Mental Illness And Misinformation

What’s something most people don’t understand?

It’s astounding how many people still completely misunderstand mental illness. Well, maybe not astounding because it’s hard for me to understand despite personally dealing with it for a large percentage of my life. But I guess what I’m referring to is the amount of people who believe mental illness can be solved through a little prayer, some good ol’ positive thinking, or through the strength of the will.

I’m not saying those things don’t help, but the idea that recovery is as simple as that is absurd. On the other hand, we also have the assumption that everyone who has mental illness is dangerous and/or crazy which is also not true. Yes, people who are mentally ill can be psychotic but many are “normal” in most aspects. Most mentally ill people are also more of a danger to themselves than anyone else.

I think it’s great that the stigma around mental illness isn’t as strong as it once was (though it still remains).  But I do think, in some ways, it’s minimized the hardships and reality of true mental illness. There’s way too many self-diagnosed people, way too many doctors ready to hand out pills and call you depressed because you had a bad day. That’s called life.

I’m not saying self-diagnosed people can’t be mentally ill either. My point is that if we reduce mental illness to checking off a few boxes in a list of symptoms through a quick google search it’s easy to make light of mental suffering.

Sadness is not mental illness. Feeling lost is not mental illness. Feeling agitated, feeling anxious and scared is not mental illness. Feeling lethargic is not mental illness. Grief is not mental illness.

All these things can be symptoms of mental illness depending on severity and frequency. But are not on their own. They are all normal human emotions that everyone feels at some point in their life.

The risk is that by normalizing or over diagnosing mental illness we get far too many people who assume that mentally ill people are just lazy, cowards, need to just deal with life, etc. because “by God I felt that way and managed”.

No…no, you didn’t. You felt a normal human response (even if it was terrible). Mental illness is an abnormal response to life that one can’t just shake themselves out of.

The risk in under diagnosing is that people don’t get help who could. People end up hiding in shame instead of getting treatment. People get worse because they are fighting with all their might just to keep it together long enough that they don’t get labeled crazy or dangerous and are ostracized.

People still misunderstand mental illness because it’s a baffling and complex disease. It doesn’t show up the same in every person and what treats one person may make another worse. The most important thing is that we keep having conversations in our society so that we don’t end up in extreme conclusions at either end of the spectrum.