A thread about Mental Illness

The first diagnosis is to determine what is normal for the person who is determined to be mentally ill.
If it is destructive behavior; the next step is to determine what caused the behavior.
The movie Good Will Hunting is a good example. Another one is The Punisher.
“Normally” It’s not your fault.
We all have crazy thoughts; we don’t all act on them.
Mentally ill people don’t know the difference between the “land of make believe” and reality. :face_with_monocle: although a good writer can portray truth using fantasy.(Walt Disney).
I can be someone I’m not on a forum. :innocent:
Non-conformity is not mental illness.
Perception is reality.

First I will say there are many types of mental illness. Perhaps the ONLY flavor of that “May” apply to your opinion, would be Schizophrenia.

I would disagree with that As a “Totally” inclusive statement, which is the way you wrote it.

I imagine your OPINION would not sit well with someone on here who has admitted to being mentally ill. I can not speak for them.

Although, I find it insulting.

I can speak for my Friend Barbara and Bill,your opinion which is FAR from Diagnosis[Are you a Doctor,I would doubt it because they would never make such a definitive and narrow minded statement] certainly does not apply to them.

I suggest reading the various types of mental illnesses and the symptoms associated with them before you pass judgement. :wink:

Not a doctor; worked as a mental health tec for about 10 years; from severe and profound to high functioning.
Not a judge.

I don’t find it insulting. But I do find it detached from the reality I live in.

In my case it was not about the sense of reality but purely about poor emotions management.

I would think you should know better then.

“Mentally ill people don’t know the difference between the ”land of make believe” and reality.”

That right there is JUDGEMENTAL,that right there is NOT true.

My friends suffer from Depression,that has NOTHING to do with NOT knowing the difference between make believe and reality!! They understand reality and can function in society with the help of medication and supportive friends,NOT people who stigmatize them.

I suffered from depression and anxiety since I was about 8 or 9. I was on medication since then since I also had ADD. I saw therapists but never found real relief, I feel they didn’t treat depression in young people as serious back then which was the mid 90s. My biggest mistake was self medicating with alcohol and drugs. They made the anxiety and depression go away for awhile but created worse problems. About ten years ago I decided I had to make a change so I quit drinking and smoking and all the other stuff and started taking my medication properly. I got heavily into exercise and going to church for support. It still is very difficult at times but I always remember that it doesn’t last forever and does get better.

I think three things are important. Your everyday job, your hobby or free tíme and friends/girlfriend… Som things needs everybody.I remember when i was unemployed for a long tíme… I change… Just example…

Mental illness is a very broad and far reaching subject, the nuances of which cannot be discussed properly on this forum.
My comments were not meant to open a can of worms or a Pandora’s Box; only meant to throw some light on this subject which has been studied for many years by some of the most intelligent people on the planet.
Still mental illness in all its forms exists.

In some instances we found that changing the diet of some clients had very good results.
Also there is a very good book called Switch on Your Brain by Dr Caroline Leaf.

One of the most important things noeadays around the mental healt is to be maximum offline in my opinion. Why not to debate about it…

Changing the diét? How?

This Scientific American article made sense of my life up to that point, for me. Why camping out always cheered me up. Why getting up at 5am to run til the sun came up always helped.

I started building bright light boxes immediately, and eventually discovered dawn simulators
(best affordable ones are from: http://windhovermfg.com/)
and learned about timing bright lights from the site cet.org (which has an excellent self-survey to decide how to time bright lights during the day).

More here: Seasonal Affective Disorder - The Basics | ScienceBlogs
and here: https://psychcentral.com/blog/light-and-dark/

and here: Bipolar Disorder, Light, and Darkness – Psych Education

One observation — SAD treatment is most helpful if started in August (N. Hemisphere fall) (we have the dawn simulator and light boxes set for approximately a late August “day length” period of bright/blue light every day; it’s easy to start to slip into winter depression as the days start to get shorter (the clock change in October tends to hit hard).

It’s a lot more difficult to clamber out of the pit by this time of year, though light treatment does help.

I’m realizing things I and others chalked up to “laziness” or “lack of motivation” along with other traits I just thought were fundamental to me or bad habits are probably indicators of ADHD and am beginning the process for an assessment. I had some inaccurate ideas about the condition and never even considered it as a cause of some of my issues till I stumbled on a podcast where others were discussing their experiences dealing with it which fit me to a “T”.

I always wondered how much was nature, and how much was nurture.

So if you come from a screwball family, do you either succumb to your environment/surroundings (victim), or get ornery enough to just not let them win (victor)?

I have found that sunlight, or better put, the lack of sunlight in the higher latitudes in the winter season affects me. I had mild depression in winter back home at latitude 50° N. Extended periods of cloudy weather, constant grey cloudy skies, also affect me. Just one more reason I love where I now; 35° N. I cannot imagine living further north.

I do have family members with more serious mental illness running back through a couple generations. For those the right meds have helped.

NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, is the nation’s largest grassroots mental health organization dedicated to building better lives for the millions of Americans affected by mental illness. There website is informative to help understand the issues.

