I was listening to NPR today, and there was a story about a man who suffers from mental illness. To sum it up, he was involuntarily committed because of a mental breakdown. He had to spend about 2 days in the Emergency Room until a bed opened in the Psych. Ward.
This story got my mind thinking of how we treat the mentally ill in this country and even worse in some other nations around the world.
The man in this story owns a small business, is productive in society, has healthy relationships, is religious, but has a disease. Yes, Mental Illness is a disease and we need to treat it as such. It should also be an issue we talk about as openly as we would tell someone how our allergies are bothering us or that we have a broken arm or the arthritis in your elbow is hurting badly on a certain day. It should not be something we treat with suspicion seeing the person as lazy, crazy, useless, etc.
The problem is that we can't see the disease. There are no germs that cause it. There are no broken bones or swelling. We only see the manifestation of these diseases. It would be like only hearing a person scream in pain but not being able to see that they just fell and broke a bone.
Mental illness is not like other diseases. A cold has a "lifespan." Mental illness is different for each person. For some people it lasts a season and for others a lifetime. But in each case, we do no help by ignoring the problem or passing the person off as crazy or beyond help.
Everyone of us has had "the blues." Imagine having that every day...that's what a person who suffers from depression feels like. Some days are worse than others. Some days a depressed person can't even tell why they're sad.
Everyone of us gets nervous going to the dentist and having a drilling (ok, not all of us, but just follow me here). That feeling of nervousness is what a person with anxiety disorder has all day long.
Some days we feel like we are "on top of the world" and other times we feel like we have the "weight of the world on our shoulders." Some days we just don't feel like being nice. Some days we feel like just staying in bed and hiding. Bipolar people feel these feelings all the time.
The good news is that there is treatment. Medication works. The bad news is that there is no "1 size fits all" treatment. One medicine may work for one person and not for another, though the 2 may have identical symptoms.
As a society, we need to look at this issue, talk about this issue, and treat this issue as we would any other medical problem.
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