The Plague of Mental Illness

[Escape Fantasy]

Hey there, guys

This is something I wrote my second year of community college. I was going to submit it in to the professor as an essay but decided not to

I was wondering how far gone u guys must think I am? Tell me what you think.

The Plague of Mental Illness


I have long been diagnosed with depression. It's a shame really but, I have been trying to understand it. Some people argue that mental problems can become hereditary and I began to wonder why. After giving it some thought I came to the conclusion that it was because people/s problems just don't go away. They are there to be solved and if the first generation couldn't solve it then it is brought down to you. And here I am, plagued with mental illness.


Now, what do I mean by "people's problems?" Well, I mean financial problems, never-finding-love problems, having unfit and uneducated parents, being an ethnic minority, feeling under-confident and undesirable, creating a drug addiction and possibly having a tragedy in the family. All of these things contribute to a person's mental illness. And, it only makes sense that these things are brought down on an unfortunate person. We don't get to pick and choose the families we come from and not everybody wins the genetic lottery with being white and having natural blond hair.


Now, what's the treatment for all this? Talk therapy and a few pills. There is no alternative treatment, these are all problems created by the mind and therefore must be solved by the mind by taking real-world action. To put it simply, mental illness is caused by a bad experience that leaves people paralyzed or stuck in a negative thought loop. The only way to solve it is to have a good experience in life. Meaning work your way up, pick up your own weight, get clean and healthy to go to school, earn your degree, get a high-paying job, acquire wealth and stay educated, build your dream body, and in the end, build healthy new relationships. The ones that you always wanted when you were stuck with mental illness.


I believe education and social interaction are the only cures to mental illness. Learning is really everything because it starts with your brain. And the beauty about America is that it is the land of opportunity. If you make enough money, you can literally go anywhere. People will bow down to you if you have enormous amounts of wealth (well, not really, I mean they'll kiss your ass), and if you didn't like your family from the beginning, then you can cut them off. Possibly marry a pretty white woman and have children that can assimilate into society finally deemed as "normal".


That's the cure to my mental illness, a normal life. And dammit, if I couldn't have one then I will damn well make sure my kids have one. But first, I need to fix myself. I need to learn how to smile. Smiling will get you somewhere.

 

[MrRoot]

Are you serious or is that sarcasm?

 

[swilow]

That was an interesting read Escape Fantasy, you write well I like the gear-wheel head guy, reminds me of a very strong DMT trip from last year where the entire world devolved into this complex series of interlocking wheels and teeth. Reality appears to be deeply steampunk :D

Now, what's the treatment for all this? Talk therapy and a few pills. There is no alternative treatment, these are all problems created by the mind and therefore must be solved by the mind by taking real-world action. To put it simply, mental illness is caused by a bad experience that leaves people paralyzed or stuck in a negative thought loop. The only way to solve it is to have a good experience in life. Meaning work your way up, pick up your own weight, get clean and healthy to go to school, earn your degree, get a high-paying job, acquire wealth and stay educated, build your dream body, and in the end, build healthy new relationships. The ones that you always wanted when you were stuck with mental illness.

I just cannot agree with you though. Sure, there are times when mental illness is related to one's life circumstances, but this doesn't really explain the very common experience of depressed people who have a decent job/family/life/etc. and yet are still depressed. In fact, these things can make one feel MORE depressed or anxious, because you feel like you have no right to be sad or whatever, you've got it made but you're fucking crying in the shower every morning, what an ungrateful cunt I am.

I can assure you that psychosis is not really something that can be switched off simply by changing one's life.

Mental illness is not due to a "bad experience". It can be, but for most people suffering a mental illness, its due to a number of factors. There is both biology and life experience at play, and imagining that a 'normal life' is the cure (what is that anyway??) doesn't help anyone who is living such a normal life and is still suffering. It implies that a sufferer's illness is their fault in some way, and this just feeds into the dark spiral of mental illness IMO. There are higher rates of depression and anxiety amongst developed nations, putting lie to the idea that material comforts offer some kind of cure to mental illness. In fact, there is an argument that our affluence and the ease of our lives is causing a deep emptiness in the human animal.

Some people argue that mental problems can become hereditary and I began to wonder why. After giving it some thought I came to the conclusion that it was because people/s problems just don't go away

With all due respect, this is really not why mental illness becomes hereditary. You don't inherit your parents fears and worries, that is not how evolution works. There are epigenetic changes caused by mental illness (chicken or egg?) but its quite absurd to imagine that mental illness could be removed from a families genome simply by solving one's personal and individual problems. Things like schizophrenia appear hereditary in the sense that a child is inhereiting mutated genes which cause subjective changes in consciousness and this change is not really due to environment or nurture or whatever. There is really no problem that can be 'solved' to switch off such traits. And there is no deep worry or fear that is going to somehow write to a persons germ line and get inserted into offspring to continue the worrying. Life, evolution, natural selection simply doesn't work that way.