Depression actually has a lot to do with not being able to discern the “real” from the “not real”. That isn’t judgmental. It’s the truth. To say that someone who suffers from mental illness “doesn’t know the difference between the ”land of make believe” and reality.” might not be a “nice” way of saying it, but it’s still true. The medication your friends are taking probably is made to deal with this exact fact, in a physical way. Telling the truth about a “condition” isn’t the same as “stigmatizing” someone.

There is a lot of mental illness in my family, on my mom’s side. I don’t know how far back, but my mom’s mom was mentally ill, all of her children (my mom and her siblings) were all mentally ill, probably a lot of it from the insane abuse they suffered, but also some of it genetically. My three sisters and brother have all been diagnosed with various mental illnesses. I’ve never been diagnosed with any mental illness, thank God. But I know there are times when I have episodes of probably some form of depression.

I’m a very meta thinking person. I think about what I’m thinking about. When I go through “hard” times mentally/emotionally, I have to tell myself it’s not real. That doesn’t change how I feel in the moment, but it makes a difference in how I actually deal with it when it happens. I can usually maintain control of myself when I feel completely out of control inside. I can make good decisions even though I feel like I don’t want to. But I have to “make” this happen. I have to “choose” to remember and believe the truth, because, in that moment, truth doesn’t exist for me. It’s only a memory. I’m not a doctor, but I can imagine that people who aren’t advanced metacognitive like me can actually become completely detached from reality by depression, anxiety, bi-polar disorder, etc.

The medicine I was taking was blocking serotonine reabsorption.

I’ve seen cases of people who strongly denied reality. Not the case with most I’ve seen though. That’s my truth.
And I’ve seen some strong reality denial in healthy people as well.

I’m not a doctor, so this will involve a great deal of speculation on my part. My belief is that nature is the foundation that nurture builds upon. Nature defines the basic shape of the individual physically, mentally, and emotionally. Siblings brought up in the same home under the same nurture, can turn out vastly differently from each other. Sometimes siblings will grow up in an abusive family, and one or more of them will become insanely successful in life, while the others become incapable of even functioning in society. The opposite can also happen. The home could have been “perfect” and children can still turn out to have problems. That’s why it’s often said that parenting isn’t and shouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all approach. People screw up their own children sometimes by trying too hard to be fair. Each child should be parented separately.

I’ve seen in my own family how nature and nurture interact to produce various results in people who should be genetically similar, and are raised together under the same nurture standard. It makes sense if you think about the millions of decisions we make in our lifetimes, and realize that no decision is ever completely black-and-white. There’s always some gradient. Nature and nurture both influence where you’ll be on the gradient of each decision, sometimes working together to push you toward one end of the scale, other times working against each other, so it’s difficult to be decisive at all. It’s amazing how nuanced our minds really are. That explains why small chemical changes in our bodies can create huge mental health swings too. Not only that, but the environment we continue to live in can continue to influence our mental state pretty dramatically.

I guess if we’re going to talk about it much more, we should stop and define what it is we’re talking about. I think there’s a difference between conscious and unconscious “reality denial”. I also believe there’s a physical condition (or maybe more than one) which can result in the mind becoming incapable of even understanding that there is such a thing as real vs not real. We tend to think in absolute limits sometimes that don’t exist. For example, the electromagnetic spectrum includes both light and sound waves, but we usually think of sound and light as being two distinctly different things. What about radio waves? Those are on the same spectrum, but we think of them being completely distinct from sound and light. What I was talking about when I said people can’t discern the difference between “real” and “not real” is basically the opposite of this effect. Imagine seeing a “spectrum” where normal people see a distinction of “real” and “not real”. That’s what I was talking about. The other, more conscious “reality denial” is a choice people make, and I’ve also seen people that I thought of as otherwise “normal” in their mental faculty, and even “very smart” by worldly standards make that awful choice.

Everyone is different when it comes to causes. For me it’s just chemical imbalance. I’ve had life going amazing and everything I wanted then depression hits me out of nowhere. It comes completly without cause or reason for me and it’s only medication that helps.

[was addressing DaveEF’s comment from the previous page, fwiw]

Wellp, a friend of mine who was diagnosed as bipolar / manic-depressive told me once that “depression” isn’t just feeling sad all the time (as I misunderstood it to be), but more like forgetting most of the positive things that happened to you, and remembering (if not dwelling on) the negative things instead.

So you might not remember the gorgeous chickie in the sausage-casing microdress waiting to cross the street at the light, but instead how long it took you to get home because of all the traffic.

That in itself is skewing reality, just/only seeing the glass-half-empty aspects of even a routine trip home from work.

Kinda like the nightly news. No one wants to hear about all the planes that didn’t crash that day, or all the houses that didn’t burn to the ground, or all the people who were not stabbed, shot, run-over, hit by meteors, and so on. So just watching the news can give you that depressing outlook of the world. Being depressed, or in the depressive phase of bipolar, is kinda like that, only 24/7 (at least as it was explained to me; someone correct me with a clinical definition if so inclined).