopefully bring more compassion into the way we look at each other if nothing else.
As I mentioned earlier people can suffer and can have a large range of emotions on the what we percieve as the negative scale - unhappy is a common one. We see someone unhappy and the first thought I see on people's faces is oh no. Unhappy however can mean - sad, melancholy - afraid, ashamed, hurt, betrayed depressed, anxious, frustrated unloved. There are so many things that look can be - and to make everyone sure there isn't a range of ALIEN EMOTIONS that those people show that you can contract from them, they might have those emotions and those emotions aren't weird, they aren't different. WE just usually experience them in lower doses. IN people with anxiety those feelings are much larger - fear is enhanced shame is enhanced, sadness is enhanced and in essence more powerful or we think more powerful than us.
So now when you see a person you can imagine instead of someone weird - someone who has an emotion that they can't handle or are afraid to express or simply can't. That emotion is too large for them to perceive or they struggle in themselves to accept feeling or being a certain way in a way that stops them from functioning correctly.
To show it in a simple tale i will compare a person with emotional difficulty in the story of an Elephant with a hurt foot. This is a story i heard as a child so i don't remember it so well. But basically there is an elephant who is living quite happily until he steps on a piece of wood and it gets a splinter the splinter causes it to be in pain, causes it to be angry, causes it to hate other animals and hate itself until someone comes along and takes the foot and takes the splinter out. The elephant is surprised at how calm it is, the splinter is gone and so is the source of the pain. When a person undergoes a lot of stress or gets into a situation where someone hurts them and they hurt them too bad, they might have that kind of splinter in the heart or in the mind. And as with that kind of thing, the pain is too large to be percieved at first or too shameful or too dangerous. We might feel that way. The information I present here is not completely 100 % correct but it is a part of the truth. One cannot explain everything in a paragraph.
SO the second thing I want people to see when they see a person is apart from seeing that they have some kind of emotion. Is to see that there is causality. They didn't wake up one day and go crazy for no reason. Unless they were already born like that. But those cases are extremely rare. I don't have the experience to talk about whether there is a link between parents and illnesses and those kind of things but I am a believer in nurture and the way we interact with each other as being a source of our selves. Of our pain and of our suffering and of our happiness too.
So I want to show that there is always a reason, the reason isn't from nowhere, and if someone is mad they didn't become like that because they wanted to because they just chose to be like that. Who would want to be like that? Who would want to be in pain? who would want to suffer? And everybody essentially suffers.
Therefore see people who you know and who you don't and remember that they were extremely hurt, now or before in life, and that there is always a reason why it happened to them. They have a story. They are you - but in a different body, they are another person but have another surrounding and they might not have the tools that YOU have to solve their pain. They are people with broken minds and and broken hearts and not mentally ILL people. They are people behind their pain, because once the pain goes away they go back to being the people they were before. And although this may never happen, it might. And although you aren't anxious or stress you might become like that, for absolutely understandable reasons.
And if we want to live in a world where we recieve compassion we must give compassion first. Remember that it's an investment into your future selves no matter who that person is. And that no good deed will be punished - contrary to the popular saying.