The Myth of the Myth of Mental Illness

Posted on June 5, 2005 in Anger Psycho-bunk Psychosis

Every so often (and I won’t mention where I found it this time) you run into some clown who says “You don’t have bipolar! These are normal emotions!” It’s hard to know what you are dealing with when you say this. Usually I give it even odds that the person is simply a consumer of the same old stupid myths about mental illness or in denial.

Get this: it is not a sign of mental health to do any of the following:

• Think you are God
• Start carving on your wrists or arms or throat or thighs, etc.
• Talk at a rate that no one can understand
• Remain in bed for days or weeks at a time, unable to move
• Find yourself unable to focus
• Want to die even though you are otherwise in good health
• Walk naked down the street
• Get only three hours of sleep every night and feel just fine
• Don’t eat because you’re not hungry for days at a time
• Eat and eat without regard for your health
• Purge and not eat without regard for your health
• Pull your hair
• Scrub your skin until it is raw
• Start crying at the sight of the produce section in your supermarket
• Bow before every appliance in your house before you leave for work every morning
• Take drugs or drink alcohol to “level off” your mood
• Deny that any of the above is harmful

Yes, all this is perfectly normal behavior.

Insisting that mental illness is not real is like insisting that poverty is not real, that the poor are poor only because they want to show off. The damage of mental illness comes from two places: First from the symptoms of the disease. Second from the puerile folk medicine which some try to apply when dealing with the mentally ill.

I must say that there doesn’t seem to be a clear partisan division when it comes to denying mental illness. The Right thinks you are lazy. The Left thinks you are just a thrall of the big drug companies. Denial of the reality of the disease amounts to an intellectual laziness, one that sufferers need to ignore. (Note that I do not refer to myself or others as a victim but as a sufferer. I’m not blaming this on anyone. It just happened.) Too often I see those with bipolar disorder, depression, schizoaffective disorder, etc. think the disease is their fault, that maybe they are”faking it”. They go off their meds and they are back doing the same things they were before. Or else they go too far the other way: they clinicalize everything they do, every emotion, every bit of happiness or sadness.

Recognizing what is the Disease and what isn’t the Disease is one of the most important distinctions that a sufferer must learn. All my friends who live in this world are attacked from all sides by people with miracle mind cures, St. John’s Wort, moral improvement, economic rhetoric, and ideology. What we need is understanding. We have the right to seek treatment, to make ourselves as well as we can. We need to learn to turn our backs on those who have no clue about the way the chemicals slosh about and keep sloshing about in our heads.