The brain and nervous systems are physiological aspects of the body just like any other. They are prone to illness just like any other organ or body part is prone to illness. Given certain biological or environmental factors, illnesses of the brain and nervous system will develop, just as illnesses of the pancreas and lungs will develop when exposed to excess sugar or tobacco smoke.
We already understand that in the past, plague and disease ran rampant because of the unsanitary conditions we lived in. People used to burn pitch in buckets in the middle of the streets because of their superstitious belief that it would chase away the plague spirit. Then, we discovered germs, how to fight them, and how to minimize their impact on our health. In the future, we will understand that mental illness runs rampant because of the unsanitary social and cultural conditions we live in. We will understand that the 40 hour wage-slavery work week is primitive and mentally unsanitary (read: unsanitary), and we will learn to abandon the superstitious belief in market systems, lotteries, and "trickle down economics" just as soon as we realize these things are every bit as deleterious to ourselves and the environment as tobacco smoke is to pregnant women.
You might be interested in my story. This was originally posted in another thread, but has relevance here It's quite long, and I don't expect you to read it, but I thought I'd offer it nonetheless:
My mental health struggles began when I was about ten years old, developing very gradually throughout my teen years. I first started noticing something was wrong when I started having bizarre dissociative episodes and waking nightmares. Together with these events, I had begun to show reclusive tendencies at a very young age. These things came with feelings of embarrassment and guilt; I could sense that I was different from the other kids, and this quickly convinced me that I was less of a person. By the time I was 15, I has become a deeply introverted, deeply unsure individual constantly writhing under an anxious inner turbulence within which I felt helplessly trapped.
The people around me saw this as immaturity, "teenage angst", or the result of an undisciplined mind, and in those days I took those suggestions as confirmation that I was indeed less of a person. I tried extremely hard to compensate for it, to "do better", "grow up", and "be a man". When those efforts met with little to no success, I felt like even less of a person than I did before, such that I became only more entangled as I tried to wriggle my way out of the briar patch.
It was around that time that I started self-medicating with drugs. That helped a lot. Cannabis made me feel like a kid again, as did mushrooms. The drugs brought out my charisma and charm, and they chased away the perpetually gathering dark. Because of this, drugs and drug use quickly became an integral component of my identity, and I came to rely on them to feel normal. Naturally, that didn't pan out very well -- while it helped in some aspects in the short term, it made other aspects much, much worse in the long term. Ultimately, taking drugs was just a strategy to avoid confronting the fact that I had a problem; it was an attempt to push back an inevitable mental health tide that was and is constantly driven in by a force much greater than myself.
It was toward my late teens and early-mid twenties that my baseline state of latent sadness began to oscillate between crushing lows and soaring highs. This drove me into all kinds of destructive behaviour: in the "up" phase I'd become highly energetic, charismatic and manipulative, while in the "down" phase I'd become a swirling vacuum of self-loathing and bottomless despair. Even as these markedly distinct states cost me careers, strained family relationships, destroyed romantic relationships and friendships, still I wouldn't ever consider that I had a medical problem. I always blamed myself and my choices, whether that be my lifestyle choices, personal choices, career choices, or whatever else. It was easier to blame my own choices and habits, because if these things were not the culprit it meant that I was helpless to improve upon myself and my life. That idea was too scary to confront.
As those oscillating moods started to manifest, people in my life asked me to consider that I might have a medical problem. My response was to mock the "medical establishment" and "big pharma". Foolishly, I saw all of western medicine as a money-making scam. "Science is so narrow minded", I'd say. I'd think "my mind is just gifted, like Mozart, or like a shaman." I didn't need to talk to any doctors or psychologists because I didn't really have a problem; I had a gift. Rather than focus on getting well, I started to focus on developing and utilizing my gifts, because I had convinced myself that the real cause of my troubles was a lack of outlets for my "stagnant energy". Before long I was investing heavily in Buddhism, holistic "medicine", and self-help books written by this or that self-styled "guru". I found great comfort in all of that, and there were times when I felt like I'd discovered "the answer", and that my troubles had been pacified.
It was around this time that I started finding myself in hospitals. I'd be taken there for a variety of reasons: in the "up" phase I'd be hospitalized after colliding with police over my erratic and at times delusional behaviour, while in the "down" phase I'd be hospitalized after threatening or attempting suicide. The real nature of my problem was getting difficult to ignore, but it would be another 6 years before I'd actually seek any meaningful treatment, let alone admit to my family the sort of ordeals I'd been really going through since leaving home.
In my mid twenties, I decided that the best way to take control of my situation was to make adjustments to my lifestyle and mental habits. I decided that I'd stop letting my thoughts carry me down into pits of despair, and that I'd stop letting myself get carried away in energetic enthusiasm. I added a bunch of brain-boosting supplements and food items to my diet, and stopped eating processed foods; I took up twice-daily mindfulness meditation and yoga; I sold my car and became a year-round, all-weather cyclist, and so on and so forth.
During that period, I felt great! "Look at how well I'm taking care of myself," I thought, "I'm doing such a good job at being healthy." I had ideas like "I'm doing so much better now that I'm exercising more and doing yoga," and "meditation has helped clear my mind so much." "I don't have a problem," I would say to myself, "I was just making bad choices before. Now that I'm making good choices, I'm all better."
That lasted less than a year. After about eight months of that, I found myself wandering around in the pouring rain with no shoes or jacket on, only jeans and a T-shirt, feeling like nothing could bother or hurt me. It was in fact the biggest storm of the year, and flash flood warnings had shut most people inside their homes. The empty streets were running freely with water, and the city was being peppered by lightning. It was dangerous out there, but that didn't matter because I felt invincible. A few days later, though, I was so depressed that I once again lost my job, lost my girlfriend, alienated my friends and peers, and became helpless but to watch everything good in my life drain away with the storm waters as I myself was helplessly sucked out to sea in a depressive rip tide. "What caused this?" I asked myself, "how could this possibly happen? What did I do wrong?"
The fact is that I had been lying to myself all those years. When I was a child, I tried to hide it or ignore it. When I was a teen, I tried to cover it up, and then I tried to philosophize it into something mystical or esoteric. As I emerged into adulthood, I tried to take control of it, believing that self-empowerment and self-care would keep me healthy.
"I'm not sick, I just have to work a little harder to stay healthy."
I was so scared of being "broken" that I lied to myself about getting better, and even managed to convince myself that I'd made improvements and gains which I had not actually made. Every step of the way, I resisted medical advice, because accepting medical advice seemed synonymous with identifying myself as defective. Now, more than 20 years after the first signs of trouble began, I'm finally starting to accept that I have a medical condition with a physiological substrate. Now that I'm 31 years old, I'm a bit more mature, and I've come to realize that throughout these past two decades I've been doing everything in my power to avoid labelling myself and calling myself broken. I told myself many lies, invested in many guru-concepts and "natural cures", and while some of this was really quite convincing and at times marginally helpful, all of it turned out to be hollow in the end.
What I really needed was professional help and pharmaceutical intervention. These things are necessary because no matter how much I'd rather it not be true, the reality is that I have mental health condition, most likely bipolar II disorder (according to the doctors I've been working with). No longer in denial, I'm being treated for my condition, and while I still struggle from time to time I'm no longer completely out of control.
Why am I telling you this story? Simple: because I want you to have the benefit of seeing how powerful denial can be, especially when it comes to mental illness. Being fearful of labels and diagnoses can drive a person further and further from the environs of the actual treatment they require, and it can make pseudoscience, philosophical quackery, feel-good mantras, trite beliefs, trendy diets and self-help gurus seem very attractive. In my case, such things delayed my access to the real treatment I require, and this delay nearly claimed my life before the end of my 20s: the longer bipolar disorder goes untreated, the greater the likelihood it will end in suicide.
Now, please don't misunderstand: I'm not saying that you have a condition like mine, nor am I saying that you have a condition at all. Rather, I'm imploring you not to rule this out as a potential explanation for your difficulty, and to carefully discern between actually getting better, and deceiving yourself into thinking you're getting better such that your deterioration continues beneath the surface while you're not looking. If it can happen to me, it can happen to you or anyone.
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